AI Visibility Checker

Why AI visibility is a different problem than SEO

Traditional SEO tools tell you how a search engine ranks your pages. This tool answers a narrower, newer question: can an AI system technically access your content in the first place? A page can rank perfectly on Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity if it blocks the wrong crawler, has no structured data, or accidentally ships a noindex tag.

That gap matters because AI answer engines are becoming a real traffic source. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question your page could answer, the AI system needs to be able to fetch your page, parse it, and trust that it's actually about what it claims to be about. This checker measures exactly that: the technical plumbing that decides whether you're even in the running to be cited.

It does not call any paid AI API to ask 'does ChatGPT know about my brand'. That's a different, and much more expensive, product category (see our honest comparison of AI visibility trackers if you want live prompt-level monitoring). This tool is the free, fast, technical first step: a crawlability audit built specifically for AI crawlers, not a black box.

How the AI Visibility Score is calculated

The score out of 100 is a weighted sum of six signals. Every weight and every rule is listed below, on purpose: a scoring methodology you can't see is not a scoring methodology you can trust.

The indexability signal is the only one that can trigger a critical warning banner, because a noindex directive makes every other signal irrelevant. Fix that one first.

What we mean by '16 AI crawlers', exactly

Most competing tools check three bots at most: GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. That misses more than half the picture. This checker looks at all of the documented AI crawlers, including the quieter ones: OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, Anthropic's Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended (which are training-data opt-out tokens, not full user-agent strings you'll see in your logs), Meta-ExternalAgent and Meta-ExternalFetcher, Amazonbot, CCBot (the crawler behind Common Crawl, which many open-source LLMs train on), Bytespider, and DuckAssistBot.

Each bot is checked individually against your robots.txt file: does an explicit rule for that bot's own user-agent block it, does a generic wildcard rule catch it, or is it free to crawl? The full reference table, including which company runs each bot, what it's used for, and whether it actually honors robots.txt in practice, lives on our llms.txt and AI crawler guide.

AI visibility, GEO and AEO: three names for overlapping ideas

You'll see this space described with three different acronyms, and they're not quite synonyms. AI visibility is the broad, practical question this tool answers: can AI systems find, read and trust your content. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the content and authority side of that question: how you write and structure a page so a generative AI system chooses to summarize or cite it. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) overlaps heavily with GEO but leans toward direct-answer formats, the kind of concise, structured content that gets lifted into a single AI-generated answer rather than a list of links.

In practice, all three depend on the same technical foundation this checker measures. You can't optimize your GEO content strategy if GPTBot is blocked at the robots.txt level, and you can't win AEO answer boxes if your page has no schema markup identifying what kind of content it is. Read the full breakdown on our Generative Engine Optimization guide (with a second embedded checker widget) and our Answer Engine Optimization guide, which also compares the tools worth paying for once your technical foundation is solid.

What this tool won't do, on purpose

This checker does not send live prompts to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity to see whether they mention your brand today. That's a genuinely useful, genuinely different capability, and it requires a paid LLM API subscription on the backend, which is why every tool that offers it charges a monthly fee. Building a thin, free-sounding wrapper around that capability without disclosing the cost structure would be dishonest, so we don't.

Instead, this tool focuses on the part of AI visibility that's 100% within your control and free to check as often as you want: the technical crawlability signals that determine whether an AI system can read your site at all. If you want ongoing, live prompt-level tracking once your technical score is solid, see our tested comparison of paid AI visibility trackers.

Common technical mistakes that quietly block AI crawlers

Most low AI-visibility scores come from a handful of repeat offenders, not exotic misconfigurations:

• A security plugin or CDN rule blocking unfamiliar user-agents. Many bot-blocking tools default to denying anything that isn't a recognized search engine, which silently catches GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot along with actual spam bots.
• A staging-environment noindex tag that never got removed. It's common to set X-Robots-Tag: noindex during development and forget to remove it at launch, which this checker's critical-signal logic is specifically built to catch.
• A robots.txt that only has a wildcard rule. A single User-agent: * block with a broad Disallow can unintentionally block every AI crawler at once, even if you never meant to target them specifically.
• No schema markup at all. Many sites, especially older ones, never added Organization or WebSite JSON-LD because it wasn't considered necessary for search ranking. It still isn't required for ranking, but it now matters for AI trust signals.

Every one of these is a five-minute fix once you know it's the problem, which is the entire reason this checker exists: to tell you exactly which one, if any, applies to your site right now.

How AI visibility affects real traffic, not just theory

This isn't a purely academic concern. AI-powered answer surfaces (ChatGPT with browsing, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Bing's Copilot) are an increasingly common way people research a product, compare tools, or look up a fact before ever opening a traditional search results page. When one of those systems can't reach your page, it doesn't just skip citing you gracefully. It either cites a competitor who is reachable, or it answers from stale training data that may misrepresent your product entirely.

The upside is that this is one of the cheapest visibility gains available today, precisely because most sites haven't checked it yet. Fixing a blocked crawler or adding a missing schema block takes minutes and, unlike a full content strategy, doesn't require ongoing investment to maintain once it's fixed. Run the checker above, fix whatever comes back red or yellow, and re-check after your next deploy.