What is AI visibility, and how is it different from SEO?

SEO decides whether your page appears in a list of blue links. AI visibility — also called Answer Engine Optimization or AEO — decides whether an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity can reach your page, understand it, and name your business in its answer. A site can rank well on Google and still be invisible to AI, most commonly because its robots.txt blocks AI crawlers or its content only renders with JavaScript.

How do I check if ChatGPT can see my website?

ChatGPT reaches websites through crawlers named GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User. If your robots.txt file disallows those user agents, ChatGPT can never read or cite your site. Enter your URL in this tool and the AI Visibility report shows each AI crawler's access individually, along with the exact robots.txt rules blocking them.

Why is my site blocked from AI crawlers when my robots.txt allows them?

A CDN can override your file. Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control feature injects its own managed block into robots.txt, disallowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and others before your own rules are read. Check Cloudflare's dashboard under AI Crawl Control and set AI crawlers to Allow. Some hosting firewalls and security plugins block these bots by IP as well.

What is llms.txt and do I need one?

llms.txt is an emerging plain-text file at the root of your site that gives AI models a curated summary of your business, services and key pages, in the same spirit as robots.txt for crawlers. It is not yet an official standard and no engine guarantees it will read one, but it costs nothing to add, very few sites have one, and it lets you state plainly who you are rather than leaving models to infer it.

Is this tool free, and does it need my password or website access?

The scan is free and requires no signup, no password and no access to your site. It reads only what is publicly available: your page HTML, robots.txt, sitemap and llms.txt — the same files any search engine or AI crawler fetches. You provide an email only to unlock the full dashboard.

Does this show my Google ranking position?

No, and any free tool claiming to is guessing. Real ranking positions come from Google Search Console for your own site, or a paid rank-tracking API. What this tool measures is topic match: how clearly a page signals that it is about a given query, scored from where the words appear across your title, H1, headings, copy, URL and schema. A page scoring zero is not in the running at all; seventy or higher is properly set up to compete.

How can I improve my AI visibility score quickly?

In order of impact: unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt and at your CDN; add JSON-LD structured data identifying your business; add an FAQ section answering the exact questions customers ask, marked up with FAQPage schema; make sure your content is present in the raw HTML rather than rendered by JavaScript; and publish an llms.txt file. The tool's report ranks these by the points each one would recover on your specific site.

How many pages of my website does the scan cover?

It scans the page you enter first, then finds every other page it can through your sitemaps and internal links and scores those too, up to 150 pages. Progress is shown live and you can stop at any point and keep the results gathered so far. Each page gets its own AI, SEO and speed score, and the dashboard shows the average across the whole site.

AEO vs SEO: What Answer Engine Optimization Actually Changes

By LunieaJuly 25, 2026

SEO decides whether your page appears in a list of blue links that a person then chooses from. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — decides whether an AI assistant names your business inside its answer, where there is no list and usually only two or three businesses get mentioned at all. The fundamentals overlap heavily, but the winner-take-most shape of AI answers changes what you prioritise.

What carries over from SEO

Most of it. Crawlability, fast pages, clean HTML, descriptive titles, structured data and genuinely useful content all matter to both. If you have done real SEO work, you are not starting from zero.

Authority still counts too. AI answers lean on sources that other sources reference, so links and mentions retain their value.

What genuinely changes

Access is now binary and separate. Googlebot being allowed says nothing about GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, and each is controlled independently. A site can rank on page one of Google and be entirely invisible to ChatGPT.

There is no page two. Ranking eleventh in Google still earns some traffic; being the eleventh most relevant business to an AI answer earns none, because the answer names three.

Content shape matters more. Answers are assembled from passages, so a page that states a clear, quotable answer in two or three sentences outperforms one that buries the same information in a long narrative.

JavaScript is a bigger liability. Google renders JavaScript; most AI crawlers do not. Client-rendered content that ranks acceptably on Google can be completely invisible to AI.

Where to start, in order

First, confirm AI crawlers can reach you — check robots.txt and your CDN's bot settings. Nothing else matters if the door is shut.

Second, make sure your content exists in the raw HTML rather than being rendered by JavaScript.

Third, add structured data identifying your business, and FAQPage schema on pages that answer real customer questions.

Fourth, rewrite your key pages so each obvious customer question has a direct, specific answer near a heading that matches how people ask it. Specificity is what gets quoted — prices, service areas, timelines and credentials beat adjectives.

Frequently asked questions

Is AEO replacing SEO?

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No. Search engines still send far more traffic than AI assistants for most businesses. AEO is an additional channel that shares most of its foundations with SEO, not a replacement for it.

How do I measure AEO?

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Two ways. Technically, audit whether AI crawlers can reach and parse your pages — that is measurable from your site and is what our free checker does. Behaviourally, ask the assistants the questions your customers ask and record whether you are named; this needs repeating over time, since answers vary between sessions.

Does AEO work for local businesses?

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Especially well. Local recommendation questions are among the most common things people ask AI assistants, the competition for structured local data is still thin, and a complete address, service area and FAQ set puts you ahead of most local competitors quickly.