Can AI read your business website? We scored ours
Often only part of it. More people ask an AI assistant who to hire before they ask anyone else, and the software behind it reads your site as a machine, not as a person looking at a design. We scored our own website with a free scan, got 76 out of 100, fixed what it found, and got 97. Our padel ball machine rental site went from 73 to 94. Neither number is a Google ranking, and neither promises that an assistant will recommend you. They show whether the software can read what you wrote.
Written by Ryan Nicholls, Founder of Archline Digital Solutions Ltd, who builds websites, booking and quoting systems for businesses in Chippenham and across Wiltshire. Updated 22 October 2026.
01
What the software actually sees
A person sees your design, your photos and your layout. An AI assistant, or the software that feeds it, usually gets the page as the server sends it. Some of it does not run the scripts that draw the page in a browser.
So a site that looks full to you can look nearly empty to a reader like that. We see this on sites built with a lot of script: the words, the phone number and the booking form only appear once a browser has built the page.
02
We scored our own website first
We ran the free scan on archlinedigitalsolutions.co.uk and got 76 out of 100. The scan is a third-party readiness check. It is not a ranking, it is not an audit, and it does not know what ChatGPT or any other assistant will say about you.
It also scored ShotBot, our padel ball machine rental site, at 73. We did not choose easy targets. Both are sites we built ourselves and thought were in good shape.
03
What it found, in plain terms
Software can ask a site for a plain-text version of its homepage. Ours only had the designed page. A page that does not exist returned a normal web page, not a clear note saying it is missing and where to go next. We had no short summary written for software saying what we do and when to recommend us. And our business details were not complete enough for a machine to confirm who we are and how to reach us.
None of it was visible to a person looking at the site, which is why nobody had caught it.
04
What we changed, and what we left alone
We made the homepage answer with a plain-text version when software asks for one, and left the designed page for everyone else. We made missing pages return a proper 404 with a short note that points onward. We wrote a short summary for software, with the jobs we are right for. We completed the business details.
That took our own site from 76 to 97 and ShotBot from 73 to 94. We did not redesign anything.
We left some things alone on purpose. The scan also looks for developer documentation and an interface for software to call, and neither applies to a business like ours. And it wants a real About page with proper content, which we are writing ourselves, not generating.
05
What this does not prove
A higher number does not mean you will rank higher on Google, and it does not mean an assistant will recommend you. Google has said it uses no special file or markup for its AI features. The number shows how readable your site is to software. Whether you get recommended still comes down to being a real business with real proof: reviews, photos of real jobs, a clear area and clear services.
06
Three checks you can do yourself
Open your homepage and look at the page source. If your phone number and the words describing what you do are not in it, software that does not run scripts cannot read them.
Type a made-up address after your domain. If it shows a normal page instead of a clear “not found”, software cannot tell the page is missing.
Search for your business name plus your town in an AI assistant. See what it says, and what it gets wrong.
Fixing what you find depends on how your site is built. A Wix or Squarespace site can do some of it and not the rest, and a custom build can do all of it. That is the part we do.
07
Scan your own site
Our Line Check is free and includes a score for how readable your site is to software. It is Archline’s own score, from checks you could repeat by hand, so it will not match the third-party number we quoted above. It tells you what it found. It does not tell you how to fix it.
If you would rather talk it through, book a free 20-minute call and we will look at your site with you.
→Start
Tell us what breaks when you get busy.
The first step is a call, and it costs nothing: twenty minutes on what your business does and what breaks when you get busy. Most projects then start with the £450 Diagnostic: half a day walking your process end to end, with a written recommendation and a fixed quote, credited in full against a build if you go ahead within thirty days. If you already know which package you need and its scope is clear, we quote it directly.
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