What Is an AI Visibility Checker?
Artificial intelligence is changing the way people search for information online. Many users now ask questions directly in AI platforms instead of searching only through traditional search engines. Tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity can help users discover websites, compare products, understand topics, and find useful answers.
Because of this change, website owners are becoming more interested in checking whether AI systems and their crawlers can access their websites. An AI Visibility Checker is a useful online tool that analyzes a website's robots.txt file and checks whether important AI crawlers appear to be allowed or blocked.
Our free AI Visibility Checker makes this process simple. Enter your website domain, click the Analyze Domain button, and the tool checks your website's robots.txt configuration and displays the access status for multiple AI-related bots.
The tool can analyze crawler permissions for popular AI services and web crawlers, including GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-Web, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, AnthropicAI, Bytespider, CCBot, and Cohere-ai. It also displays useful technical information from the Cloudflare edge network, helping users understand the environment in which the website check is performed.
Why AI Visibility Is Important for Websites
Traditional SEO mainly focuses on search engines, keywords, backlinks, technical optimization, and organic rankings. AI visibility is a related but different area. It focuses on whether AI systems can discover, retrieve, understand, and potentially reference useful website content.
However, allowing an AI crawler in robots.txt does not guarantee that a website will appear in an AI-generated answer. Robots.txt primarily communicates crawler access rules. It is not a direct ranking signal and does not automatically increase visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity.
Website quality, content relevance, authority, structure, freshness, and the AI platform's own retrieval systems may also affect whether content is used or cited. A robots.txt file mainly provides crawler access instructions and should not be treated as a guaranteed AI ranking or citation signal.
AI Crawler Access Is Only the First Step
Checking crawler access is an important technical starting point, but it is only one part of AI visibility. A website may allow a crawler and still receive little or no visibility in AI-generated answers. Similarly, a website can have strong content but face technical limitations that make it difficult for automated systems to access or understand important pages.
For better AI and search visibility, website owners should also focus on publishing useful content, using clear headings, maintaining accurate information, improving page speed, keeping important pages accessible, and creating a logical website structure.
Clean and properly formatted HTML can also make website content easier to read and maintain. You can use our Free HTML Formatter to format and organize HTML code online.
How Our Free AI Visibility Checker Works
Our tool checks the domain entered by the user and analyzes the website's publicly available robots.txt file. The tool then reviews the available crawler rules and displays an access status for the supported AI bots.
After the analysis is complete, the tool provides a clear report that may include:
- Website domain being analyzed
- Robots.txt access information
- AI crawler permission status
- Allowed and blocked bot results
- AI visibility score
- Public network and edge diagnostics
- Cloudflare data center information
- HTTP and TLS protocol details
The results are designed to provide a quick technical overview. They should be treated as an access analysis rather than a guarantee of AI rankings, AI citations, or traffic. The purpose of the tool is to help website owners identify possible crawler-access issues and understand how their robots.txt configuration may affect supported AI bots.
To learn more about how robots.txt works, read the official Google Search Central robots.txt guide.
How to Use the Free AI Visibility Checker
Our AI Visibility Checker is designed to make website AI crawler analysis simple and easy. You do not need to install software, create an account, or manually read every line of a robots.txt file. Enter your website domain, start the analysis, and review the crawler permission results displayed by the tool.
Follow the steps below to check your website:
Step 1: Enter Your Website Domain
Open the AI Visibility Checker and find the website input field. Enter the domain you want to analyze. You can enter a domain such as example.com or a complete website address such as https://example.com.
For the best results, enter a valid public website. The website should be accessible online because the tool needs to request and analyze its publicly available robots.txt file.
Step 2: Click the Analyze Domain Button
After entering the website address, click the Analyze Domain button. The tool will process the domain and check the available robots.txt information.
During the analysis, the tool may display a loading message. The analysis time can depend on the target website, server response, network conditions, and the availability of the robots.txt file.
Step 3: Review the Target Domain
After the analysis is complete, the tool displays the target domain and indicates that the website's robots.txt information has been analyzed.
Always confirm that the displayed domain is the same website you entered. This is especially useful when testing websites that use different subdomains, redirects, or URL variations.
Step 4: Check the AI Crawler Permission Results
The tool displays the access status for the supported AI crawlers. Depending on the robots.txt rules detected by the current analyzer, a crawler may be shown as ALLOWED or BLOCKED.
The supported crawler list may include:
- GPTBot
- ChatGPT-User
- ClaudeBot
- Claude-Web
- PerplexityBot
- Google-Extended
- AnthropicAI
- Bytespider
- CCBot
- Cohere-ai
These bots may have different purposes. Some are associated with AI crawling, some may be related to AI search or user-requested access, and others may be connected with web data collection. Therefore, the status of one crawler should not automatically be used to describe the behavior of every AI platform.
Step 5: Understand the Allowed and Blocked Status
An ALLOWED result generally means that the current analyzer did not detect a blocking rule for that supported crawler. A BLOCKED result means that the analyzer detected a relevant robots.txt rule that restricts the crawler's access.
It is important to understand that an allowed status does not guarantee that the website will appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or another AI-generated answer. The result only provides information about crawler access rules detected from the website's robots.txt configuration.
Google explains that robots.txt is mainly used to communicate crawler access rules and manage crawling activity. A robots.txt rule is not the same as a ranking guarantee, and it does not automatically control every aspect of search visibility.
Step 6: Review the AI Visibility Score
The tool displays an AI Visibility Score based on the crawler permission results supported by the current version of the analyzer. A higher score generally indicates that more supported bots appear to be allowed, while a lower score may indicate that more bots are blocked.
This score should be treated as a tool-generated access estimate. It is not an official score from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity, Cloudflare, or any other AI company.
The score also does not measure brand mentions, AI citations, website authority, search rankings, traffic, content quality, or the probability of appearing in an AI response. It is intended to provide a quick summary of the crawler-access results shown by the tool.
Step 7: Review the Network and Edge Diagnostics
In addition to AI crawler permissions, the tool displays technical information about the current connection. Depending on the available Cloudflare request data, the report may include:
- Public IP address
- Approximate location
- ISP or organization information
- Visitor score
- Visitor status
- Cloudflare data center code
- TLS protocol version
- HTTP protocol version
- ASN information
- Browser user-agent
These details are useful for understanding the technical environment of the current tool session. They do not change the AI crawler permission result for the website being analyzed.
How to Read Your AI Visibility Checker Results
When reviewing the report, focus first on the target domain and the crawler status. If a supported bot is marked as blocked, review the website's robots.txt file and check whether the restriction was added intentionally.
If all supported bots are shown as allowed, the result means that the current analyzer did not find a relevant blocking rule for those bots. It does not mean that every AI platform has crawled the website or that the website is guaranteed to receive AI-generated traffic or citations.
Website owners should use the results as part of a broader technical SEO and AI visibility review. Important pages should remain accessible, content should be useful and well structured, and the website should provide clear information for users and search systems.
For additional technical optimization, you can use our Free HTML Formatter to clean and format website HTML. Well-organized HTML can make code easier to review, update, and maintain.
Understanding AI Crawlers and Their Roles
AI crawlers are automated systems that access publicly available website content for different purposes. Depending on the company and crawler, these purposes may include collecting information for AI model development, supporting AI-powered search, retrieving web pages when a user requests information, or improving the quality and relevance of AI-generated responses.
Not every AI crawler performs the same task. Some bots may be connected with model training, while others may support live web search or user-requested page access. For this reason, website owners should review each crawler separately instead of assuming that every AI bot has the same purpose.
Our AI Visibility Checker analyzes the supported crawler rules found in a website's robots.txt file and displays the current access result. The tool helps users understand whether a supported bot appears to be allowed or blocked according to the rules detected by the analyzer.
GPTBot
GPTBot is an OpenAI web crawler associated with collecting publicly available web content that may be used to improve future AI models. Website owners can use robots.txt rules to communicate whether GPTBot should be allowed to access their website.
For example, a website owner may use the following robots.txt rule to restrict GPTBot from accessing the entire website:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
Website owners should understand that blocking GPTBot is not the same as blocking every OpenAI-related crawler. OpenAI may use different crawlers for different purposes, so each supported user-agent should be reviewed separately.
ChatGPT-User
ChatGPT-User is associated with situations where ChatGPT may access a website in response to a user's request. This type of access is different from a crawler that collects content for general model development.
For example, if a user asks ChatGPT to open or analyze a specific webpage, a user-triggered crawler may request access to that page. The crawler's behavior can depend on the available website permissions, robots.txt rules, and other technical restrictions.
Because user-requested access and model-training access are different concepts, website owners should avoid treating GPTBot and ChatGPT-User as identical bots. A website can have different rules for different user-agents.
ClaudeBot
ClaudeBot is associated with Anthropic's web crawling activities. According to Anthropic, different bots can be used for different purposes, including collecting public web content and supporting AI-related web access.
Website owners can use robots.txt rules to communicate crawler preferences. For example, the following rule requests that ClaudeBot should not access the website:
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
Blocking ClaudeBot does not automatically mean that every Anthropic-related crawler is blocked. Website owners should review the specific user-agent names used in their robots.txt configuration and check the latest crawler documentation before making changes.
Claude-Web and AnthropicAI
Some websites may contain older or additional Anthropic-related user-agent rules, such as Claude-Web or AnthropicAI. These names may appear in existing robots.txt files, website logs, older configurations, or crawler-management tools.
Because crawler names and technical systems can change over time, website owners should verify the current official documentation before adding, removing, or modifying these rules. An older user-agent name should not automatically be assumed to have the same role as a current crawler.
PerplexityBot
PerplexityBot is associated with Perplexity's web crawling and AI-powered information systems. Website owners may review their robots.txt rules to determine whether the crawler appears to have access to public website content.
A website owner may use a rule similar to the following example to restrict the crawler:
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
However, crawler access alone does not guarantee that a website will appear in an AI-generated response. AI systems may use multiple data sources, search indexes, retrieval methods, and ranking signals when producing answers.
Google-Extended
Google-Extended is a special robots.txt product token provided by Google. It is not the same as Googlebot and does not have a separate HTTP request user-agent. Google explains that the token can be used by publishers to manage whether content crawled from their websites may be used for future Gemini model development and certain Gemini grounding features.
Google-Extended does not directly control whether a website appears in Google Search. Therefore, blocking or allowing Google-Extended should not be confused with blocking or allowing Googlebot.
For example, a website owner may use the following rule to communicate a restriction:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
Before changing this rule, website owners should understand the difference between Google Search crawling and Google-Extended controls. A Google-Extended rule is related to specific Gemini model and grounding uses, while Google Search uses its own crawling systems.
Bytespider
Bytespider is a web crawler associated with ByteDance. It may appear in website server logs, robots.txt configurations, and bot-management systems. Website owners can review the crawler's access status through the AI Visibility Checker and compare the result with their website's robots.txt rules.
If a website owner wants to restrict access to the entire website, a robots.txt rule may look like this:
User-agent: Bytespider
Disallow: /
Before adding a blocking rule, website owners should review the latest official crawler information and consider the possible effect on services or platforms that may use the crawler.
CCBot
CCBot is the crawler used by Common Crawl, a nonprofit organization that collects and maintains an open web crawl dataset. Common Crawl data may be used for research, search-related projects, language technologies, and other data-driven applications.
Website owners can communicate crawler access preferences through robots.txt. For example:
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
Blocking CCBot only applies to the crawler identified by that user-agent. It does not automatically block other AI crawlers, search engines, or automated systems.
Cohere-ai
Cohere-ai is a crawler user-agent that may be associated with Cohere's web-related AI activities. Website owners can check whether the current robots.txt configuration contains a relevant rule for this user-agent.
As with other bots, an allowed result does not guarantee that website content will be used in an AI answer. It only provides information about the crawler-access rules detected by the current analyzer.
Why Different AI Bots Need Separate Robots.txt Rules
Each crawler can have a different purpose, user-agent name, and access policy. A general robots.txt rule may affect many crawlers, while a specific user-agent rule can be used to manage an individual bot.
For example, a website owner may want to allow search-related access while restricting a crawler associated with model training. In this situation, separate crawler rules can provide more control than applying one broad rule to every automated system.
Website owners should carefully review their robots.txt file before making changes. A small mistake can unintentionally restrict important search crawlers or website resources. After updating the file, test the website again with the AI Visibility Checker and review the results.
You can also use our Free Robots.txt Generator to create a basic robots.txt file for your website. If you need to format or review HTML code used on your website, try our Free HTML Formatter.
Important: Allowed Access Does Not Guarantee AI Visibility
An ALLOWED result means that the current analyzer did not detect a relevant blocking rule for the supported crawler. It does not confirm that the crawler has visited the website, indexed the content, used the content for training, or included the website in an AI-generated answer.
Actual AI visibility can depend on many additional factors, including content quality, topical relevance, website authority, technical accessibility, page structure, freshness, search availability, and the AI platform's own retrieval and ranking systems.
For this reason, the AI Visibility Checker should be used as a technical crawler-access tool rather than a guaranteed AI ranking or citation checker.
How Robots.txt Affects AI Crawler Access
The robots.txt file is one of the most important technical files used to communicate crawler access preferences. It is normally placed in the root directory of a website. For example, the robots.txt file for a website may be available at:
https://example.com/robots.txt
Website owners can use this file to provide instructions for search engine crawlers, AI crawlers, web bots, and other automated systems. The file may contain rules that allow or restrict access to specific website sections.
Our AI Visibility Checker reads the publicly available robots.txt information for the domain entered by the user. It then checks the supported AI crawler user-agents and displays whether the current analyzer detects an allowed or blocked status.
Basic Structure of a Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file normally uses directives such as User-agent, Disallow, and Allow. The User-agent line identifies the crawler to which the rule applies.
For example, the following rule requests that GPTBot should not crawl any part of the website:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
In this example, the slash / represents the website's root and indicates that the rule applies to the entire website.
To communicate that GPTBot is not restricted by this specific rule, a website may use an empty Disallow directive:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow:
However, website owners should review the complete robots.txt file because other rules may also affect crawler access. A single line should not always be evaluated without considering the full configuration.
Blocking a Specific AI Crawler
Website owners may create a separate rule for an individual AI crawler. This provides more control than applying one general rule to every automated bot.
For example, the following configuration requests that GPTBot should not crawl the website:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
At the same time, other crawlers may have different rules. A website owner could allow a search engine crawler while restricting an AI crawler associated with another purpose.
Separate rules can be useful because AI crawler systems may have different functions. Some may be associated with model development, while others may support search, retrieval, or user-requested webpage access.
Allowing a Specific AI Crawler
If a website owner does not want to restrict a supported crawler, the robots.txt configuration may contain an empty Disallow directive or no blocking rule for that crawler.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow:
An allowed result does not mean that the crawler has already visited the website. It only means that the current analyzer did not detect a relevant blocking rule in the available robots.txt configuration.
It also does not guarantee that website content will be included in an AI-generated response. AI visibility depends on additional factors such as content quality, relevance, accessibility, authority, freshness, and the AI platform's own retrieval systems.
Using a General Rule for All Crawlers
The wildcard user-agent * is commonly used to create a general rule that applies to crawlers that follow the rule.
For example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /private/
This rule requests that crawlers should not access the /private/ directory. It does not necessarily block access to the rest of the website.
A website owner should be careful when using broad rules because they may affect search engine crawlers and other automated systems in addition to AI-related bots.
Allow and Disallow Rules
The Allow directive can be used to indicate that a specific path should remain accessible. In some configurations, an Allow rule may be used together with a broader Disallow rule.
For example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /members/
Allow: /members/public-guide.html
This example requests that the general /members/ directory should not be crawled while allowing access to the specific public guide page.
Robots.txt rule interpretation can depend on the crawler and the rules it supports. Website owners should check the official documentation for the crawler they are managing instead of assuming that every bot processes every directive in exactly the same way.
What Happens When Robots.txt Is Missing?
Some websites do not have a publicly available robots.txt file. If the AI Visibility Checker cannot find the file, the tool may show that no robots.txt configuration was detected.
A missing robots.txt file does not automatically mean that a website is blocked. In many cases, the absence of a robots.txt file means that the analyzer did not find a specific robots.txt restriction for the supported bots.
However, crawler behavior can vary. Some crawlers may have their own access policies, technical requirements, rate limits, or security checks. A website may also use other systems, such as a firewall, bot management service, login requirement, or server-level restriction.
Therefore, a missing robots.txt file should not be treated as a guarantee that every crawler can access every webpage.
Robots.txt Is Not a Security Tool
Robots.txt is publicly accessible and should not be used to protect private information. If a sensitive page is listed inside a robots.txt rule, the URL path may still be visible to anyone who opens the robots.txt file.
Private pages should be protected using appropriate authentication, access controls, passwords, server rules, or other security measures. Robots.txt is designed to communicate crawler preferences, not to secure confidential content.
Website owners should also understand that robots.txt is not a complete solution for preventing all automated access. Different bots may interpret or follow crawler rules differently, and malicious bots may ignore the file.
Robots.txt and Search Engine Indexing Are Different
Robots.txt controls crawler access preferences, but it is not the same as an indexing control. A page can sometimes be discovered through links or other sources even when crawler access is restricted.
If a website owner wants to manage whether a page appears in search results, additional methods may be required. Depending on the situation, these may include a noindex robots meta tag, an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, or password protection.
For example, a page may contain the following meta tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Website owners should make sure that search crawlers can access the page when using a noindex directive. If a crawler is completely blocked from accessing the page, it may not be able to read the noindex instruction.
Common Robots.txt Mistakes to Avoid
Small errors in a robots.txt file can unintentionally affect important website pages. Before publishing changes, review the file carefully and test the website.
- Do not accidentally use
Disallow: /when you only want to block one folder. - Do not assume that blocking one AI crawler blocks every AI platform.
- Do not use robots.txt to protect passwords, private documents, or sensitive information.
- Do not confuse crawler access with search rankings or AI citations.
- Do not block important search engine resources without understanding the possible SEO impact.
- Do not copy outdated crawler names without checking current official documentation.
- Do not make major changes without testing the updated robots.txt file.
If you need help creating a basic robots.txt configuration, try our Free Robots.txt Generator. You can also use our Free HTML Formatter to organize and review HTML code before publishing it on your website.
How the AI Visibility Checker Uses Robots.txt Data
The AI Visibility Checker is designed to provide a quick overview of supported AI crawler permissions. The tool checks the website's publicly available robots.txt file and compares the detected rules with the supported crawler user-agents.
The result is displayed as an easy-to-read status, such as ALLOWED or BLOCKED. The tool also calculates a visibility score based on the supported bot results.
The score is a tool-generated estimate and should not be treated as an official AI ranking score. It does not measure AI mentions, citations, search traffic, content authority, or the likelihood of appearing in an AI-generated answer.
Use the result as part of a wider website audit. For stronger technical SEO and AI visibility, review your website structure, content quality, internal links, page accessibility, metadata, structured data, and crawler permissions together.
Understanding the AI Visibility Score
The AI Visibility Checker provides a simple score based on the supported AI crawler permissions detected in a website's publicly available robots.txt file. The score gives website owners a quick overview of how many supported AI bots appear to be allowed or blocked by the current robots.txt configuration.
For example, if the tool checks ten supported AI crawlers and detects that all ten are allowed, the tool may display an AI Visibility Score of 100%. If some crawlers are blocked, the score may be lower.
The score is calculated from the crawler-access results shown by the tool. It is not an official score from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, or any other AI company.
How the AI Visibility Score Is Calculated
The basic score is calculated by comparing the number of supported bots that appear to be allowed with the total number of supported bots checked by the tool.
AI Visibility Score = Allowed AI Bots ÷ Total Supported AI Bots × 100
For example, if the tool checks ten supported AI bots and detects that eight are allowed:
8 ÷ 10 × 100 = 80%
In this example, the website would receive an estimated AI Visibility Score of 80%.
The score is designed to make robots.txt results easier to understand. It should be used as a technical access indicator rather than a prediction of AI traffic, AI citations, rankings, or brand mentions.
What Does an ALLOWED Result Mean?
An ALLOWED result means that the AI Visibility Checker did not detect a relevant blocking rule for the supported crawler in the website's publicly available robots.txt file.
For example, if the tool checks GPTBot and displays:
GPTBot — ALLOWED
the result indicates that the analyzer did not find a detected robots.txt rule that blocks GPTBot from the website.
However, an allowed result does not confirm that the crawler has visited the website. It also does not guarantee that the website will appear in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews, or another AI-powered system.
AI platforms may use different sources, retrieval systems, search indexes, ranking methods, and content-selection processes. Crawler access is only one technical factor.
An Allowed Result Does Not Guarantee AI Citations
A website can allow AI crawlers and still receive no AI-generated citations or mentions. AI systems may select content based on relevance, quality, authority, freshness, structure, and the user's query.
For example, two websites may both allow the same crawler, but one website may be selected more often because it provides clearer information, stronger topical coverage, better page structure, or more useful answers.
Therefore, an allowed crawler result should not be treated as a guarantee of AI visibility.
What Does a BLOCKED Result Mean?
A BLOCKED result means that the analyzer detected a relevant robots.txt rule that appears to restrict the supported crawler.
For example:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
This configuration requests that GPTBot should not access the website. The AI Visibility Checker may display GPTBot as BLOCKED.
A blocked result may be intentional. Some website owners do not want certain AI crawlers to access their content for model development, data collection, retrieval, or other AI-related purposes.
Before removing a blocking rule, website owners should understand why the rule was added and review the current official documentation for the relevant crawler.
A Blocked Bot Does Not Mean the Entire Website Is Unavailable
If one AI crawler is blocked, other crawlers may still be allowed. For example, a website may block GPTBot while allowing Googlebot and other search engine crawlers.
Each user-agent can have its own robots.txt rule. Therefore, website owners should review individual bot results instead of looking only at the overall score.
A lower AI Visibility Score does not automatically mean that the website has an SEO problem. The result may simply reflect the website owner's intentional crawler preferences.
Why the AI Visibility Score Can Change
The score may change when the website's robots.txt file is updated. Adding or removing a crawler rule can affect the allowed and blocked results displayed by the tool.
For example, a website may initially allow all supported bots and receive a score of 100%. If the website owner later adds a blocking rule for several AI crawlers, the score may decrease after the tool checks the updated robots.txt file.
The result can also change if a website temporarily returns an error, blocks the request, redirects the robots.txt file, or uses a security system that affects crawler access.
Because websites and crawler policies can change over time, it is useful to test the domain again after making important technical updates.
Supported AI Crawler Results
The AI Visibility Checker displays individual results for the supported AI crawler user-agents included in the tool. Depending on the current tool configuration, the results may include bots associated with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, ByteDance, Common Crawl, Cohere, and other AI-related systems.
Each bot result helps website owners identify which crawler is allowed or blocked. This is more useful than viewing only one overall score because different crawlers can have different purposes and access rules.
The tool may display information such as:
- The AI crawler name
- The crawler user-agent
- Allowed or blocked status
- The detected robots.txt access result
- The total number of supported bots checked
- The number of allowed bots
- The number of blocked bots
- The estimated AI Visibility Score
Why You Should Check Individual Bot Results
The overall score provides a quick summary, but the individual crawler results provide more detailed information.
For example, a website may receive an AI Visibility Score of 80%, but the missing 20% may be caused by only two intentionally blocked crawlers. The website owner may be satisfied with this configuration.
Another website may receive a score of 100%, but the website may still have technical problems that prevent important pages from being accessed or understood. The score does not check every SEO or AI visibility factor.
For this reason, review the complete bot list before making changes to your robots.txt file.
AI Visibility Score vs AI Search Performance
The AI Visibility Score and AI search performance are not the same thing. The score measures the crawler permissions detected by the tool, while AI search performance may involve many additional factors.
AI search performance may include:
- Whether an AI system can discover the website
- Whether website pages are technically accessible
- Whether the content answers relevant user questions
- Whether the information is accurate and useful
- Whether the content is current and well structured
- Whether the website has strong topical relevance
- Whether an AI platform selects the page as a source
- Whether the website receives an AI citation or referral visit
The AI Visibility Checker focuses mainly on the crawler-access part of this process. It does not measure all of these additional factors.
Important Limitations of the AI Visibility Score
The AI Visibility Score should be treated as an estimated technical indicator. It has several important limitations.
- It does not prove that an AI crawler visited the website.
- It does not confirm that website content was used for AI model training.
- It does not guarantee AI citations or mentions.
- It does not measure traffic from AI platforms.
- It does not measure Google rankings or organic search performance.
- It does not replace server-log analysis.
- It does not verify every possible AI crawler on the internet.
- It may not detect restrictions created by every firewall, security system, or server configuration.
The tool should be used together with other website audits. For example, you can review page accessibility, internal linking, structured data, metadata, content quality, and technical SEO.
To check whether your website URLs are redirecting correctly, try our Free Redirect Checker. You can also use our Free HTML Formatter to format and review HTML code before publishing it.
How to Use the Score Correctly
Use the AI Visibility Score as a starting point for reviewing your website's crawler permissions. If the score is lower than expected, open the individual bot results and identify which crawlers are blocked.
Next, review the website's robots.txt file and determine whether the blocked status is intentional. Do not remove a rule only to increase the score. The correct configuration depends on your website goals and content-access preferences.
If your goal is to make public content technically available to supported AI crawlers, review the relevant user-agent rules carefully. If your goal is to limit AI crawler access, a lower score may be expected and appropriate.
After making changes, test the website again with the AI Visibility Checker to review the updated results.
Benefits and Use Cases of the AI Visibility Checker
The AI Visibility Checker helps website owners review whether supported AI crawlers appear to be allowed or blocked by the rules detected in a website's publicly available robots.txt file. The tool provides a quick technical overview without requiring users to manually read every crawler rule.
As AI-powered search and answer systems continue to grow, website owners may want to understand how their public content is being made available to different automated systems. The AI Visibility Checker makes this process easier by displaying individual crawler results, allowed and blocked totals, and an estimated AI Visibility Score.
1. Check AI Crawler Permissions Quickly
Reading a robots.txt file manually can be difficult, especially when the file contains many user-agent groups, allow rules, disallow rules, comments, and sitemap entries.
The AI Visibility Checker simplifies the review process. Enter a domain, click the analysis button, and the tool checks the available robots.txt information for the supported AI crawler user-agents.
Instead of searching through the complete file manually, users can view an easy-to-read result such as:
GPTBot — ALLOWED
ClaudeBot — ALLOWED
Google-Extended — ALLOWED
PerplexityBot — BLOCKED
This can save time during a technical website audit.
2. Review Website AI Access Before Publishing Changes
Website owners may update robots.txt rules when changing an SEO plugin, installing a new website theme, moving to a different hosting provider, or adding a security service.
These changes may affect crawler access. A new configuration could unintentionally block a supported AI crawler or apply a broad restriction to an important section of the website.
After making a technical update, run the domain through the AI Visibility Checker and compare the results with the intended crawler policy.
3. Check AI Crawler Access After Changing Robots.txt
Whenever a robots.txt file is edited, the updated configuration should be tested. A small formatting error or incorrect directive can create unexpected results.
For example, a website owner may want to block only one folder but accidentally use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This broad rule requests that all paths on the website should be restricted for the crawlers covered by the rule. If the intention was only to restrict a private folder, the rule should be reviewed carefully.
The AI Visibility Checker can be used after publishing the updated robots.txt file to review the supported crawler results.
4. Compare Different Websites
SEO professionals, website developers, content publishers, and digital marketers may need to compare crawler permissions across multiple domains.
For example, a user may check:
- Their own website
- A competitor's public website
- A client website
- A new domain before migration
- A website using a different CMS
The tool can provide a quick comparison of the publicly available robots.txt permissions detected for supported AI crawlers.
However, the results should not be used to copy another website's configuration without understanding its goals. Different websites may have different content policies, privacy requirements, business models, and AI access preferences.
5. Support Technical SEO Audits
AI crawler access is only one part of a complete technical SEO audit, but it can be useful to review alongside other website signals.
A broader technical audit may include:
- Checking website redirects
- Reviewing HTTP status codes
- Testing page accessibility
- Checking robots.txt rules
- Reviewing XML sitemaps
- Checking canonical URLs
- Testing structured data
- Reviewing internal links
- Checking mobile usability
- Improving website speed
For redirect testing, you can use our Free Redirect Checker. The tool can help you review URL redirect chains and HTTP status information.
To create or review a website sitemap, try our Free XML Sitemap Generator. A sitemap and robots.txt file have different purposes, but both can be important parts of a website's technical setup.
6. Check a Website After Moving to Cloudflare
Many website owners use Cloudflare for performance, security, caching, DNS management, and website protection. After changing Cloudflare settings, it is useful to review the publicly available robots.txt file and check whether the expected crawler rules are still visible.
Security tools, bot-management settings, firewall rules, and server-level protections can affect how automated requests are handled. The AI Visibility Checker focuses on the robots.txt information detected by the tool and does not replace a complete security or server-log audit.
If a crawler appears to be allowed in robots.txt but cannot access the website, another technical restriction may be involved. For example, a firewall, rate limit, login requirement, geographic restriction, or bot-management rule may affect access.
7. Review AI Crawler Settings for Blogger Websites
Blogger users can review the public robots.txt file for their Blogspot website and check the supported AI crawler results with the AI Visibility Checker.
Before making changes to Blogger's custom robots.txt settings, review the existing configuration carefully. An incorrect rule may affect search engine crawling or important website pages.
For example, a Blogger website may have a robots.txt file that contains rules for search crawlers, labels, search pages, and the website sitemap. AI crawler rules may need to be evaluated separately.
Use the AI Visibility Checker as a review tool before and after making changes. Do not edit robots.txt only to increase the AI Visibility Score. The configuration should match the website owner's content and crawler-access goals.
8. Help Website Owners Understand AI Access
Many website owners know about Googlebot but may not recognize newer AI crawler names. The AI Visibility Checker displays supported bots individually so users can understand which crawler is being checked.
This can be useful for beginners who want a simple overview before learning more advanced robots.txt configuration.
The tool does not require users to understand server code or manually parse every directive. It provides a readable summary while still encouraging users to review the original robots.txt file before making important changes.
Who Can Use the AI Visibility Checker?
The tool can be useful for many different types of users.
Website Owners
Website owners can check whether supported AI crawlers appear to be allowed or blocked. The results can help them understand their current robots.txt configuration and review whether it matches their website goals.
SEO Professionals
SEO professionals can include AI crawler permission checks in technical audits. The tool can provide a quick overview before performing a deeper review of robots.txt, crawling, indexing, and website accessibility.
Content Publishers
Publishers may want to manage how different automated systems access public content. The AI Visibility Checker can help them review the crawler rules currently visible in the robots.txt file.
Web Developers
Developers can use the tool after updating website infrastructure, changing a CMS, deploying a new version, or modifying robots.txt rules.
Digital Marketing Agencies
Agencies can use the tool to review multiple client websites and identify domains that may require a closer technical inspection.
Bloggers
Bloggers can check their website's AI crawler permissions without manually reading the entire robots.txt file. This can be useful when reviewing Blogger, WordPress, or custom website settings.
Best Practices for Improving Technical AI Visibility
Allowing a crawler is only one part of making public website content technically accessible. Website owners should also maintain a clear and well-structured website.
Consider the following best practices:
- Publish original, useful, and accurate content.
- Use clear headings such as H1, H2, and H3.
- Answer important user questions directly.
- Keep important content accessible without unnecessary login barriers.
- Use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions.
- Create logical internal links between related pages.
- Use structured data when it is relevant and valid.
- Maintain an updated XML sitemap.
- Check for broken links and unnecessary redirect chains.
- Make sure important pages work correctly on mobile devices.
- Improve website speed and reduce technical errors.
- Review robots.txt rules after major website changes.
For content and code review, you can use our Free HTML Formatter. Clean and properly structured HTML can make website code easier to review and maintain.
Important Limitations of the AI Visibility Checker
The AI Visibility Checker is designed to analyze supported crawler permissions based mainly on the publicly available robots.txt information detected by the tool. It does not provide a complete measurement of every AI visibility factor.
The tool does not:
- Confirm that an AI crawler visited the website.
- Confirm that website content was collected or used for model training.
- Guarantee that a website will appear in AI-generated answers.
- Guarantee citations, mentions, or referral traffic.
- Measure AI brand visibility across every platform.
- Replace website server-log analysis.
- Check every AI crawler that exists.
- Detect every firewall or server-level restriction.
- Measure content quality or topical authority.
- Measure Google rankings or organic traffic.
An allowed result means that the analyzer did not detect a relevant blocking rule for the supported crawler. Actual crawler access may still depend on additional technical systems and the crawler's own behavior.
Use the Tool as Part of a Complete Website Audit
The best way to use the AI Visibility Checker is as one part of a wider website review.
Start by checking the supported AI crawler results. Next, review the website's robots.txt file and confirm that the rules match your intended policy. Then check redirects, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, page structure, internal links, structured data, and website performance.
If you find a blocked crawler, determine whether the rule is intentional before removing it. A lower AI Visibility Score is not automatically a problem. Some website owners may intentionally restrict specific AI crawlers because of privacy, licensing, content-control, or business considerations.
Use the results to understand your current configuration, not as a guarantee of AI search performance.
External Resource for Google Crawler Information
For additional information about Google's crawler systems and robots.txt user-agent tokens, visit the official Google Common Crawlers Documentation.
Google explains that Google-Extended is a separate product token used to manage certain Gemini model training and grounding preferences. It does not control a website's inclusion in Google Search and is not used as a Google Search ranking signal.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Visibility Checker
1. What is an AI Visibility Checker?
An AI Visibility Checker is an online tool that checks a website's publicly available robots.txt file and analyzes whether supported AI crawler user-agents appear to be allowed or blocked.
The tool provides an easy-to-read overview of AI crawler permissions, including individual bot results, allowed and blocked totals, and an estimated AI Visibility Score.
2. Is the AI Visibility Checker free to use?
Yes. The AI Visibility Checker is available as a free online tool. You can enter a website domain and review the detected AI crawler permissions without installing software.
3. Does an ALLOWED result mean that an AI bot has visited my website?
No. An ALLOWED result means that the analyzer did not detect a relevant blocking rule for the supported crawler in the publicly available robots.txt file.
It does not confirm that the crawler has visited your website, downloaded your content, indexed your pages, or used your information in an AI system.
4. Does an ALLOWED result guarantee that my website will appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity?
No. Allowing an AI crawler does not guarantee that your website will appear in an AI-generated answer.
AI visibility can depend on many additional factors, including content quality, topical relevance, accuracy, freshness, website accessibility, authority, search availability, and the AI platform's own retrieval systems.
5. What does a BLOCKED result mean?
A BLOCKED result means that the analyzer detected a relevant robots.txt rule that appears to restrict the supported crawler.
For example, the following rule requests that GPTBot should not crawl the website:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
If the tool detects this rule, GPTBot may be displayed as blocked.
6. Should I remove a blocking rule to increase my AI Visibility Score?
Not necessarily. A lower score is not automatically a problem. Some website owners intentionally block specific AI crawlers because of content-control preferences, licensing concerns, privacy requirements, business policies, or other reasons.
Before removing a rule, review why it was added and check the latest official documentation for the relevant crawler. Your robots.txt configuration should match your website goals instead of being changed only to increase a tool score.
7. Does the AI Visibility Score affect Google rankings?
No. The AI Visibility Score generated by this tool is not a Google ranking factor and is not an official score from Google or another AI company.
The score is an estimated technical indicator based on the supported crawler permissions detected by the analyzer.
8. Does Google use the AI Visibility Score?
No. Google does not use this tool's AI Visibility Score as an official ranking signal.
The score is created by the AI Visibility Checker to summarize the allowed and blocked results for the supported AI crawler user-agents.
9. Is Google-Extended the same as Googlebot?
No. Google-Extended is separate from Googlebot. Google-Extended is a product token that can be used to manage certain Gemini model training and grounding preferences.
Google-Extended does not control whether a website appears in Google Search. Google Search crawling and Google-Extended controls are different systems.
10. Will blocking Google-Extended remove my website from Google Search?
No. Blocking Google-Extended does not directly remove a website from Google Search.
Google-Extended is separate from Googlebot. Website owners should avoid confusing AI-related crawler controls with Google Search crawling and indexing controls.
11. What happens if my website does not have a robots.txt file?
If no publicly available robots.txt file is detected, the tool may show that no robots.txt configuration was found. The analyzer may treat the supported bots as not having a detected robots.txt block.
However, this does not guarantee that every crawler can access every webpage. Other systems, such as firewalls, security services, login requirements, rate limits, or server restrictions, may still affect access.
12. Can robots.txt protect private information?
No. Robots.txt should not be used to protect confidential information, private files, passwords, or sensitive website areas.
The robots.txt file is publicly accessible. If a sensitive URL path is listed inside the file, the path may become visible to anyone who opens the robots.txt URL.
Private content should be protected using authentication, passwords, access controls, server rules, or other appropriate security methods.
13. Does robots.txt prevent a page from appearing in Google Search?
Robots.txt is mainly used to communicate crawler-access preferences. It is not the same as an indexing control.
If you want to prevent a page from appearing in search results, a noindex directive or another appropriate method may be required. Search crawlers generally need to access a page to read a noindex instruction.
14. Can the AI Visibility Checker detect every AI bot?
No. The tool checks the supported AI crawler user-agents included in its current configuration. It does not represent every AI crawler or automated system on the internet.
New crawlers may be introduced, crawler names may change, and different AI platforms may use additional systems. The supported bot list may be updated as the tool develops.
15. Why is an AI bot shown as allowed even though I use Cloudflare?
The AI Visibility Checker mainly analyzes the robots.txt information detected for the website. Cloudflare settings may affect actual access through firewall rules, bot-management controls, rate limits, security challenges, or other protections.
A crawler can appear to be allowed in robots.txt while another technical system still limits or blocks its requests.
16. Why is my AI Visibility Score lower than 100%?
Your score may be lower because one or more supported AI crawlers appear to be blocked by the detected robots.txt rules.
Open the individual bot results to identify the blocked crawler. Then review your robots.txt file and determine whether the restriction is intentional.
17. Can I use this tool for a Blogger website?
Yes. You can enter your Blogger or Blogspot domain into the AI Visibility Checker and review the publicly available robots.txt information.
Before changing Blogger's custom robots.txt settings, carefully review the existing rules. Incorrect changes may affect search crawler access or important website pages.
18. Can I check WordPress websites with this tool?
Yes. The AI Visibility Checker can be used to check publicly accessible websites, including many WordPress websites.
The tool reviews the robots.txt information available for the entered domain. The CMS used by the website does not change the basic purpose of the analysis.
19. How often should I check my website?
You can check your website after making changes to robots.txt, updating your CMS, changing hosting providers, modifying security settings, moving to Cloudflare, or completing a major website migration.
Regular checks can also be useful when reviewing technical SEO and AI crawler permissions.
20. Does this tool measure AI traffic or AI citations?
No. The AI Visibility Checker does not measure traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or other AI platforms.
It also does not count AI citations, brand mentions, or AI-generated referrals. The tool focuses mainly on supported crawler permissions detected through robots.txt analysis.
Final Conclusion
AI-powered search and answer systems are becoming an important part of how users discover information online. Website owners may want to understand whether supported AI crawlers appear to have access to their public content and whether their robots.txt configuration matches their intended crawler policy.
The AI Visibility Checker provides a simple way to review supported AI crawler permissions. Enter a website domain, analyze the available robots.txt information, and review the individual allowed or blocked results.
The tool also provides an estimated AI Visibility Score to summarize the detected crawler permissions. However, the score should be treated as a technical access indicator rather than a guarantee of AI rankings, citations, mentions, or traffic.
An allowed crawler result does not confirm that an AI platform has visited or used your content. Likewise, a blocked result is not always an SEO problem because the restriction may be intentional.
For better technical website visibility, review AI crawler permissions together with other important factors, including content quality, page accessibility, internal links, structured data, XML sitemaps, redirects, canonical URLs, metadata, mobile usability, and website performance.
You can use our Free Redirect Checker to review URL redirect chains and HTTP status information. You can also use our Free XML Sitemap Generator to create an XML sitemap for your website.
For HTML code review and formatting, try our Free HTML Formatter. Properly organized HTML can make website content easier to review, edit, and maintain.
Use the AI Visibility Checker regularly after important technical changes, but always review the original robots.txt file before modifying crawler rules. The best robots.txt configuration is the one that supports your website's content, privacy, SEO, and AI access goals.
Try More Free SEO Tools
Explore more free tools on SEO Toolkit Hub to improve your website's technical SEO, content quality, code structure, and URL management.
- Free Robots.txt Generator
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AI Visibility Checker: Review supported AI crawler permissions, understand your robots.txt configuration, and make informed technical decisions for your website.

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