How to check if your website is visible to AI

By The AI Visibility Checker team8 min read

Last updated: July 8, 2026

TL;DR

The fast answer: paste your URL into a free AI Readiness scan and you'll get a 0–100 grade with a per-agent breakdown in seconds. Want to verify by hand? Fetch your page as an AI bot with curl, compare the raw HTML to what a browser shows, and check your robots.txt and server logs. “Visible” means three things clear at once: the bot can reach you, read you, and trust you enough to cite.

The fast way: score it

You don't have to guess. AI Bot Checker fetches your site the way GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Gemini, Grok and Doubao do, and returns a grade for each — plus the exact reasons behind any low mark. Paste your URL on the homepage for the full audit, or look up any domain (including a competitor) at /score/domain.com. No account, no card. If you only do one thing, do this — the rest of this article is for confirming why the score is what it is.

What “visible to AI” actually means

It's not one switch. A page has to clear three gates, in order:

  1. Reach. The bot's request has to succeed — not a 403, not a CDN challenge, not a robots.txt Disallow.
  2. Read. Your content has to be in the HTML the bot receives. Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so client-side-rendered text is invisible to them even if the request succeeded.
  3. Trust. The content has to be structured and credible enough that a model will extract a fact and attribute it to you.

Fail gate one and nothing else matters. That's why the manual checks below start at the top.

The manual checks you can run yourself

1. Fetch your page as an AI bot. Set the user-agent and see what actually comes back:

curl -A "GPTBot/1.0 (+https://openai.com/gptbot)" -sS https://example.com | head -c 2000

A 403, a captcha page, or an empty shell is a red flag. If you see your real headings and paragraphs in that output, you've cleared gates one and two for GPTBot.

2. Compare raw HTML to the rendered page. Open “View source” (the raw HTML) and compare it to what you see on screen. If your main content is on screen but missing from the source, it's being injected by JavaScript — and most AI crawlers won't see it. This is the single most common reason a good-looking site is invisible to AI.

3. Read your robots.txt. Check example.com/robots.txt for lines that disallow AI user-agents. Blocking GPTBot or Google-Extended only affects model training — but blocking the retrieval bots (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) is what actually stops you being cited. See robots.txt for AI crawlers.

4. Look for bot hits in your logs. Grep your server or CDN logs for AI user-agents. If you never see them, you may be blocking them upstream without realising:

grep -iE "GPTBot|ClaudeBot|PerplexityBot|OAI-SearchBot" access.log | tail -20

Common reasons a site is invisible

  • Cloudflare or a WAF is challenging bots — the “block AI scrapers” toggle catches the citation bots too.
  • Client-side rendering — a single-page app that ships an empty shell to non-JS crawlers.
  • Over-eager robots.txt — a blanket Disallow that took out retrieval bots.
  • Thin or buried content — reachable and readable, but nothing quotable or structured to cite.

FAQ

Can't I just ask ChatGPT if it can see my site?

Not reliably. A chatbot may hallucinate a confident answer, cache an old crawl, or describe your brand from training data even while its live retrieval bot is blocked today. Fetching the page yourself with the bot's user-agent — or running a scan — tests the thing that actually matters.

My site ranks #1 on Google — doesn't that mean AI can see it?

No. Google renders JavaScript and runs its own crawler; most AI bots don't and use different user-agents your firewall may treat differently. A #1 page can be completely invisible to GPTBot. That gap is exactly what this check finds.

If I'm invisible, how long to fix it?

Access and rendering fixes (unblock the bot, server-render the content) can take effect on the next crawl. Earning citations from authority and content takes longer. But getting reachable and readable is usually an afternoon, and it's the prerequisite for everything else.

Stop guessing: check if your site is visible to AI free, see the public scores, or read why AI assistants ignore your site.

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