Can AI engines actually see your website?
A growing share of people now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI for a recommendation instead of scrolling a results page. If those systems cannot read your site, you are not in the running, and most owners have no idea whether they are blocked.
Check my AI visibility
Enter your website address. We run the check against your live site and show you this section of the results in a few seconds.
Checks run against your live site. We record the website address you check, the pass, warn and fail counts, and your email address. We use your email to run the check, and to send marketing only if you tick the box. We do not sell, rent or share your details. Ten free scans per hour.
What this checks
- AI crawler accessIf GPTBot/ClaudeBot/PerplexityBot/Google-Extended are blocked, you are invisible to AI search.
- llms.txt fileEmerging standard that tells AI engines what your site is about.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)Schema markup is how AI engines reliably understand your business.
Why it matters
There is a file at the root of your website called robots.txt. A surprising number of sites are blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended in it, usually because a plugin, a host, or a well meaning developer added the lines during the panic about AI scraping.
The effect is simple and total. When somebody asks an AI engine who does what you do in your area, your competitors get read and summarised, and you are not in the answer at all. Unlike a poor search ranking, there is no partial credit here. You are either readable or invisible.
The flip side is that being cited by an AI engine is far less crowded than ranking on Google. The businesses that get quoted now are the ones whose pages are readable, clearly structured, and marked up so a machine can tell what the business actually is.
How to fix it
Decide deliberately whether you are blocking AI crawlers
There are honest reasons to block them. Being blocked by accident, and losing the referrals, is not one of them. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. If you see GPTBot or Google-Extended with Disallow underneath, that is a decision somebody made for you.
Add an llms.txt file
An emerging convention, a plain text file at your root that tells AI engines in clear language what your business is, what you sell and which pages matter. It costs nothing and it is one of the few places you get to describe yourself in your own words.
Add structured data
JSON-LD schema markup is the difference between an engine inferring what you do and being told. At minimum mark up your organisation, your location, your services and your opening hours.
Write pages that answer questions directly
AI engines quote text that answers a question in a self contained way. A page with a clear question as a heading and a straight answer underneath gets cited. A brochure page of adjectives does not.
Questions
- Is being readable by AI the same as ranking in Google?
- No. They overlap, but a site can rank well in Google and still be blocked from AI engines, because the blocking happens through separate crawler names in robots.txt. That is exactly why it goes unnoticed.
- Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?
- That is a real decision with trade offs, and it depends on whether your content is the product or the advertisement. For most local and service businesses the pages are advertising, and blocking them is turning away a referral channel. The point of this check is to make sure it is a decision rather than an accident.
- What is llms.txt?
- A plain text file at the root of your site, in the same spirit as robots.txt, that describes your site for large language models. It is a convention rather than a standard, it is cheap to add, and the engines that use it are the ones sending traffic now.
The other seven checks
Each one is free, instant and needs just your email address. Or run all 25 at once.
Being readable is step one. Being chosen is the job.
The free check tells you what is broken. The audit is a dated report, tested by a person, that shows what was checked and when. That record is what protects you when somebody complains, and it is the part an automated scan cannot give you.
This is an automated check of what is publicly visible on your website. It is a plain language summary, not legal advice, and passing it does not by itself make you compliant with any particular law. Where a rule is mentioned, confirm it against the source before acting on it.