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Check your own site. Free, no email required.

Everything on this page uses free public tools or your own eyes. No signup, no catch, and you keep the results. If they worry you, the next step is at the bottom of the page. If they do not, you just saved money.

The 60-second test

Ask an AI who to hire. See if you come up.

More and more of your customers start here instead of a search results page. They ask a question, they get one short answer, and they call whoever is in it. This test shows you what that answer says today.

1

Open any AI tool.

ChatGPT, Google with AI answers turned on, or Perplexity. The free versions count.

2

Ask it, in your own words, who to hire.

Recommend a [your trade] near [your town]. Who should I call and why?

Then ask a second question: "What do you know about [your business name]?"

3

The answer lands one of three ways.

  • You are named, and the facts are right. Good. The work now is keeping it that way, because these answers get rewritten constantly and nobody notifies you when yours changes.
  • A competitor is named. That same answer repeats every time a customer asks. The reasons the machine picked them are readable, and most of them are fixable.
  • Nobody local is named. The answer for your field in your town is still unwritten. Being the first business the machines can describe clearly is cheaper than dislodging someone later.

Whichever one you got, it is a signal, not a verdict. The checks below tell you why the answer came out the way it did.

Free instruments

Three more checks, ten minutes, still free.

These are the same public tools I use in paid work. Run them yourself and write down what you get, with today's date. Dated numbers are worth more than impressions.

How fast people see your page

pagespeed.web.dev

Open PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed test, and enter your web address. The mobile score tells you how long phone visitors wait before your page shows up. Below 50 means people are leaving before they see you. For reference, this site's most recent run scored 92 (July 11, 2026, one lab run; scores swing a few points run to run).

The locks your site tells browsers to use

securityheaders.com

Open securityheaders.com and enter your address. Every website sends browsers a set of security instructions that lock out common attacks. This tool checks which ones yours sends and grades it A through F. A site with none configured grades an F automatically; that is the most common result for small business sites, and it is fixable. This site grades A.

What a stranger's search shows

Google, in a private window

Open a private or incognito browser window, so Google is not showing you results shaped by your own history, and search your business name plus your town. Is the top result yours? Are the hours, address, and phone number right everywhere they appear? Machines and customers both trust what they can verify, and mismatched facts quietly cost you both.

The self-check

Twelve questions, one letter grade.

Answer honestly. Nothing here leaves your browser, and there is no email gate on the other side. "Not sure" counts as no, and that is a finding, not a failure: not knowing is exactly what a measurement fixes.

Do you know what ChatGPT says when someone asks it to recommend a business like yours near your town?
On a phone, does the main content of your site show up in under three seconds?
Does your site spell out, in plain text a machine can read, exactly what you do, where you work, and how to reach you?
Does securityheaders.com give your site an A? (The free check above.)
Does every page on your site have its own title and description, the text people see in search results?
Is your business name, address, and phone number written exactly the same everywhere it appears online?
Do you know your site's current mobile speed score from Google's free test?
Has anyone ever tested whether your site works for people using only a keyboard, or a screen reader?
Does your site have a privacy page that matches what it actually collects?
Do you know how your site compares with your closest competitor's on any of these checks?
If your hosting company deleted your server today, could your site be back up within a day?
Has anything on your site been measured in the last 90 days?

    Whatever the grade, the next step is the same and it is free: request the free baseline reading. Your grade comes with you automatically. Got an A? Then the one thing a self-check cannot measure is what AI actually says about you, and the reading covers that too.

    What the grade means

    Whatever the letter, the next step is free.

    Eleven or twelve yes answers grade an A: your basics hold. Nine or ten, a B: a small number of gaps. Six to eight, a C, which is the most common shape and entirely fixable. Three to five, a D. Under three, an F, which mostly means nothing has been set up yet, not that anything is beyond repair. A site with nothing configured grades an F as a mechanical property of the checklist, and it also means the fastest wins are all still on the table.

    The self-check tells you where the gaps are. The free baseline reading tells you which ones are costing you: you send your web address, I send back five measurements of how your site is doing, each dated, each explained in one sentence. Bring your grade with you; it carries over automatically when you open the baseline page in this browser.

    Get your free baseline reading