// TOOL 02 — AI VISIBILITY: ONLINE
AI Visibility Checker
Before an AI assistant can cite you, it has to be able to reach you and read you. This scanner checks whether the major AI crawlers are allowed in, whether your homepage is machine-legible without JavaScript, and whether you've published the signals AI systems use to trust a source.
What the scan checks
- C-01
AI crawler access (robots.txt)
Nine major AI user-agents tested against your robots.txt — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Amazonbot, and Meta's agent. A single blanket disallow can silently remove you from every AI answer surface.
- C-02
Entity legibility (JSON-LD)
Whether your homepage carries structured data — Organization, LocalBusiness, Person — that tells AI systems who you are without inference. No schema means the machine has to guess, and machines guess wrong.
- C-03
Crawlable content (no-JS render)
How much readable text exists in the raw HTML before any JavaScript runs. Many AI crawlers don't execute JS, so a client-rendered site can look empty to them even when it's rich in a browser.
- C-04
Machine channels (llms.txt, sitemap)
Whether you publish an llms.txt — a direct instruction file for AI agents — and a valid sitemap. Both are explicit invitations that raise your citation probability.
Why AI visibility is a separate discipline from SEO
Ranking on Google and being cited by an AI assistant share a foundation but diverge fast. Googlebot renders JavaScript and rewards a huge basket of ranking signals; AI crawlers are often simpler, frequently skip JS, and lean heavily on structured entity data and clean, extractable text. A site can rank on page one and still be functionally invisible to ChatGPT because its content only exists after hydration, or because a robots.txt rule quietly blocks GPTBot. This tool measures the AI-specific layer that traditional SEO audits miss.
// RELATED OUTCOMEReady to move from visible to cited? See how we engineer AI citations →FAQ
What does this tool actually check?
It fetches your robots.txt and tests whether the major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and others) are allowed or blocked; checks for an llms.txt and sitemap.xml; and parses your homepage's raw HTML for title, meta description, H1, JSON-LD entity schema, and how much text renders without JavaScript. These are the accessibility signals that gate whether AI systems can read and cite you at all.
Why does blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot matter?
If you disallow an AI crawler in robots.txt, that assistant cannot fetch your pages to ground its answers in your content. Blocking is a common accidental cause of AI invisibility — a well-meaning rule copied from a template can quietly remove you from ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and AI Overviews.
My site scores low but ranks fine on Google. How?
Traditional Google ranking and AI citation are different games. Googlebot renders JavaScript; many AI crawlers don't. A client-rendered SPA can rank on Google yet appear as an empty shell to an AI crawler that only reads raw HTML. This tool measures the AI side specifically.
Does a high score guarantee AI citations?
No. This checks accessibility and legibility — the necessary foundation. Actually being cited also depends on entity authority, citable content structure, and topical relevance to the query. A passing score means AI systems can see you; earning the citation is the next layer of work.