The short answer: once a year, spend 30 minutes checking five things: your home page address, your padlock, your robots file, your Google listing and your contact form. They break quietly, and most owners only find out when the phone stops ringing.
1. Does your home page have one address? (1 minute)
Your home page should open at one address only, with every other version forwarding to it. Run the free test. Green means you are done.
2. Is the padlock working? (2 minutes)
Open your website and look for the padlock or “secure” symbol next to the address. Click it to check that the certificate is valid. Certificates expire, and automatic renewals sometimes fail. More on this in is your website still on http?
3. Is your robots file blocking anyone you want to let in? (5 minutes)
Type yourbusiness.com/robots.txt into your browser. You are looking for the word “Disallow”.
- “Disallow: /” under “User-agent: *” means every robot is blocked from the whole site. This sometimes gets left on by accident after a redesign, and it can remove you from Google.
- Names like GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot with a “Disallow” mean AI engines are blocked.
If you see either one and did not ask for it, send a screenshot to your web developer.
4. Is your Google Business Profile still right? (10 minutes)
Search for your business name on Google and look at the panel that appears. Check the hours, including holidays. Check the phone number, the website link, the categories and the photos. Google sometimes accepts changes suggested by the public, so details can change without you touching anything.
5. Does your contact form still deliver? (5 minutes)
Fill out your own contact form using a personal email address. Did the message arrive? Did it go to the right person? Did it land in a spam folder? Forms stop working more often than you would think, usually after an update or an email change. Test the phone number and the email link on your site while you are there.
Bonus: ask AI about yourself
Once a year, run the 15-minute AI visibility check and save your notes. Next year you will be able to see how far you have come.
Put it in your calendar
Pick a quiet week and set a reminder that repeats every year. Thirty minutes once a year is cheap insurance for the thing that brings you customers.
