AEO checker: is your site ready for AI search?
Enter your site and this free checker reads it the way AI search crawlers do. It reports which of them your robots.txt and firewall let in, whether your page makes sense before JavaScript runs, whether Google may show a snippet of it, and what structured data it carries, scored out of 100.
What the score measures
An AI answer can only cite a page its crawler fetched and understood. The score adds up the things that decide that, weighted by how often they are the reason a site goes missing:
- Search crawler access, 30 points. Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, read from your robots.txt for the exact page you entered.
- Server rendered content, 20 points. Most AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. A page that is an empty shell until scripts load looks blank to them.
- Firewall, 15 points. What the page returns when GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot ask for it.
- Indexing and snippets, 15 points. noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet:0 keep a page out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, whether set in a meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header.
- Structured data, title, description and sitemap, 20 points. The basics that help any search engine understand what a page is.
Search crawlers, training crawlers and user fetches
AI companies run separate crawlers for separate jobs, and robots.txt treats each by name. OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot build the indexes that ChatGPT search and Claude cite from, so blocking them removes you from those answers. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot gather training data; blocking them is a licensing choice and doesn't affect citations.
ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User fetch a page because a person asked an assistant to open it. They act for that person, may not read robots.txt, and only a server rule can stop them.
Questions
- Is AEO different from SEO?
- Mostly not. Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO: the AI Overview and AI Mode draw on pages Google can crawl, index and show a snippet of. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity run their own crawlers, so the extra work is making sure those crawlers are let in and can read your pages without JavaScript.
- Should I block GPTBot and the other training crawlers?
- That is your call, and this checker doesn't score it. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot collect text for training models. Blocking them doesn't stop ChatGPT search or Claude from citing you; that is controlled by OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot.
- Why does my score drop when robots.txt allows everything?
- Usually a firewall or bot protection. Cloudflare, Vercel and other hosts can answer AI crawlers with a challenge page or a 403 even when robots.txt says yes. The checker requests your page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot to see what they get back.
- Does llms.txt affect the score?
- No. Google has said its search ignores llms.txt, and no major AI search engine has said it uses one. The checker notes whether you have one and gives it no points.
- What do you do with the URL I enter?
- We fetch robots.txt, the page, llms.txt and your sitemap, the way a crawler would, and keep the result for ten minutes so a repeat check is instant. We don't store the page content or follow links into private addresses.
More free tools
- llms.txt generator and validatorCheck the llms.txt file you have against the format, or draft one from your sitemap.
- AI Overview checkerDoes Google show an AI Overview for a keyword, which pages does it cite, and are you one of them?
- AI visibility checkerAsk ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity up to three questions your customers ask, and see whether they name or cite you.
SEOpen is in private beta
Tell us the site you'd use it for and we'll send an invite. After the beta: a seven day trial, then $29 or $79 a month.