AI Visibility Checker
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI assistants now recommend stores, tools, and services directly. This free AI visibility checker audits any URL, shows whether AI systems can read, trust, and cite it, then asks ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini a real question live to see if your brand actually appears in their answers.
What is AI visibility?
AI visibility is whether AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini can find, read, and cite your website when people ask questions your business should answer. It is the AI-era equivalent of ranking in Google, except the "result" is a direct recommendation inside an answer, and the rules for earning it are different from classic SEO.
This matters because AI search does not simply mirror Google. Large-scale research shows the two layers reward different pages, which means a site can rank well in Google and still be invisible where AI assistants pick their sources.
Source: Ahrefs AI search research, 2026, based on over 1 billion data points across 14 studies.
02 — THE PIPELINEHow AI assistants decide whether to cite your site
Every AI answer that mentions a brand goes through the same pipeline: a crawler has to reach the page, the content has to exist in the raw HTML, the system has to extract and classify it, and the page has to look credible enough to cite. A failure at any stage means your competitors get recommended and you do not.
The AI citation pipeline. Most sites fail silently at the access gate or the extraction stage and never find out, because nothing visibly breaks. The page keeps working for humans while AI systems see a blocked URL or an empty shell.
Two failure points cause most invisibility. First, the access gate: CDN bot protection and robots.txt rules frequently block AI crawlers by default, through settings nobody consciously chose. Second, JavaScript rendering: most AI crawlers read raw HTML and do not execute JavaScript, so content that only appears after scripts run does not exist for them. A page can look perfect in a browser and be nearly blank to the systems deciding what to cite.
Illustration of the JavaScript gap the checker measures on your real page: a client-rendered product page as a browser renders it versus the raw HTML a non-rendering AI crawler reads.
03 — THE CHECKSWhat the AI Visibility Checker tests
The checker runs a live technical audit against your actual page, then queries real AI assistants to see whether you appear in their answers right now. It is not a questionnaire: every result comes from fetching your site the way AI systems do, plus real-time answers from the assistants themselves.
AI crawler access
Reads your robots.txt against 33 real AI crawlers, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Bingbot, and names the exact rule that blocks or allows each one. Then it fetches your page with a GPTBot user agent to catch firewall and bot-protection blocks that robots.txt never shows.
What AI actually sees
Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. The tool measures how much of your content exists in the raw HTML, detects client-rendered frameworks shipping empty shells, and scores the gap between what a browser shows and what an AI crawler reads.
Trust and structure signals
Structured data, author and freshness signals, headings, meta, canonical, and indexability. The signals AI systems use to classify a page and judge whether it is a credible source worth citing.
Prompt fit
An AI model reads your page content and tests it against 6 realistic questions people actually type into ChatGPT and Perplexity, then tells you which ones your page can win, which are partial, and where the gaps are.
Live AI answer check
The tool then asks ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini a real buying question from your category, live, and reports whether your brand was mentioned or cited in each answer, and which competitors were cited instead. Not a simulation: these are the actual assistants answering right now.
How to check your AI visibility
Enter the page you want audited
Your homepage shows overall access health. A key product page or blog post shows whether your money content is actually readable and citable.
Add your email and run the audit
The report renders on this page in about 15 seconds. You get 3 audits per day, so you can compare several pages or test a competitor.
Read your grade and the four sub-scores
Access, delivery, structure, and content are scored separately, because a perfect page behind a blocked firewall still scores zero where it matters.
Fix the critical items first
The report orders fixes by impact. Crawler blocks and noindex directives come before anything cosmetic, because nothing else matters until access works.
Re-run after your changes go live
Results are cached for a few hours per URL, so re-check the next day after deploying fixes to confirm the blocks are actually gone.
The AI crawlers that matter in 2026
Every major AI assistant runs its own crawlers, and each can be blocked independently. These are the ones with the most direct effect on whether you appear in AI answers. The checker tests all 33 known AI crawlers, including training-data bots like CCBot and Google-Extended.
| Crawler | Company | What it powers |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | ChatGPT's training corpus and search index. Blocking it removes you from the most used AI assistant. |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | ChatGPT search results specifically, the live web answers with citations. |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Real-time fetches when a ChatGPT user asks about your site or product right now. |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Perplexity's answer index. Perplexity cites sources on nearly every answer, so access here converts directly into visible links. |
| ClaudeBot / Claude-User | Anthropic | Claude's index and the live fetches Claude makes when users ask it to check a site. |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | The Bing index that powers Copilot answers and feeds several other AI products. |
| Google-Extended | The training signal for Gemini. Separate from normal Googlebot, blocked separately. | |
| Applebot | Apple | Siri and Spotlight answers, plus Apple's AI features. |
| CCBot | Common Crawl | The open dataset many AI models train on. Blocking it quietly removes you from future models. |
A robots.txt rule written years ago to stop "scrapers", or a CDN bot-protection preset, often blocks several of these without anyone noticing. That is exactly what the checker's access section surfaces.
06 — THE BLOCKERSThe 4 reasons AI systems cannot see a website
1. Crawler blocks in robots.txt or the CDN
The most common and most invisible cause. Bot-protection presets in Cloudflare and similar CDNs, or old anti-scraping rules in robots.txt, silently return errors to AI crawlers while humans see a normal site. Fix: allow the specific AI crawlers you want citing you, in both robots.txt and your CDN's bot rules, then confirm against real crawler logs.
2. Content that only exists after JavaScript runs
Client-rendered storefronts and single-page apps ship a near-empty HTML shell and build the page in the browser. AI crawlers read the shell, not the finished page, so products, prices, and copy simply do not exist for them. Fix: server-side rendering, prerendering, or static generation for every page you want cited.
3. Indexing directives pointing the wrong way
A leftover noindex tag, an X-Robots-Tag header, or a canonical pointing at a different URL tells every crawler to discard the page. These survive site migrations and staging pushes more often than anyone expects. Fix: audit meta robots, response headers, and canonicals on your key pages after every deploy.
4. Content AI systems cannot classify or trust
No clear H1, no author or date signals, thin text, and no structure. When an AI system cannot work out what a page is about or who stands behind it, it cites a competitor whose page it can parse. Fix: one clear H1, a real author, visible dates, and enough substantive text to answer the questions your buyers actually ask.
AI visibility vs SEO: same site, different game
Optimizing for AI answers goes by several names: generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), or LLM optimization. Whatever the label, it overlaps with SEO on fundamentals like crawlability and content quality, then diverges hard on what earns the citation.
Classic SEO rewards ranking signals: links, keywords, domain authority. AI assistants reward being quotable: direct answers to real questions, comparison content, third-party mentions across the web, and pages a non-rendering crawler can fully read. That is why nearly half of ChatGPT's citations go to listicle-style comparison pages, and why a technically blocked site loses both games at once. This checker covers the technical layer, the part you can fix this week. The content and mentions layer is a longer play, and it only pays off after the technical layer works.
Where the data comes from
Every result in your report is a live measurement, never an estimate. When something cannot be verified, the report says so instead of guessing.
✓Live fetches of your page
Direct HTTP requests to your actual URL with both a browser and a GPTBot user agent, raw HTML analysis, response headers, and timing from the real responses.
✓Robots Exclusion Protocol
Rules parsed from your live robots.txt against 33 AI crawler user agents, with the exact matching rule named for every verdict.
✓Real AI engine answers
The live answer check calls the actual ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini APIs with a real question and reports what they answered, including who they cited instead of you.
Common questions
Keep going: related tools and guides
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