AI-search readiness in 2026: is your site visible to ChatGPT and Google AI?

Ranking #1 in ten blue links matters less every quarter. In 2026, a growing share of queries are answered by an AI summary — Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity — that cites a handful of sources and never shows a traditional results page. If your site isn’t legible to those systems, you’re invisible where the answer actually happens.

What an AI-search readiness score measures

• llms.txt. An emerging standard: a plain-text summary of what your site is, for LLM crawlers. Cheap to add, disproportionately useful.
• Structured data coverage. AI summarizers lean on JSON-LD — Organization, Product, FAQPage — to understand entities. A recursive schema inventory is the difference between “2 types found” and the 6 you actually declared.
• Semantic structure. A clear H1, a definitional opening sentence, sensible headings — the extractable skeleton of an answer.
• SGE / AI-Overview citation signals. Whether your pages show the patterns that get cited.

Moving the score

Optix scores AI-search readiness 0–100 and tells you which lever is dragging you down. The fastest wins are almost always the same: add an /llms.txt, fix the structured-data undercount, and add a FAQPage schema backed by a real FAQ. We dogfood this — Optix’s own marketing site ships all three.