Can an AI cite you?
Enter your URL. We read the live page the way an AI crawler does and audit it across twenty-seven checks, scoring how ready you are to be cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
- Entity & trust
- Structured data
- Answerability
- Machine readability
- AI access & discovery
This reads one page, not your whole site: point it at the exact URL you want assessed (your homepage by default). Different pages score differently, so scan the ones that matter.
thecraneconsultancy.com/ai-search-readiness
Scoring engine v1.6 · updated 29 June 2026 · aligned with current Google, OpenAI, Perplexity & Anthropic guidance
Reading the live page…
You scored in badge territory. Embed your verified mark; it links back to your live result.
One scan. All three reads.
You ran one. Here is the complete picture, the way an AI system sees you: whether it can find you, act on you, and confirm who you are. Together they are your Crane Index™.
Can AI find and cite you?
Can an agent act on your site?
Does AI describe you correctly?
The mean of the three reads, on the same scanners as our published research.
One page, or the whole site?
This read scored one page. A machine judges you page by page, so a strong homepage can hide thin inner pages, and the reverse. Read your key pages together for a site-level picture, on the same free scan.
The mean across the pages we could read.
The precise fix for each finding is locked
Each fix is a short sprint. Holding the result is the work.
The findings above are yours to read, and most are a quick markup sprint. Putting them live is your team's to do. What we sell is the precise prescription for each finding across all three reads, AI search, agent readiness and machine identity, then the harder part: proving on a re-read that each fix actually landed, and holding the result as the ground keeps shifting.
Why this only grows in weight
More of every buying journey now starts inside an AI assistant, and increasingly an agent does the searching, the shortlisting, even the booking. If a machine cannot read you, confirm who you are, or act on your site, you are absent at the moment the decision is made. That gap widens as more of the journey moves to AI, so being unreadable quietly costs revenue that never shows up as a lost click, and the sites that are legible now compound their lead.
£1,600 / year ex VAT
- The full prescription, and we confirm on a re-read that each fix you put live actually landed
- Your whole field watched every day: your site, the pages that matter across it, and the competitors you choose, so a drift or a new gap is caught the morning it appears
- Held, not just fixed: daily reconnaissance, a dated archive and a private dashboard, so the result stays won as AI keeps moving
£1,250 once, ex VAT
- The exact fix for every finding across all three reads, in one paste-ready brief for your developer or an LLM
- Yours to implement on your own schedule
- Plus 30 days of Crane Index™ Monitor, so a re-read confirms each fix has landed
For businesses where AI and agentic readiness genuinely moves revenue. A monthly partnership that steers your strategy as the landscape shifts, keeps you ahead of each change in how machines find, verify and act on you, and treats the Index as one input among many. By application.
The top-line findings above are free. The precise fixes are part of a paid prescription. Any email you leave is used only to answer your request and is handled per our Privacy Policy.
The mind behind the diagnostic.
A public sample of a private standard.
This scanner reads a site the way I do on a first pass: the entity a model can trust, the structured data it can parse, the answers it can lift, the access it is granted. I built it because most businesses have no honest read on whether AI can see them at all. What it surfaces in seconds, a forensic audit takes apart in full.
Led paid media for the LUSH Cosmetics global digital transformation across sixteen markets, former Head of Paid Media and Paid Media Enablement lead at senior agencies, most recently Digital Data & Analytics lead through the Everywhen brand launch across Towergate Insurance and forty other brands. A power user of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and structured data, working the machine-readability layer directly rather than briefing it out.
The brands that win 2027 are legible to the machine, not just the reader. My work makes you legible.
A scanner finds the obvious. The audit finds the rest.
This reads what is visible in your HTML. A forensic AI search audit goes deeper: the entity graph a model actually trusts, the queries you should own, and the schema and authority work that makes a model more likely to read, trust and cite you.
Speak with NicSee how AI search optimisation works, or read the forensic method.
What AI search readiness means.
AI answer engines no longer return a page of blue links. They read the live web, synthesise a reply, and cite a short, curated set of sources. Whether you are in that set depends on something most sites have never measured: how legible your page is to a machine.
This scanner reads your live HTML the way an AI crawler does and scores it across twenty-seven checks in five dimensions. It reads what is in the page source, not what renders after JavaScript, because that is what most AI crawlers read too. It is a readiness proxy, not a guarantee: it measures the on-page signals you control, while the rest of citation rests on off-page authority no scan can see.
Twenty-seven checks, five dimensions.
Entity & Trust
Can a model confirm who you are? Organisation and person schema, sameAs links to known profiles, logo and contact, and named, credentialed authorship.
Structured Data Depth
Is your meaning machine-readable? Valid, linked JSON-LD that describes what you actually offer, not merely that a website exists.
Answerability
Can a model lift a clean answer? Concise, self-contained passages, question-led sections, and a clear heading structure it can quote.
Machine Readability
Is the page easy to parse? Substantive text, honest titles and descriptions, image alt coverage and semantic structure.
AI Access & Discovery
Are the right crawlers allowed in? Indexable, snippet-eligible, and open to the crawlers that surface you in AI answers.
Legible to the machine is the new front page.
AI answers reach buyers at the point of decision, and the cited sources capture demand a tenth-place link never sees. The brands a model can already read and trust are the ones it surfaces as these answers take more of the journey. The work that makes you legible to the machine is becoming the work that wins.
AI search readiness questions.
Does AI really cite just one source?
No. Answer engines synthesise a reply and cite a curated set, usually a handful of sources. The goal is to be in that set; a page a model cannot read or trust is not.
Is this the same as SEO?
It overlaps. Sound technical SEO, crawlability, structured data and clear content, is the foundation, and Google says its generative features reward the same fundamentals. AI search adds emphasis on entity clarity and extractable answers.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Not for AI search. Google has confirmed llms.txt has no effect on Search, and the major AI search crawlers rarely fetch it. It is useful for coding and agent tools, so the scanner scores it lightly and never penalises its absence.
Why does blocking GPTBot not hurt my score?
Because GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler. The crawlers that surface you in ChatGPT are OAI-SearchBot, which builds its search index, and ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page live when a user's prompt needs it. Blocking training is a separate, legitimate choice, so the scanner only flags blocking the crawlers that actually read and cite you.
Does a high score guarantee citation?
No. It measures on-page readiness, which you control. Whether you are cited also depends on off-page authority and brand presence no on-page scan can see. A strong score removes the on-page reasons not to cite you.
What does the scanner not see?
It reads static HTML and does not run JavaScript, so content built entirely in the browser is invisible to it, as it often is to AI crawlers. It also does not measure backlinks or brand authority.
Three reads. One picture.
It comes down to one question: can AI work with you? AI visibility is won on three fronts: whether AI can retrieve you, whether an agent can act on you, and whether AI describes you correctly. This is one of the three. Run all three for the full picture, and the marks that come with them.
AI Search Readiness
Can AI find and cite you?
You are hereAgent Readiness
Can an agent act on your site?
Run the read → IIIBrand Representation
Does AI describe you correctly?
Run the read →Take the whole picture to your board.
One document, all three reads, set on our letterhead. We measure the site live server-side, so every figure is real, then email you the board report. Each one stays re-measurable in about a minute.
A strong Crane Index™ earns a mark you can embed. Each one is drawn live from your real scores, so it cannot be faked, and it links back to your result. It sits on any site, dark or light — preview both below. See how the marks work →
The shift, on the record
The move to AI answers is documented, not a hunch. In 2026, Google reported that its AI Mode in Search had passed a billion monthly users. What those users can be shown of you comes down to the machine-readable layer of your site, the structured data Google Search Central documents. The question is no longer whether a buyer asks an AI about your market, but whether it can read you, and represent you accurately, when they do.
The senior read,
once a week.
Most marketing newsletters are noise on a schedule. This is not that. Once a week I send a short, considered read on the shifts that actually change what you should do, across the AI shift, PPC, technical SEO and analytics. Filtered, weighted and signed off by me before it goes out. The judgement is mine, and now you can hear every edition in my own voice.
Nic CraneFounder, The Crane Consultancy
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