To check your website's AI visibility, confirm
that AI crawlers are allowed in your robots.txt, that
your content is in server-rendered HTML, that you have structured
data and a clear heading hierarchy, and that your pages show
freshness signals. The fastest way to test all of these at once is
to run a free AI visibility check that probes your
site and returns a score with specific fixes.
This is the practical version of the checks. For the underlying concept, see what AI visibility actually is.
Your site can rank on page one of Google and still be completely invisible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. That's because answer engines judge your site on a different set of signals than traditional search. This guide walks through how to check each one yourself, then how to get a complete picture in 30 seconds.
1. Confirm AI crawlers can actually reach your site
AI engines use named crawlers to read the web. If your
robots.txt blocks them, you're invisible before the
conversation even starts. Open https://yoursite.com/robots.txt
and check that none of these are disallowed:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI / ChatGPT
- ClaudeBot, Anthropic / Claude
- PerplexityBot, Perplexity
- Google-Extended, Google's AI training and AI Overviews signal
A blanket User-agent: * with a broad Disallow
can accidentally lock all of them out. If you want to be cited by AI,
you have to let AI in. We cover the exact rules in our guide on
how to allow GPTBot in robots.txt.
2. Check that your content is in the HTML, not just JavaScript
Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript the way a browser does. If your headline, body copy and key facts only appear after a client-side framework renders them, an AI engine may see a nearly empty page. To test it: right-click your page, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it isn't in the raw HTML, AI engines probably can't read it either. Server-side rendering or static HTML fixes this.
3. Verify your structured data and headings
Structured data (JSON-LD) tells AI engines what your content
is, an article, an FAQ, a product, an organization. A clear
<h1> followed by logical <h2>
sections tells them how it's organized. Together they make your
content easy to quote accurately. Check that each important page has:
- A single, descriptive
<h1> - Logical
<h2>/<h3>subheadings - Relevant JSON-LD (Article, FAQPage, Organization, Breadcrumb)
For more on which schema types matter most, see our SEO vs AEO vs GEO guide.
4. Check your freshness signals
AI engines favor content they can trust is current. Pages that expose
a visible "last updated" date, and back it up with a
machine-readable dateModified in schema, are more likely
to be cited than undated pages. Make sure your important pages aren't
silently stale.
5. Run a full AI visibility audit
Checking each signal by hand is useful for understanding, but slow and easy to get wrong. A dedicated AI visibility checker fetches your real pages, runs a live crawler probe, inspects your schema and content structure, and returns a single score with a prioritized fix list.
Sona's free AI visibility checker runs up to 35 checks across crawlability, content structure, content quality, performance, security and accessibility in about 30 seconds, no signup required. It's the quickest way to answer "does my site appear in AI search?" with specifics instead of guesswork.
