How to Audit Your Own Website Before Paying Anyone to Fix It

Start here, not with a sales call

Before you pay anyone for anything, spend twenty minutes checking your own site. Most local business websites have a handful of the same problems, and you can spot them yourself without special tools. This matters for two reasons. First, some fixes cost nothing and take ten minutes, so there's no reason to pay someone to tell you about them. Second, when you do talk to a company that offers to fix your site or improve how AI tools recommend you, you'll actually understand what they're proposing instead of just trusting the pitch.

This isn't about doing the whole job yourself forever. It's about knowing enough to tell the difference between a real fix and a vague promise.

Check what your site actually says about your business

Open your homepage and read it like a stranger who has never heard of your business. Does it say, in plain sentences, what you do, where you're located, and who you serve? A surprising number of business sites lead with a slogan or a stock photo and never actually state the basics clearly.

This matters because AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity generate answers based on text they can read and understand. If your site doesn't clearly state "we are a plumber in [city]" or "we do [specific service] for [type of customer]" somewhere in plain language, you're making it harder for any system, human or AI, to know what to recommend you for.

While you're there, check your other pages too. Do your service pages exist as real pages, or is everything crammed onto one homepage? Separate, clearly titled pages for each major service give both search engines and AI tools more to work with.

Look under the hood without needing to code

You don't need to be technical to check a few basic things.

• •View your page's meta description by right-clicking and choosing "view page source," then searching for "meta description." If it's missing, generic, or auto-filled with random text, that's worth fixing.

• •Check if you have schema markup, which is structured data that tells search engines and AI systems specific facts about your business, like your hours, location, and services, in a format they can parse reliably. You can look for it the same way, searching the page source for "schema" or "application/ld+json." If nothing comes up, you likely don't have it.

• •Run your site through a free PageSpeed tool. A slow-loading site isn't just annoying for visitors, it can also affect whether crawlers and AI systems fully process your page before moving on.

None of these checks require paying anyone. They just require ten minutes and a willingness to look at your own site the way a machine would.

Ask the AI models directly

Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity and ask the kind of question a potential customer might ask, like "best [your service] in [your city]." See if your business comes up. Try it a few different ways, with different phrasing.

Don't panic if you're not mentioned. Being left out doesn't necessarily mean something is broken. It might mean there simply isn't enough clear, structured information about your business available for these models to draw on yet, which is a fixable, ordinary problem, not a mysterious one.

What you're doing here is establishing a baseline. If you later decide to invest time or money into improving this, you want to know where you started so you can tell if anything actually changed.

What to do with what you find

If you've gone through all of this and found real gaps, missing schema, a thin homepage, no meta description, a slow site, that's useful information. Some of it you can fix yourself with a bit of time. Some of it you may want help with, either because you don't have the time or because you want it done properly the first time.

Either way, you're now in a much better position. You know what's actually wrong, which means you can evaluate whether a proposed fix addresses your real problems or just sounds impressive. That's really the whole point of doing this yourself first: not to avoid getting help, but to make sure any help you pay for is solving something real.