Can AI actually read your site?
More people now start with an AI answer instead of a list of links. This checks, in a couple of seconds, whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI can reach your pages, read them, and cite you. Free, no signup.
The three things that decide it
1. Can the AI crawlers get in. AI answers come from crawlers like OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. If your robots.txt blocks those, you are invisible to those answers. The confusing part is that blocking the training crawler (GPTBot) is a separate, reasonable choice that does not cost you citations. People block the wrong one all the time.
2. Is the page actually readable. If your site renders its content in the browser with JavaScript and ships an almost-empty page to start, most AI crawlers see nothing. Server-side or static rendering fixes it.
3. llms.txt is optional. It is a new convention some sites add to guide AI tools. Nice to have, not required to be cited today. The checker tells you if you have one, and there is a generator and validator if you want to add one or check yours.
Common questions
How do I know if AI can read my website? Paste your address into the checker above. It looks at whether the AI search crawlers are allowed by your robots.txt, and whether your homepage sends real text instead of an almost-empty page that fills in later with JavaScript.
Why is my site not showing in ChatGPT? Usually one of two reasons. Either your robots.txt blocks OAI-SearchBot, the crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT Search, or your pages render in the browser and send an almost-empty page first, so the crawler sees nothing. Here is the full guide on showing up in ChatGPT.
Does blocking GPTBot stop ChatGPT from citing my site? No. GPTBot is the training crawler. ChatGPT Search uses a different one called OAI-SearchBot. You can block GPTBot to stay out of training and still get cited, as long as OAI-SearchBot is allowed.
Do I need an llms.txt file to be cited by AI? No. It is optional and new. Being crawlable and readable matters far more. If you want one anyway, there is a generator on this site.
Other free tools here
- llms.txt generator and validator. Builds one from your real pages, or checks the one you have against the spec.
- AI crawler census. Which of the top 5,000 sites block each AI crawler, from their robots.txt, with the data as JSON.
- The 20 AI crawlers, one page each. What each one does, what blocking it costs, and how many sites block it.
Guides
- How to get your website to show up in ChatGPT. The crawler that matters, the robots.txt lines that let it in, and what the cited pages have in common.
- Does ChatGPT see my website? Three checks, from a one-minute look at robots.txt to what your server logs prove.
- How to rank in AI search. How ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews find and cite pages, and the five things a site has to get right.
- Should you block GPTBot? What blocking it does and does not control, and the mistake that takes sites out of ChatGPT search by accident.