Before hiring an agency for AI search work, run three checks on the agency itself: visit the agency's own /llms.txt file to see whether their site is AI-readable, ask ChatGPT or Perplexity what the agency does and who it serves, and view their homepage source for schema.org structured data. An agency that sells AI-readiness but fails all three checks on its own site is selling a service it has not done for itself.
A year ago, almost nobody sold "AI-ready websites." Now every agency deck mentions it. Some of that is real. A lot of it is SEO language with the letters changed.
The good news: you don't have to take an agency's word for any of it. Their own website either does the work or it doesn't, and you can check it yourself in about ten minutes. These are the same checks I'd run before hiring anybody.
Check 1: Does their site have an llms.txt?
Open a new tab and type the agency's domain followed by /llms.txt. That's the file that tells AI assistants what the site is, in plain language.. the machine-readable front door. If it returns a page full of useful, specific text about who they are and what they sell, good sign. If it returns a 404, or a thin auto-generated stub with a dozen links and no actual description, their own site isn't AI-ready.
This is the check with the fewest excuses attached to it. An llms.txt takes an afternoon to write. An agency charging for AI optimization that hasn't done it for themselves hasn't started.
Check 2: Ask the assistants about them.
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini and ask two questions: "What does [agency name] do?" and "Who are they good for?" A genuinely AI-readable agency comes back accurate: correct services, correct market, correct location. An agency that gets summarized as generic filler, or confidently described doing work they don't do, has a website the AI can't read well. That is the exact failure they are promising to prevent for you.
Bonus round: ask "Who should I hire in [your town] for [your trade]?" and notice which names come back. Then look at those businesses' websites. You'll start seeing the pattern: the recommended ones have clean structure, direct answers, and consistent information everywhere.
Check 3: Look at their homepage source for schema.
On the agency's homepage, right-click, choose "View page source," and Ctrl+F for "schema.org." You should find structured data describing the business: type of organization, area served, services, contact information. That's the layer AI assistants actually read. A site with none of it is invisible in the way that matters most for this work.
You don't need to understand the markup. You're checking whether it exists and whether it describes a real business, the same way you'd check whether a contractor has a license without needing to know how to pull wire.
What the checks tell you
An agency that passes all three has at least done the work on themselves. One that fails all three may still build you a fine-looking website.. but the AI layer they are selling is theoretical, not practiced. The uncomfortable middle is a site that passes one or two: they know the moves exist, and chose not to finish them.
I'll put it on us too: run these same checks on panoptic360.com. The llms.txt is there, the schema is in the source, and we publish the assistants' answers to questions about our clients. That's the standard we'd want held against us, so it's the one we hold ourselves to first.
If you want to see what the checks look like on your own business, ask for the free AI snapshot.. we run the assistants on your business and send you every answer, word for word. Email contact@panoptic360.com and put "snapshot" in the subject.