AI Crawler Access: Is Your Site Even Readable by ChatGPT?
If AI bots can't crawl your site, nothing else matters. robots.txt rules, JavaScript rendering risks, and how to make your content machine-accessible.
The foundation everything sits on
Before schema, before citations, before content — AI engines have to be able to read your site at all. If GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, or Google's AI crawlers can't access your content, you're invisible no matter how good the rest of your AEO is.
robots.txt: the gatekeeper
Your robots.txt file controls which bots can crawl which pages. Many sites accidentally block AI crawlers — or fail to explicitly welcome them. A one-line rule can be the difference between being cited and being ignored. We audit and fix robots.txt AI-bot policy as a standard part of every engagement.
The JavaScript rendering trap
If your site is built as a client-side JavaScript app, many AI crawlers see an empty shell instead of your content. Server-side rendering (SSR) or static rendering ensures the actual text, headings, and structure are present in the HTML the crawler receives. This is one of the most common — and most invisible — AEO failures.
How to check
The fastest way to know whether AI can read your site is to test it directly. Our free AEO score checks crawler access, robots.txt policy, llms.txt presence, and rendering risk — and the full report shows you exactly what's blocking you and how to fix it.
See how visible your business is to AI
Get your free 0–100 AEO score across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews.