AI visibility checker

A page can rank third for its main query and never be cited in an AI answer about the same topic. When we look into cases like that, the cause is usually mechanical before it is editorial: a CDN rule blocking OAI-SearchBot, a max-snippet:0 tag copied from a template, or a page whose text only exists after JavaScript runs. This free AI visibility checker tests those mechanics for one URL, scores the result, and then, if you want it, measures how often the domain already appears in ChatGPT and Google AI answers.

What does an AI visibility audit check?

It checks four things: whether the crawlers behind AI search products are allowed in robots.txt and not blocked by a firewall, whether the page is eligible for snippets, whether the main text is present in the HTML without JavaScript, and whether the content has the structure and signals that make it quotable. The readiness score is the AI visibility category from our full audit, run on its own.

The crawler table below the score is the part people act on most. For each crawler it shows the robots.txt decision for that exact URL and the HTTP status we received when requesting the page with that crawler's user-agent string. The fetch test is a heuristic: real crawlers are verified by IP address, so a block here almost always means a bot-management rule keyed on the user agent, which is fixable in an afternoon.

Which crawlers matter for AI visibility?

Fewer than the list suggests, and not the ones most people block.

The common mistake is blocking GPTBot to opt out of training and assuming ChatGPT search is unaffected, or blocking everything with "AI" in the name and quietly disappearing from ChatGPT search, Claude and Perplexity in one edit. The OAI-SearchBot glossary entry and the AI crawlers guide go through each bot and a sensible allow/block matrix.

What is an AI mention, and why does it matter more than the score?

An AI mention is your domain being named or cited in an answer. The gated check queries a third-party index that samples a large volume of United States, English prompts across ChatGPT and Google AI features and counts how often each domain appears, with an estimated monthly prompt volume behind those answers. Research shows that branded web mentions are the factor most strongly correlated with AI visibility: Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found a correlation of about 0.66 for AI Overviews, far ahead of backlinks at about 0.22. That is correlation, and Ahrefs says so, but the direction is consistent across studies: assistants cite brands that the sources they read already talk about.

This is why a perfect readiness score can sit next to zero mentions. The score removes obstacles; mentions on review sites, forums, news and comparison pages create the visibility. The on-page work is still worth doing, because a blocked or unreadable page cannot be cited even when everyone talks about you.

Is GEO different from SEO?

Google's position is that normal SEO is what gets a page into AI Overviews and AI Mode, and the mechanics support that: the same crawl, the same index, the same snippet controls. Research shows some content-level effects beyond that. The KDD 2024 paper that coined generative engine optimization reported up to a 40% visibility gain in a benchmark from adding statistics, quotations and cited sources (Aggarwal et al.); that is a benchmark result, not a field study. Schema markup showed no measurable citation lift in Ahrefs' 2026 test, and llms.txt is not used by Google Search. Our readiness checks weight each of these accordingly: citability counts, schema counts for entity disambiguation, and llms.txt is informational. The GEO vs SEO guide lays out what actually changes in practice.

What to do next

Fix any blocked search crawler first, then any snippet restriction, then extractability; those three account for most of the gap between a good page and an invisible one. If the problem is in a template, the website audit will show every page it affects. After that, work on being mentioned: the AI visibility guide covers platform-by-platform tactics drawn from the platforms' own documentation. To see how the page scores on everything else, run the full audit below.