Making an existing website readable by Google, Bing, ChatGPT and the other assistants.
Trevor Stuckless runs the AI Visibility Pass for Blue Crane Works in Hamilton, Ontario. It is a fixed-quote job: fetch a website exactly as each search engine and AI crawler does, prove every one of them receives the full page, remove the settings that silently keep it out of AI answers, publish the files those systems read, then measure again. He wrote the audit tools the Pass runs on.
What does an AI visibility audit actually check?
Four gates, in order. Does robots.txt let each company's crawler in? Does the firewall hand that crawler the same page a browser gets? Is a noindex, nosnippet or noarchive setting quietly removing the page? Are the facts real text, or painted in by script?
The second gate is the one ranking tools miss. A robots file is permission, not access: OpenAI publishes the address ranges its crawlers come from and asks site owners to allow those ranges, because a firewall can turn away a crawler the robots file invited. So the audit requests every page as every crawler and compares the bytes it receives with what a browser receives.
Which settings remove a site from AI answers?
Two directives do most of the damage and show no symptom in a rankings report. Bing's guidelines state that NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses and that NOSNIPPET may limit Copilot citation quality. Google lists nosnippet among the controls that limit what appears in its AI features.
The audit looks for both in the page, in the body as well as the head, and in the response headers, where a hosting setting can add them without anyone editing a file.
Does a site need special AI files to appear in AI answers?
No. Google's own guidance on its AI features says that a page eligible for ordinary search results needs nothing extra to be shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode: no special file, markup or schema. The extra files earn their place for a different reason: an llms.txt summary and a Markdown copy of each page make a site cheaper for AI tools to read and harder to quote wrong.
The saving is large. On the Garage Doorman homepage, the Markdown copy is 10,840 bytes against 49,069 bytes of HTML, according to its case study. Every change is also announced through IndexNow, which passes it to Bing and the other participating engines in one request.
How are the results proven, and what can nobody promise?
The same scripts run before and after against the live site, and the report carries both sets of numbers. What nobody can prove in advance is a citation, and Bing's Webmaster Guidelines say as much about their own AI answers, so Trevor never promises one. What the Pass does promise is the work itself: each condition the engines publish for reading and quoting a page is met, then shown to be met with a measurement.
Which sites has the Pass been run on?
| Site | Crawlers given the full page | Audit result | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amarettos | 12 of 12, identical to a browser | 0 blockers, 0 warnings, 17 September 2026 | Case study |
| Garage Doorman, both sites | 12 of 12, byte for byte | 0 blockers, 0 warnings across three audits at launch | Case study |
| trevor.bluecraneworks.ca | Every answer-engine crawler checked | 25 warnings down to 3, 0 blockers, 28 September 2026 | This site |
What does an AI visibility check cost?
For a site that already exists, Blue Crane Works quotes the Pass as a single fixed price, set by the number of pages and usually between $750 and $1,500 CAD. Growing a one-page site into a full one usually costs $2,500 to $5,000, and anyone who wants the checks repeated each quarter pays $150 to $250 a time (published prices).
What else does Trevor build?
- Websites built to be foundMulti-page sites written from the owner's own facts, checked by a deploy gate on every release.
- Business applicationsSoftware that runs the work itself: job-site records, parts and stock, paper archives.
- AI featuresAI that removes one specific chore: site walks to estimates, paper to documents, websites an assistant can use.
- Payments and billingStripe subscriptions, one-time passes, donations, and platform payouts to the people on a platform.
- Data pipelinesReading hundreds of public sources on a schedule and handing back one thing a person can act on.
- Scheduling and eventsCheck-ins, calendars, rosters and maps for gyms, a festival and a members community.
- Media and advertisingSix media titles and the ad server that sells and counts every placement directly.
Talk to Trevor about an AI visibility check.
Describe what the business needs and what it is doing by hand today. You will get a straight answer on whether this is the right job for it, and what it would cost.