AI search readiness checker.

How AI assistants find your website

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews answer many questions by searching the web and quoting the pages they find. Each company runs crawlers to do this, and those crawlers follow the rules in your robots.txt file, just like Googlebot does.

There are two kinds. Training crawlers, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot, collect pages to train future models. Search and user crawlers, such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, fetch pages to answer questions right now, and those are the ones that lead to your site being cited with a link. Blocking training crawlers is a reasonable business choice. Blocking search crawlers means you can't be recommended at all.

What this checker looks at

• Crawler access: your robots.txt rules for 13 AI crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Common Crawl.
• llms.txt: an optional plain-text file that points AI tools to your most important pages.
• Content in the HTML: most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so text that only appears after scripts load is invisible to them.
• Entity schema: Organization or LocalBusiness structured data that says who you are and where.
• Answer-shaped content: question headings, FAQ markup and visible dates.
• The basics: HTTPS, indexability and an XML sitemap.

What a good score does and doesn't mean

A high score means nothing technical is stopping AI tools from reading and quoting your page. It doesn't mean they will. Assistants recommend businesses that are clearly described, well reviewed and mentioned by other trustworthy sites, and whose pages answer the question better than the alternatives.

That's the difference between readiness and visibility, and it's why we treat AI search as an extension of SEO rather than a trick. Our answer engine optimisation work covers the content side; generative engine optimisation covers mentions, entities and measurement.

Quick wins after you run the check

• Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Bingbot in robots.txt.
• Make sure your key pages work without JavaScript: view the page source and check the text is there.
• Add Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone and social profiles.
• Rewrite a few headings as the questions customers actually ask, with a direct answer underneath.
• Show a "last updated" date on pages you keep current.