Your website is visible to AI chatbots only if two separate things are true: AI crawlers can read your pages, and AI assistants actually mention your brand in their answers. These are different questions with different tests. A perfectly crawlable site can be ignored in every answer, and a technically broken site can still get mentioned from third-party sources.
Run both tests below. Together they take under an hour and tell you which problem you actually have.
Test 1: Can AI crawlers read your site?
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot fetch raw HTML and do not execute JavaScript. Googlebot does render JavaScript, which is exactly why this problem hides: a client-side-rendered site looks fine in Google while serving AI crawlers a nearly empty page.
To test, load your key pages with JavaScript disabled in your browser, or fetch them with curl and read the returned HTML. If your product descriptions, pricing, and copy are missing from the raw source, AI crawlers cannot see them. Also check your robots.txt: some sites block GPTBot or ClaudeBot without realizing that this can remove them from citation-driven answers, not just from training data.
Test 2: Does AI mention your brand?
Readability is the entry ticket, not the prize. The second test is whether assistants name you when buyers ask category questions. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for the best options in your category, for alternatives to your biggest competitor, and what they know about your brand by name. Note whether you are cited as a source, mentioned in passing, or absent entirely.
Do this across several phrasings and fresh sessions, because single answers vary. The full manual method and its blind spots are laid out in how to know what AI says about your brand.
The four outcomes and what each means
Your two test results place you in one of four situations:
- Readable and mentioned: you have a foundation, shift to measuring position and sentiment against competitors
- Readable but ignored: a competition problem, you need third-party citations, comparisons, and reviews, not technical work
- Unreadable but mentioned: AI knows you from other sources, fix rendering fast because you are ceding control of your own story
- Unreadable and ignored: start with rendering and entity basics, nothing else will stick until crawlers can read you
Test both in one scan
The free scan checks which AI crawlers can read your site and whether five AI providers mention your brand on buyer prompts, so you get both answers at once.
Frequently asked questions
Is my brand being cited by AI or ignored?
Test it by asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity unbranded buyer questions for your category across several fresh sessions. If your brand never appears in recommendations or cited sources, you are being ignored, and the cause is usually missing third-party evidence rather than anything on your own site. A systematic scan across providers gives a more reliable verdict than manual spot checks.
How do I check if AI crawlers can read my website?
Load your pages with JavaScript disabled, or fetch them with a tool like curl, and check whether your real content appears in the raw HTML. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot do not execute JavaScript, so anything rendered client-side is invisible to them. Also confirm your robots.txt is not blocking these bots.
Does ranking in Google mean AI can see my site?
No. Googlebot renders JavaScript, so Google can index content that AI crawlers never see. A site can hold page-one rankings while serving GPTBot and PerplexityBot an empty shell. The two need to be verified separately.
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