How to Check Whether Your Website Is Visible to AI Search Engines

AI visibility is whether AI systems — chat assistants, AI-powered search, and research agents — can actually access and understand your site's content. It depends on a few concrete, checkable factors rather than being a vague ranking signal.

What determines AI visibility

Crawler access. If your robots.txt blocks a given AI crawler, that crawler's provider generally can't read your site at all, regardless of anything else. This is the first thing to check, since it's a hard yes/no gate rather than a ranking factor.

Reachability. A page also needs to return a successful response (HTTP 200) and, ideally, have its key content in the initial HTML rather than requiring client-side JavaScript to render — some crawlers don't execute JavaScript.

Machine-readable summaries. Some sites publish an llms.txt file at their root — a plain-text index of what the site offers, intended to be easy for AI systems to parse quickly. It's not a universal standard yet, but it's a low-cost, low-risk addition.

How to check your own site

1. Run your domain through the GPTBot Checker to see whether GPTBot and other tracked AI crawlers are allowed or blocked by your robots.txt.
2. Confirm the page loads with a normal HTTP 200 status and isn't accidentally set to noindex.
3. Check whether your site has an llms.txt file at the root (yoursite.com/llms.txt).

What to do if a crawler is blocked

If a scan shows a crawler you want to allow is currently blocked, add an explicit Allow rule for that crawler's user-agent token in robots.txt — see How robots.txt Affects AI Crawlers for the exact syntax.