Can AI see your website? How to check

Check 1: is your content in the raw HTML?

Right-click your homepage, View Page Source, and search for a sentence from your main content. If it is not there, your site renders content with JavaScript that most AI crawlers never execute - the single most common and most severe AI-visibility failure. The fix is prerendering or server-side rendering of your public pages.

Check 2: are AI crawlers allowed in?

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended. Explicit blocks were fashionable in 2023 and many were never revisited. Blocking is a legitimate choice - but it should be a choice, not a leftover.

Check 3: do you have structured data?

Paste your homepage into Google’s Rich Results Test or validator.schema.org. You are looking for Organization markup at minimum, plus FAQ, Product or Service schema where relevant. Structured data is machine-readable fact - exactly the format retrieval systems prefer to quote.

Check 4: does llms.txt exist?

Visit yourdomain.com/llms.txt. Most sites return a 404, which is normal today - and an easy differentiator. A good llms.txt gives AI systems your canonical summary in one fetch.

Check 5: ask the assistants directly

Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity: what does [yourdomain.com] do? A confident, accurate answer means you are readable. A refusal, a guess, or details from an old version of your site tells you retrieval is failing - and the four checks above tell you why.

The automated version

AuditHQ’s AI Visibility suite runs these checks and the deeper ones - schema depth and validity, entity sameAs network, citation-friendly structure, author and freshness signals - in one pass with a score and specific fixes. It is one of nine suites in the free 60-second scan.

Frequently asked questions