AI Readiness Retrofit

What does the AI Readiness Retrofit change on your site?

The retrofit works through the same technical layer the audit tests, in the same order, and ships the fix for each item instead of a finding.

Structured data comes first. Each template on the site receives valid schema.org markup describing what the page is: the organisation behind it, the service it describes, the questions it answers, and where it sits in the site. The same organisation is described the same way on every page, because inconsistency is the most common reason a machine cannot decide who a business is. Every block is validated and the results go in the report.

Crawler access comes second. Most sites block the AI crawlers without ever deciding to, through a default firewall rule, a security plugin or a robots.txt line copied from somewhere. We review robots.txt, server rules and the firewall for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot, and set access deliberately, so the decision about who can read your site is a decision you made.

An llms.txt file is written and published, with an honest note in the report about what it does and does not do.

Entity consistency is the fourth item. Your business name, address and phone number are checked across the site, your Google Business Profile and the major directories, and brought into line where they disagree. A machine deciding whether two records describe the same business is easily put off by a suite number in one and not the other.

Content structure is last and the only part visitors can see. Your key pages are restructured so each opens with a direct answer to the question it exists for, then the detail, with headings phrased as the questions people actually ask. That is the shape answer engines quote from and the shape that helps a reader who arrived from a search decide in seconds that they are in the right place.

Finally, we compare the raw HTML with the rendered page, because content that only exists after JavaScript runs may never be seen by a bot that does not run it.

When is the retrofit the right next step?

The retrofit is designed for the moment after an audit. The Standard SEO & AI Readiness Audit and the Extended SEO & AI Readiness Audit both end with a severity-rated roadmap, and that roadmap is written so any developer can act on it. Some clients have that developer. Many do not, or have one who is busy, or have a platform where the fixes are fiddly. The retrofit takes the AI readiness section of the roadmap and ships it for a fixed price.

It is also the right choice when the site is otherwise fine. A site that loads quickly, ranks reasonably and converts does not need a rebuild to become citable by AI engines. It needs the layer described above, added carefully, without disturbing what works. When the underlying site is the problem, a rebuild with this foundation built in is the better spend, and we will say so.

It is not the right choice for a site whose main problem is speed or crawlability. Those go to Core Web Vitals remediation or the broader technical SEO service first, because schema on a page that cannot be crawled or that takes eight seconds to load is effort spent in the wrong order.

What does llms.txt actually do?

Less than its reputation suggests. It is a plain text file that describes a site to language models in the way robots.txt describes it to crawlers. Some AI systems read it. Google has said it does not use it, and adoption across the web is uneven. We include it because it takes about an hour, costs nothing to maintain and does no harm, which makes it a reasonable hedge. We do not present it as a ranking factor, and we would be wary of anyone who does. The structured data, the crawler access and the content structure are where the measurable effect sits.

How does the retrofit work with the audit and the retainer?

The audit measures, the retrofit fixes, and the retainer tracks. That is the whole sequence and each step is optional.

The audit's AI visibility test runs your prompts across four engines, three times each, and logs whether your brand appeared, where, and which sources the engine cited. That log is the baseline. The retrofit changes the site so the engines have something to read. The Signal retainer then reruns the same test every month for $1,200 a month + GST, alongside technical health monitoring and ongoing schema and llms.txt maintenance, so you can see whether citation rate moved and catch it if a later change on the site undoes the work.

The audit is required before any retainer begins and is not credited against it, because the audit is a complete deliverable on its own. The retrofit does not require the retainer and stands on its own too.

Every change is made in your CMS or repository, documented and handed over. It is your site and it stays that way.