What this checks
Ranking and being cited are different problems. A page can sit on page one of Google and still never appear in an AI answer — usually because its text is assembled by JavaScript that the crawler never runs, or because nothing in the markup says who published it.
So this looks at four things in order, because they fail in order:
- Reach. Whether robots.txt lets the AI crawlers in at all.
- Identity. Whether the structured data names a publisher worth crediting.
- Quotability. Whether any passage can be lifted and still make sense.
- Trust. Whether it is dated, attributed and substantial enough to repeat.
Crawlers checked
- GPTBot — OpenAI — training and ChatGPT browsing
- OAI-SearchBot — ChatGPT Search results
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity answers and citations
- ClaudeBot — Claude, including web search
- Google-Extended — Gemini and Google AI Overviews
Questions people ask
AI visibility is whether answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can reach your page, work out who published it, and quote a passage from it with a citation. It is distinct from ranking: a page can sit on page one of Google and still never be cited, usually because its content is built by JavaScript or its structured data does not name apublisher.
A normal audit asks whether Google can crawl, index and rank the page. This asks a narrower question: whether a model assembling an answer can extract a self-contained passage and attribute it to you. The checks that matter most here — AI crawler access in robots.txt, question-shaped headings, short standalone answers, publisher schema — barely feature in a conventional audit.
It depends what you want. Blocking stops your content being used for training, and also stops ChatGPT citing you when someone asks a question your page answers. If you sell something people research before buying, that citation is usually worth more than the training data is worth withholding. The tool reports what you are blocking so the choice is deliberate rather than inherited from a template.
Googlebot renders JavaScript. Several AI crawlers do not, or do so inconsistently. If your copy only exists after a framework boots in the browser, those fetchers receive an almost empty document, which is why the check weighs what is in the HTML as served rather than what appears on screen.
See How AI Search Describes Your Brand Today
We run your domain through the same visibility checks we use on client accounts — AI answer coverage, technical SEO and content gaps — and send you the findings. No obligation.
