ai visibility

A machine asks four questions in order: may I fetch this page, is there any text in it, can I tell what it is about, and is there more like it. Google asks them. ChatGPT asks them. Perplexity asks them. The crawler names differ and the requirements do not — so a site that sells you an "SEO checker" and an "AI visibility checker" separately is telling you about your sitemap twice.

There are two kinds of AI crawler. Training crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended — collect pages to train models, and blocking them is a legitimate rights decision that does not affect whether you get cited. Retrieval crawlers — OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User — build the answer indexes and fetch your page live when someone asks a question. Block those and you cannot be cited at all. We grade them differently because they are different.

A server-log study by Vercel and MERJ across more than 500 million crawler fetches found that none of the major AI crawlers execute JavaScript. So a site can pass every robots.txt test and still be a blank document to ChatGPT, because the content is assembled in the browser and the crawler only ever sees the empty shell. That is why this check reads your raw HTML as well as your rules.

We cannot tell you how often ChatGPT mentions you, and neither can anyone else — those systems are non-deterministic, answers vary by person and phrasing, and any tool selling a "prominence score" is showing you a number it invented. We check the part that has a verifiable answer: whether the door is open and whether there is anything behind it.