AI Search Readiness FAQ

Answer Patch is an AI Search Readiness product that scores how easily AI search engines and assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude — can find, understand, and cite your website. It runs a free scan across six audit pillars (business clarity, answer readiness, technical access, structured data, trust signals, and competitive visibility), then offers a one-time Fix Report with exact, copy-ready edits to close the gaps it finds.

Submit your domain and Answer Patch crawls your homepage and key pages, fetches robots.txt and your sitemap, and extracts evidence about how AI systems currently see your business. A deterministic rules engine — no AI model involved — scores the evidence across six pillars, each rated 0-100. The scan takes about two minutes, requires no account, no email, and no credit card.

The Fix Report includes a score summary across all six AI Search Readiness pillars, your top blockers ranked by impact and effort, up to ten prioritized fixes that are copy-ready and developer-ready, title/meta/FAQ rewrites in your voice, JSON-LD blocks where facts allow safe markup, Google Business Profile wording for local-service businesses, a sample AI-response walkthrough with caveats, and an implementation checklist for your team.

The AI Search Readiness scan is completely free — no account, no email, no credit card. The Fix Report is a one-time $19 purchase per site audit. There is no subscription, no recurring charge, and no auto-renewal. Payment is processed by Stripe; Answer Patch never receives or stores your full card number.

No. The free scan needs no email and no account. Buying a Fix Report only requires an email address to receive it — the checkout flow captures that directly and does not require creating an account first. An account is optional and only useful for keeping a library of past reports.

No. The Fix Report is a single $19 purchase — it does not auto-renew. Rescanning a site that has changed significantly is a new $19 purchase, not a free update to the old one. There is no subscription tier and no recurring charge.

GEO is the practice of making your website more visible and citable to AI-powered search engines and assistants. Unlike traditional SEO, which targets keyword rankings in classic search results, GEO focuses on the specific things AI systems need before they'll quote or recommend a source: unambiguous facts, machine-verifiable structured data, passages written as direct answers, and crawl access for AI-specific user agents.

AEO focuses on structuring content so it can be lifted and quoted as a direct, well-supported answer by AI assistants and answer engines. GEO is the broader discipline covering everything from structured data to AI crawler access. In practice the two overlap heavily — Answer Patch's audit covers both by scoring answer readiness (how citable your passages are) alongside technical access, structured data, and the other pillars.

Traditional SEO optimizes for keyword rankings in Google's classic ten blue links. AI search engines need something different: unambiguous facts, machine-verifiable structured data, passages that read like direct answers, and crawl access for AI-specific user agents that a traditional SEO audit doesn't check. A site can rank well in classic search and still score poorly on AI Search Readiness.

Answer Patch checks robots.txt rules and page responses for fifteen AI-associated crawlers, including GPTBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI Search), ClaudeBot, Claude-User, and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (Gemini and AI Overviews), Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, Bytespider (ByteDance), CCBot (Common Crawl), meta-externalagent (Meta AI), YouBot (You.com), and cohere-ai. It distinguishes training crawlers from live-fetch crawlers that make a page eligible to be cited in a live AI answer.

llms.txt is an emerging plain-text file convention where a website publishes a curated summary of its most useful links and facts, written specifically for AI systems to read directly instead of inferring from a full crawl. Unlike a sitemap, which lists every URL for a search-engine crawler to index, llms.txt is a short, deliberate summary. Answer Patch checks for its presence and quality under the Technical Access pillar.

Yes — structured data lets a machine verify entities and facts instead of inferring them from prose. Answer Patch's Structured Data pillar checks for valid JSON-LD types like Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, and Product. Schema that's present but malformed, or that contradicts visible page content, counts against this pillar just as much as schema that's missing entirely.

Yes. Answer Patch collects only the domain/URL you submit, an email to deliver the report, payment metadata via Stripe (never a full card number), and standard request metadata for abuse prevention. This data is not used to train AI models and is not sold. Cookies are limited to what's needed for a signed-in session — there are no third-party advertising or tracking cookies.

The score and baseline findings are produced by deterministic code — the same site produces the same baseline findings every time, with no AI model involved. On top of that, select sections (title/meta rewrites, FAQ copy, JSON-LD drafts, and a sample AI-response walkthrough) are drafted by AI models using the scan's own data. Every AI-assisted section carries a visible "Suggested by Answer Patch AI" label so you always know which parts are a drafted starting point.

No. Answer Patch does not control how any third-party search engine or AI system ranks, cites, or summarizes your site, and makes no promise of increased traffic, rankings, or citations. The Fix Report improves the underlying signals those systems are known to weigh — it is not a guarantee of a specific outcome.

Answer Patch still delivers the report with all deterministic sections complete and the AI-enhanced sections omitted, rather than filled with lower-quality placeholder content. In that case, the buyer is offered a free regeneration or a full refund.

If your Fix Report is degraded or unsatisfactory — the AI-enhanced sections were unavailable, a section is broken or clearly wrong, or the recommendations don't hold up — contact support@answerpatch.com and choose either a free regeneration or a full refund. Refunds are issued to the original payment method through Stripe and typically arrive within 5-10 business days. Requests are handled case by case by a person, not an automated flow.

A Fix Report and its share link are retained for 90 days from the date of purchase by default. After that window the report becomes eligible for automated deletion and its share link stops resolving. Free-scan results that were never purchased are not on that 90-day clock — they're kept so you can revisit or purchase a report later, and can be deleted sooner on request.