What did the pass check, and what did it find?
Nine sets of checks, run against the live site rather than the code: whether each crawler gets the page, whether any setting keeps the page out of AI answers, whether the words can be read without running code, whether each page is fit to be quoted, whether an assistant can send a repair request, and whether every button works on a phone. Every rule behind them comes from a published source, mostly Google's, Bing's and the AI companies' own documentation. The pass was run the night the site launched, and run again three days later for this page.
| Check | What it looks at | At launch | Re-run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawler access | The home page fetched as Googlebot, Bingbot, OpenAI's three crawlers, Anthropic's two, PerplexityBot, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Common Crawl | 12 of 12 | 12 of 12, each the same 45,319 bytes a browser gets |
| Opt-out settings | noindex, nosnippet, noarchive and similar settings that keep a page out of AI answers | None | None |
| Readable without code | The words are in the raw page, the way an AI crawler reads it | 31 of 31 | 34 of 34 |
| Quote-ready pages | A short direct answer at the top, a visible date and publisher, and sources linked beside the facts | 2 gaps, fixed that night | 34 of 34, 0 problems |
| Site files | Robots file, sitemap, llms.txt and a Markdown copy of every page, a real “not found” page | All present | All present, 42 crawlers named, 34 pages listed |
| AI business card | An assistant can read the company's facts and send a repair request, and never sends one without the customer's yes | 15 of 15 | 15 of 15 |
| Buttons and links | Every button and link clicked by a robot on a phone, a tablet and a laptop | 3,296 clicked, 0 dead | 0 problems: 25 pages loaded with no errors or dead links, and the phone, tablet and laptop layouts checked on the home page |
| Keyboard focus | A link reached with the keyboard is always visible, never hidden under a bar | 3 of 6 pages failed | Fixed, 7 of 7 pages pass (checked 20 October) |
| Search dashboards | Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity, where quoting is measured | Not set up | Clarity recording since 21 October; Search Console connected; Bing in progress |
The site had 31 pages at launch and 34 by the re-run. At launch and with each fix that night, every changed page was sent to Bing, Copilot and the other engines that take IndexNow, and to Brave Search, which Claude's web search reads; each answered “accepted”. Phone and text links were never dialled, and no test request reached the company.
What was fixed, and how long did it take?
Four faults, all fixed and live the night they were found. None was serious, because the site was built to these rules from its first page; most of the pass proved the work rather than rescued it. A pass on an older site usually finds far more, as the case study shows: the old one-page site scored 2 out of 10 and was not in Bing at all.
- The request page gained a table of the photos that help most for each kind of problem, taken from the request form's own tips. A table is the shape an assistant lifts most easily.
- The estimates page now quotes the Ontario rule with a link to the Government of Ontario: when a contract includes an estimate, a business cannot charge more than 10 per cent above it unless the customer agrees to the extra charges. It had linked no official source before.
- Each guide now says it is free to share and quote with a link back, so other businesses and tenants can point to it as the source.
- On a tablet, a link reached with the keyboard no longer hides behind the “Request a repair” bar at the bottom of the screen or under the header at the top.
One more finding was our checker's mistake, not the site's: it said the links on the home page's drawing showed no keyboard focus, and they do. The checker was fixed so it cannot raise that false alarm again. On the re-run, two more checker mistakes were found and fixed the same way: a bot-check widget made a working page look unreachable, and the widget's own console message was blamed on the site.
Does a pass guarantee the business shows up in ChatGPT?
No, and nobody can promise that. A pass proves that a site is reachable, readable and quotable by the rules the search engines and AI companies publish. Whether an assistant quotes it is that assistant's decision, made fresh for every question. Bing says so in its own guidelines:
“SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences.”Bing Webmaster Guidelines
What can be measured is how often it happens, with three free dashboards. Their numbers are never added together, because each counts something different.
| Dashboard | What it shows | What it leaves out |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | How often pages were shown inside Google's AI answers, in its generative AI performance report | Views only; clicks from AI answers count with ordinary Google clicks |
| Bing Webmaster Tools | How often Copilot quotes the pages, and the questions that led there, in AI Performance | Google's and OpenAI's assistants |
| Microsoft Clarity | Which pages AI assistants cite, and the searches they ran to find them, in AI Visibility | Anything before the day it was switched on; it does not count backwards |
For the longer version, read what AI visibility is, how to check whether ChatGPT can see a website and why a website should be in Bing.
What is still open on this site?
Two things, said plainly. Bing Webmaster Tools is the last of the three dashboards still being connected. And the company's Google Business Profile should point at the new website and carry the plain business name, which is Google's own rule for profile names; only someone signed in to the profile can change it, so that step is the owner's. Everything else in the table above is live and was checked on the live site. This report is free to quote with a link back.