How to read your AI visibility report
Answer engines don't rank ten blue links — they read a handful of sources and write one answer. To be one of those sources, three things have to be true: their crawler must be allowed in, it must be able to read your content without running JavaScript, and it must understand who you are well enough to trust you. The checker groups its findings along exactly those lines.
AI crawler access is the heaviest category. We parse your robots.txt the same way the bots do — most specific user-agent group first, longest matching rule wins — and test OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Meta, ByteDance and Common Crawl agents. Search and user-fetch bots (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) decide whether you can be cited at all, so blocking them is a failure. Training bots are scored more gently because blocking them is a legitimate business decision.
Content & rendering measures how many words exist in the raw HTML. Many modern sites ship an empty shell and paint the page with JavaScript. Googlebot renders JavaScript eventually; most AI crawlers do not. If this number is low, your pages are effectively blank to them.
Structured data and trust signals help engines resolve your brand as an entity: Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your logo and social profiles, clearly linked About and Contact pages, consistent Open Graph tags, and question-and-answer content they can quote directly.
Best practices for Answer Engine Optimization
- Allow AI search bots explicitly, even if you opt out of training. Our robots.txt generator has one-click presets.
- Server-render the copy that matters: product details, pricing, service areas, FAQs.
- Publish an llms.txt file that points agents to your best pages.
- Add Organization or LocalBusiness JSON-LD with the schema generator, and FAQPage markup that mirrors visible FAQs.
- Write answer-first paragraphs: state the answer in the first sentence, then the supporting detail. Engines lift these almost verbatim.
- Check your CDN or firewall. Cloudflare's bot-fight modes and some Indian hosting firewalls silently return 403s to AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.
A high score doesn't guarantee citations — engines still choose the most helpful, authoritative answer — but a low score almost guarantees you won't be in the running.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI visibility score?
It's a weighted 0–100 score that estimates how easily answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews can crawl, understand and trust your website. Crawler access and server-rendered content carry the most weight, followed by structured data, llms.txt and trust signals.
Should I block GPTBot?
GPTBot collects training data; it is separate from OAI-SearchBot, which powers ChatGPT search citations. Blocking GPTBot is a reasonable content-licensing choice, but if you want ChatGPT to recommend your brand, keep OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User allowed.
Does blocking Google-Extended remove me from AI Overviews?
No. Google-Extended only controls whether your content is used for Gemini model training and grounding. AI Overviews and AI Mode are built from the normal Google Search index, which Googlebot crawls.
How often should I re-check?
After any change to robots.txt, your CDN or firewall rules, a site redesign or a CMS migration — those are the moments AI crawlers most often get blocked by accident.