Can AI tools actually read your website?

Search Engine Journal has published a write-up of one of its SEJ Live sessions, hosted by Loren Baker with Darren Shaw of Whitespark and Russ Jeffery of Duda. The subject: why AI systems sometimes cannot read a local business website at all, and what causes it.

This is a trade publication reporting a panel discussion, not an announcement from Google. Nothing has changed in how your Google Business Profile works. But two of the problems raised are worth a few minutes of your time, because they can put wrong information about your business in front of customers.

Most owners do not need to do anything

Worth saying first, because the article says it plainly. Shaw's view: "For the vast majority of business owners, they don't need to worry about this." According to the piece, sites built on established platforms such as Duda, WordPress or Wix already serve their content in a form crawlers can read.

The risk, the panel said, sits with newly generated sites that lean heavily on JavaScript — Shaw mentioned sites produced with tools like Claude Code, saying "if you're just vibe coding a website, they're usually pretty bad, and I would just pay attention to that." Jeffery said JavaScript rendering has "gone backwards in the past few years" for AI systems specifically, because, as he put it, ChatGPT does not build and store its own index of pages the way Google does.

So if someone built you a normal small business site on a normal platform, this section is not your problem.

Two things that are worth checking

Whether something is blocking crawlers. Shaw flagged Cloudflare, a service that sits in front of many websites, as a common culprit. "Cloudflare often blocks AI crawlers by default," he said, adding that many owners have no idea their developer or host switched it on. He described tracing a Shopify site's blocked crawlers back to Cloudflare. Jeffery called blocking by default "a bad default," on the basis that it makes sense for large publishers protecting their content and no sense at all for a local business trying to be found.

What to do: ask whoever manages your site whether Cloudflare, or anything similar, is sitting in front of it, and whether AI crawlers are being blocked. If the answer is yes and you did not ask for that, ask them to review the setting. That is the whole job.

Old copies of your pages. This is the one I would act on. When a site is redesigned, developers often clone pages and leave the originals behind on URLs ending in things like "-old", "-new", "v2" or "/home". Nobody reaches them through your menu. Crawlers do. And those pages can still be carrying your old phone number or your old address. As Shaw put it in the article, "the AIs would grab it."

The recommendation in the piece is a basic crawl of your own site, filtering for URLs with those suffixes, and making sure none of them can be indexed. If you do not want to do that yourself, it is a reasonable thing to ask a developer to check — and cheaper than a customer ringing a number you gave up two years ago.

Schema: the panel disagreed

The article is honest that structured data was where the panel split. Baker uses it to mirror Google Business Profile details on the site. Shaw is sceptical about it lifting rankings: "I've never seen any noteworthy study that said, if you do schema, your traditional rankings will go up or your AI visibility will go up," though he sees value in removing ambiguity. Jeffery said you should do it, with conditions. In other words, there is no settled answer here, and nothing an owner needs to rush into.

On markdown versions of pages, which Cloudflare is now offering, Jeffery said: "I wouldn't say it's required right now."

The underlying point

The consistent detail across all of this is not technical, it is bookkeeping. The same phone number, address and opening hours in every place they appear — your profile, your website, and any forgotten copies of your pages. That is the same discipline that helps you get found on Google in the first place, and it is worth reviewing alongside what your website actually needs to include.

Source: Search Engine Journal, Local Search.