What the AI Visibility Checker checks, and what it can’t
The AI Visibility Checker tells you whether search engines and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity can reach, read and identify your homepage, and whether a visitor can turn into a lead. It does not tell you whether those engines currently cite you — nobody can from the outside without running the questions themselves.
What this checker actually looks at
It runs about twenty concrete checks against your homepage, grouped the way the work is actually done: can search engines find and understand the page, can AI answer engines reach it and lift a clean answer from it, and can a visitor who arrives turn into an enquiry. Every result shows what we found and, if it failed, what to change.
The score is simply how many checks passed. We deliberately do not turn it into a 0–100 “AI visibility score”, because nobody outside OpenAI or Google can measure how often a given site is cited for a given question without running those questions, and a number that looks precise but is not is worse than no number.
Why crawler access comes first
Every AI answer engine that cites the web has to be allowed to read the page first. OpenAI documents that OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and that sites blocking it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. It is separate from GPTBot, the training crawler, so a site can allow one and block the other.
Google is equally direct: AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same crawling and indexing as Search, and a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet before it can appear as a supporting link. Since 31 August 2026 there is one more switch: Search Console’s Search generative AI setting can exclude a whole site from AI Overviews and AI Mode. It defaults to Include, but it is worth a look, and the checker reminds you because it can’t see it from outside. A leftover noindex or a nosnippet directive quietly removes a page from both. These are common reasons a good site is invisible, and most take minutes to fix.
Does schema or llms.txt make you show up?
Neither is a switch. Google says no special structured data is required to appear in AI features. We still check for it, because Organization or LocalBusiness markup is how a machine confirms who a site belongs to, and that identity helps an answer engine name you correctly when it cites you.
llms.txt is a short plain-text summary some sites publish for language models. No AI company has documented it as a ranking or citation factor, so the checker marks it as optional and does not count it toward your score. It is cheap to publish; just don’t expect it to do the work of the other checks.
What should you do with your result?
Fix the red items in the first two groups before anything else: a blocked crawler, a noindex, a missing title or a homepage with almost no readable text will undo every other piece of marketing. Most of those are an afternoon of work for whoever manages the site.
Then look at the questions your buyers actually type — our free keyword tool lists them from Google’s own autocomplete — and make sure each important one has a page with a direct answer near the top. That is the part a checklist cannot do for you, and it is where being cited is actually won. We explain the approach in what generative engine optimization is and how to rank in ChatGPT.
Verified 23 September 2026 against OpenAI’s crawler documentation and Google Search Central’s AI features documentation
Frequently asked questions
Is this a ChatGPT ranking or an AI visibility score?
No. It is a readiness checklist: it checks whether the crawlers and signals AI answer engines rely on are in place. Whether ChatGPT or Google currently cites your site for a given question can only be seen by running those questions, which is what we do by hand in an AI marketing audit.
Which pages does it check?
Your homepage, plus your robots.txt, llms.txt and sitemap. Problems on the homepage are usually sitewide (a theme, a plugin or a robots.txt rule), so it is the fastest useful sample. Individual pages can differ.
Why does my site show as unreachable?
Either the address is wrong, the site was down, or a firewall blocked our automated request. If you can load it in a browser, a security tool is probably blocking bots, which is worth checking, because the same setting can block search and AI crawlers too.
Do you store the sites I check?
Each result is cached for a few hours so a repeat check loads instantly, then it expires. We do not keep a list of the sites people check, and we only have your details if you send the form below.
How often should I re-run it?
After any theme, plugin, hosting or security change, and whenever a site redesign launches. Those are the moments a noindex or a crawler block most often slips in unnoticed.
Sources
- OpenAI — Overview of OpenAI Crawlers OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, and how robots.txt controls each.
- Google Search Central — AI features and your website Last updated 10 December 2025.
- Google Search Console Help — Search generative AI control Rolled out to all sites as of 31 August 2026.