Is your website invisible to AI?

AI readiness is whether AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews CAN crawl, read and cite your site, the technical foundation this free checker audits across 6 categories. AI visibility is whether you ACTUALLY show up in AI answers and how you compare to competitors, which the paid Sona AI Visibility platform tracks continuously. Readiness comes first: if AI can't parse your site, it can't cite you.

Traditional SEO tools optimise for Google's crawlers and ranking algorithms. AI readiness focuses on a different set of signals: structured data that AI engines parse, llms.txt files that guide AI reading, content-quality signals that make AI engines trust and cite you, and freshness indicators that determine whether AI responses include your content.

Allow AI crawlers like GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt, serve your main content in server-rendered HTML (not JavaScript-only), add JSON-LD structured data (Organization, FAQPage, Article), publish an llms.txt file, and keep content fresh with visible last-updated dates. Run a free scan above to see which of these you're missing.

Sona scores your site 0 to 100 with a letter grade. 90+ (A) means AI engines can fully crawl, parse and cite your site. 70 to 89 (B to C) means you're visible but missing structured data or freshness signals. Below 70 (D to F) means AI engines are likely skipping or misrepresenting your content. Most sites score 50 to 70 on their first scan.

They overlap but aren't the same. Google AI Overviews pull from AI-readable signals, structured data, crawlable HTML, clear headings and freshness, the same signals that strengthen traditional SEO. So improving AI readiness usually helps your Google ranking too, but it also wins you placement in answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity that classic SEO ignores. See SEO vs AEO vs GEO.

AI visibility refers to how well AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews can discover, read, and cite your website. As more users get answers directly from AI rather than clicking search results, being invisible to AI means losing traffic, leads, and brand mentions, even if your SEO is perfect.

Yes. Alongside the technical audit, your report includes a free live AI visibility preview: we ask ChatGPT and Claude real buyer questions about your category, without naming your brand, and show whether you actually come up in their answers. These are real answers queried at scan time, not estimates.

We check the exact page you enter, and only that page. Enter your homepage and we score your homepage; enter a deep URL like yoursite.com/blog/my-post and we score that page, so the score always describes the page you gave us. Domain-level files (robots.txt and llms.txt) are always read from your site root, and page-specific schema checks only apply to the matching page type: Article schema on blog posts, ContactPage on contact pages, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, and HowTo on how-to pages.

GPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler. It collects content that helps ChatGPT discover, understand and cite websites. If you want to appear in ChatGPT's answers, you should allow GPTBot in your robots.txt, blocking it makes your site invisible to one of the largest AI audiences. Our checker runs a live GPTBot probe to confirm whether OpenAI can actually reach your pages.

llms.txt is a plain-text file placed at the root of your domain that gives AI engines a clean, prioritized map of your most important content, like a robots.txt and sitemap designed specifically for large language models. It's an emerging standard and not yet required, but adding one helps AI engines read and cite the right pages. Our complete llms.txt guide explains how to write one.

SEO gets your pages ranked in traditional search results. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets your content quoted as the answer in AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) gets your brand recommended inside AI-generated responses. AI visibility covers all three. Read the full breakdown in our guide.