What a website and AI-search check can, and cannot, tell your studio

Several tools will give your studio an “AI visibility score” out of 100. Ask what the number measured and the answer gets vague. Before you act on any of these reports, including the one my own check produces, it helps to know what a public website can reveal and where every tool, mine included, is sampling rather than measuring.

What a public URL can reveal

Anyone can fetch your pages the way a crawler does. That read reliably shows:

• Whether the page loads over HTTPS, how many redirects it takes, and how long the server took to respond to that one request.
• The title, description, headings and visible text of each page, and whether any page carries a noindex instruction that keeps it out of Google.
• Your robots.txt, and which crawlers it allows or blocks. This matters more than it used to: OpenAI documents separate crawlers for ChatGPT search results (OAI-SearchBot) and for model training (GPTBot), and blocking the first removes you from ChatGPT search answers while blocking the second does not (source 1). Google says the same about Google-Extended: it controls training and grounding for Gemini, not whether you appear in Search or its AI features (sources 2 and 3).
• Structured data, if you have any: the machine-readable block that states your name, address, opening hours and category.
• Whether the facts a prospective member needs are present as text: the address, the class types, whether beginners are welcome, the intro offer and its price, the timetable, and a way to book.

The last point is the one most reports skip, and it is the one that decides whether an assistant can answer “what does a first class at your studio cost?”.

What a public URL cannot reveal

No tool that only has your URL can see:

• Your Google rankings, impressions or clicks. Those live in Search Console and need your login.
• Your Google Business Profile insights, reviews data, or category settings.
• What Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode show for a query. There is no public API for them, and a tool that claims to know is scraping a personalised page.
• Your traffic, bookings, or revenue.
• Anything rendered by JavaScript or inside an embedded booking widget, unless the tool runs a browser. Most do not, and neither do several AI crawlers.

If a report claims one of these without asking for your login, ask how.

What “asking the AI” really means

A tool can send questions to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s APIs with their web-search tools switched on and a location set to your city. That produces real, sourced answers with citations. It does not produce what a person sees in the ChatGPT app: the app adds its own instructions, memory and personalisation that the API does not share. Honest reports say “measured via the API”.

Two more things follow from how these systems work. First, the answers change from run to run, so a single answer is an anecdote. A 2026 paper on measuring visibility in AI search argues for repeated measurement and reporting variation rather than one-off scores (source 5). My check asks each question without your name three times per provider and reports “named in 2 of 3 completed runs”. Second, whether you are named when someone asks by name says nothing about whether you are found when someone asks for a pilates studio in your city. The two questions have to be kept apart.

A note on stale advice

Advice ages. Until recently, adding FAQ markup was recommended for a rich result in Google; Google stopped showing that result in May 2026 and removed the documentation in June (source 6). Answering common questions in plain text on your page is still useful for readers and assistants. Paying for markup to chase a feature that no longer exists is not.

Twenty-minute action

Open your homepage on your phone and, without tapping anything, try to answer five questions: where is the studio, what classes does it run, can a complete beginner come, what does the first visit cost, and how do I book it. Whatever you cannot answer from the text on the screen, an assistant cannot either. Write the missing sentence and add it.

If you want the evidence version of that exercise, run the free check.