How to audit your website for AI search

Site auditing

Use this guide if you need to:

• Find technical blockers that make AI assistants skip over key parts of a page
• Detect JavaScript or rendering issues that block AI crawlers
• Determine whether AI agents can fully access and index your pages
• Know which technical issues should be fixed first to improve AI visibility
• Evaluate whether your content is complete, structured, and aligned with the prompts you're targeting

Contents

🚧 Scrunch recently shipped major product updates, so some parts of this guide may not match what you see in our platform today. We'll be updating the guide to match, but if you have questions in the meantime, please:

• Ask our in-app AI assistant, Scrunchie.
• Check out our Help Center.
• Reach out to your CSM.

Quick answer

Audit your website for AI search from Scrunch's Site Maps tab.

Site auditing surfaces the technical and content issues keeping your pages out of AI responses. Here's how to find and fix them:

Start in the Site Maps tab to launch an audit:

• Domain Insights: Audit any page already in your site map.
• Page Audits & History: Audit any page (mapped or not) and review past audits.
• Mapped pages table: Browse, search, and click into any page on your site.

Drill down in the Page Details page to run a Deep AI Audit across four areas:

• Access controls: Whether AI bots are allowed to reach the page
• Content delivery: Whether the page loads with the speed and technical hygiene AI agents require
• Content quality: Whether the content is complete and formatted for AI consumption
• Content alignment: Whether the content matches your target prompts

Take action on results: Each area returns its own score plus a checklist of passed and failed checks so you know exactly what to fix first.

Bottom line: AI can't recommend what it can't access, read, or understand—site auditing is how you make sure your pages are actually shaping AI answers.

Start here

Why you should audit your website for AI search

Site auditing—aka analyzing website performance to identify issues and improvement opportunities—is the difference between being the answer in AI responses and not showing up at all. Creating and optimizing content doesn’t count for anything if AI bots can’t access it, consume it, and recommend it. To optimize AI search performance, you need to understand what’s working, what’s broken, and what you need to do to fix it.

Before you begin:

• Log in to Scrunch or sign up for a free 7-day trial to follow along.
• Add your brand and website to the AI Context tab in Scrunch, including any alternate domains or subdomains you want to track.
• Customize your brand context in Scrunch (alternative brand names, key competitors, customer personas, key topics, etc.).
• Add prompts to track in the Prompts Monitoring tab in Scrunch (or let Scrunch’s AI generate prompts for you based on your brand or convert a list of SEO keywords into prompts).
• Make sure your website isn’t blocking Scrunch’s user agent via your CDN or security settings.

Step 1: Run a webpage audit in the Site Maps tab

Log in to Scrunch and navigate to the Site Maps tab.

This page is your command center for evaluating and optimizing website performance in AI search.

At the top of the page you’ll see options for Domain Insights and Page Audits & History. You can run site audits using either path.

We’ll focus on Domain Insights in this guide, but keep in mind that you can audit any page not in your site map using the Page Audits & History workflow, as well as review all audited pages.

All you have to do is enter the URL of the page you want audited. If the URL is already active in your site map, you’ll be redirected to that page's Deep AI Audit tab.

Scroll down the Domain Insights page and you’ll find a table featuring every mapped page on your website ( check out this guide for a deep dive on Site Maps).

Find the page you want to audit in the table or use the search bar above the table to locate it.

Click into a page to open its Page Details page.

Navigate to the Deep AI Audit section and click the “Initiate Deep Audit” button.

Scrunch will run an in-depth audit of the page to understand exactly what's working and what’s not—as well as provide you with specific, actionable insights about AI accessibility, technical problems, and content issues.

After you trigger a Deep AI Audit, you’ll see your results at the top of the page.

Results are broken down into four buckets, each with its own score:

• Access Controls: Whether your website is configured to allow AI bots to access the page
• Content Delivery: Whether your content is delivered with the necessary technical hygiene and speed
• Content Quality: Whether your content is complete and in a format optimized for AI bots
• Content Alignment: Whether your content aligns with the tracked prompts where AI may cite your site.

Deep AI Audits are a one-time check of your page at the moment it’s run. If you make updates to your site’s content, metadata, access controls, speed, etc., be sure to rerun the audit in Scrunch to see how those changes impact your results.

This ensures you’re always working from the most current data.

What’s next

Start fixing website issues:

1. Prioritize technical updates: Make sure AI bots can access and read website content before focusing on content updates or creation.
2. Optimize frequently crawled webpages: Focus on making technical and content updates to the pages most commonly crawled by AI bots.
3. Update or create content: Review competitive sources and update or create content to exceed content quality.
4. Serve AI-optimized content directly to LLMs: Deliver clean, structured, LLM-optimized page content to AI bots minus any superfluous code or other issues that may hinder AI consumption.

Scrunch recommends also tracking brand presence, citations, AI agent traffic, and AI referral traffic to see whether your technical and content improvements are driving real gains in AI search performance and business results.

FAQs

How often should an AI site audit be rerun as models and bots change?

Scrunch recommends rerunning the Deep AI Audit whenever you make meaningful changes to your site (content, metadata, access controls, speed, etc.), since it’s a one-time snapshot. For ongoing model and bot changes, treat AI visibility as continuous: Run audits regularly, especially before and after publishing new or updated pages, and plan to iterate quarterly as models and response patterns shift.

How does Scrunch’s AI site audit differ from a traditional SEO crawl?

Scrunch’s AI site audit is focused on answer engine optimization (AEO)/generative engine optimization (GEO), not traditional search engine optimization (SEO). It ensures content is accessible and readable for AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and others to increase brand presence and citations in AI responses, not to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How does Scrunch help improve brand visibility across AI platforms?

Scrunch helps improve brand visibility by monitoring performance across AI platforms, auditing technical and content issues, optimizing content for AI consumption, and delivering AI-optimized content directly to AI user agents.