Week 2: Scan, the honest baseline

Every engagement starts with a Scan. No shortcuts. Before you write a word of new content, measure what search engines and AI systems can actually reach and read today.

Can AI reach the site?

• Indexable. A page marked "noindex" tells search engines not to list it. It happens by accident more often than you would think, often left over from when the site was built.
• AI crawlers allowed. The file at yoursite.com/robots.txt can block the crawlers AI companies use, such as GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. If they are blocked, those systems learn about you only second-hand.
• Sitemap. A sitemap.xml lists your key pages so crawlers find them all.

Can AI read it?

• Words in the HTML. Some site builders draw the text with scripts after the page loads. People see it; many crawlers see an empty page. The app checks whether your main text is in the page itself.
• Enough words. A home page with a slogan, three photos and a button gives a model nothing to work with.
• Title and description. The page title (shown in the browser tab and search results) and the meta description (the summary under it) should exist and be a sensible length: titles under about 60 characters, descriptions about 120 to 160.
• Canonical address. The page should declare its one official web address, so copies of it are not treated as separate pages.

Look beyond the website

AI also reads your listings. Search the business name on Google and Maps, then check Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp or the main directory for your industry, and your social profiles. Is the business there? Are the name, address and phone number exactly the same everywhere? Inconsistent details make a model less sure it is the same business.

Name the blockers

A Scan ends with a short list: the three problems that hold the business back most, in order of impact. The most common ones are not subtle: a blocked crawler, a site whose words only appear after scripts run, or a business name spelled three ways across the web. Fix blockers before anything else; nothing later in S.C.A.L.E. works without them.