What is an AI-readiness score?

Your AI-readiness score (0–100) measures one thing: how easily AI assistants can find your business, understand what you do, and recommend you to a customer.

Not how good your work is. Not how pretty your website is. Whether the machines doing the recommending can read you at all.

Why it matters now

Homeowners are skipping the scroll. Instead of reading ten Google results, they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Mode: "Who's the best HVAC contractor in Greenville?"

We ran that exact kind of test across four AI models plus Google's own results. Each AI named only a short list — typically four to six businesses. Forty different plumbers were named across everything we checked, and not a single one appeared everywhere. The shortlist is small, and it's different every time.

If your business isn't machine-readable, you're not on any version of that list. You never even know you lost the job.

Google now calls for you, too

Google's "Ask for Me" feature — now showing in Search as "Have AI check pricing" — has Google's AI call local businesses on a customer's behalf, ask about pricing and availability, and hand the customer a comparison. In May 2026 Google expanded it to home repair, which covers HVAC directly.

Three things worth knowing:

• Google picks which businesses to call from normal local search rankings. If you don't rank, you don't get the call.
• The AI announces itself as automated and calling from Google. Your front desk's first conversation about a job may be with software.
• If the call hits a dead line, a phone tree, or voicemail, the AI reports back empty for you — while competitors who answered show real answers.

What the score checks

Five categories, each one something an AI system actually trips over:

1. Crawler treatment (20 pts) — Does your robots.txt let AI bots in? Is there a sitemap telling them where to look?
2. Machine-readable facts (25 pts) — Is your name, phone, hours, and services published as structured data (schema) machines can parse — or buried in images and PDFs?
3. Agent ID files (20 pts) — Do you have an llms.txt and agent.json: the files that tell AI agents who you are and what you offer?
4. Contact actions (20 pts) — Tap-to-call links, a working quote form, an email link. Can a customer — or an AI — reach you in one tap?
5. Sharing readiness (15 pts) — Titles, descriptions, and preview cards, so your pages look right when they're cited or shared.

How it helps

Every point missing is a specific, fixable gap. The audit names them; fixing them is straightforward work — most of it is adding files and markup your site should have had all along.

Businesses that fix the gaps show up where AI looks: in the shortlist, in the comparison, on the call list. We re-audit every month and track the movement, so the score going up is the proof — and the case study.

Check your business

Every listing on Best HVAC SC carries its score, audited monthly. Find your business, see your number, and see exactly what's holding it back.

Get the $97 AI audit — the full report naming every gap, plus a done-for-you listing claim (your photos, corrected details, followed links) and a 30-day spotlight run in your city's featured slot.