Is Your Website Ready for AI Search? The Technical SEO Checklist for 2025

Search has changed more in the past twelve months than it did in the previous decade. When someone Googles "web designer in Perth" or "IT support near me," they are increasingly met with an AI-generated answer at the top of the page before they ever see a single website link. Google calls this AI Overviews. Perplexity builds entire answer pages from multiple sources. ChatGPT now searches the web in real time. The question for every Perth business owner is simple: is your website one of the sources these AI tools are pulling from, or is it invisible to them?

The good news is that the foundations of AI-friendly websites are not dramatically different from good traditional SEO. The bad news is that most small business websites have gaps that knock them out of contention. This checklist will help you find and fix them.

How AI Search Tools Work (and Why It Matters)

Traditional Google search ranks pages and shows a list of ten blue links. AI search tools do something different: they read multiple pages, synthesise the information, and write a summary answer with citations. This means two things for your business.

First, your content needs to be structured so an AI can actually understand it. Vague, flowery website copy that sounds good to a human but buries the facts is a poor candidate for AI citation. Second, the AI picks sources it considers authoritative and trustworthy. A brand-new website with no inbound links and no author information is unlikely to be quoted over a well-established local business with consistent reviews and clear credentials.

Perplexity and ChatGPT Search lean heavily on sources like business directories, local news, and websites with clear factual claims. Google's AI Overviews tend to favour pages that Google already ranks highly, so traditional SEO still matters. The goal is to do both well.

Structured Data: Give AI a Roadmap

Structured data (also called Schema.org markup) is invisible code you add to your website that labels your content. It tells search engines and AI tools exactly what something is: this is a business name, this is an address, this is a review, this is a FAQ answer.

At minimum, a Perth small business website should have:

LocalBusiness schema with your business name, address, phone number, opening hours, and the geographic area you serve. This is what feeds Google's Knowledge Panel and gives AI tools confident, accurate information to quote.

FAQPage schema on any page that has questions and answers. AI Overviews are particularly fond of pulling from FAQ sections because they are pre-formatted as useful answers. If you have a FAQ on your website, mark it up properly.

Review schema if you display testimonials on your site, and Service schema for each service you list. If you are unsure whether your site has any of this, paste your homepage URL into Google's Rich Results Test tool (search for it, it is free). It will show you what structured data exists and flag any errors.

Page Speed Is Not Optional

AI crawlers and traditional search bots both penalise slow websites, but the impact on real visitors is just as damaging. Google's Core Web Vitals measure load speed, visual stability, and interactivity. A page that takes more than three seconds to load on mobile loses more than half its visitors before they read a word.

Check your site with PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). Pay particular attention to your Largest Contentful Paint score (how quickly the main content appears) and your Cumulative Layout Shift (whether elements jump around as the page loads). Both affect how AI tools perceive your page quality.

Common culprits for slow Perth business websites include uncompressed images, old WordPress plugins, and hosting on cheap shared servers based overseas. If your site is running on Australian hosting with a modern server setup, you are already ahead of many local competitors.

Mobile-First Is Not a Trend, It Is the Standard

Google indexes the mobile version of your website first. If your mobile site is hard to read, has text that is too small, or has buttons that are too close together to tap, you lose ranking signals that flow through to AI visibility. Test your site on your own phone. If you would not use it yourself, a potential customer will not either.

E-E-A-T: Proving You Are the Real Deal

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is Google's framework for evaluating whether a website is a credible source, and it directly influences which sites AI Overviews pull from.

For a Perth trade or service business, this means having a real About page with genuine staff photos and names, not stock images. It means having consistent business information across your website, Google Business Profile, and online directories. It means collecting and responding to Google reviews. It means your website has a real physical address, an ABN, and ideally some third-party mentions like a local news article or industry association listing.

AI tools are sceptical of anonymous websites. They want to know there is a real business behind the content.

FAQ Sections That AI Will Actually Quote

If there is one structural change that can boost your chances of appearing in AI-generated answers quickly, it is adding a well-written FAQ section to your key service pages. AI tools scan for concise, factual answers to common questions.

A useful FAQ answer is two to four sentences long, states the answer in the first sentence, and uses plain language. "How much does a new business website cost in Perth?" is a great FAQ question for a web design company. An answer that says "Prices vary depending on your needs" helps no one. An answer that says "A professional small business website in Perth typically costs between $2,500 and $8,000, depending on the number of pages, whether you need e-commerce functionality, and the complexity of the design" is exactly what an AI wants to quote.

A Well-Structured Site Is the Foundation

None of the above checklist items work well on a poorly structured website. If your site has duplicate content, broken internal links, pages with no headings, or important information buried in images rather than text, fix those fundamentals first.

Run your site through a free crawler like Screaming Frog's SEO Spider (limited free version available) or use Google Search Console to check for crawl errors. If you are not already using Google Search Console, set it up today. It is free, it shows you exactly which of your pages Google is indexing, and it flags problems you would never spot just by looking at your website.

The businesses that will benefit most from AI search are the ones with clear, factual, well-structured websites that establish genuine credibility. That is not a technical trick. It is just a good website. If you are not sure where your site stands, we are happy to take a look.