The Craft of Growth

Free AEO & GEO checker for AI search

See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can crawl, read and quote your page. You get a score out of 100, a crawler-by-crawler access report and the fixes that matter most. Free, no signup.

We load the page, its robots.txt and llms.txt the way AI crawlers do, then test it as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Takes about 10 seconds.

72 C example.com/pricing
AI productTrainingSearch
ChatGPT GPTBot Blocked OAI-SearchBot Allowed
Google AI Overviews Google-Extended Allowed Googlebot Allowed
Perplexity — PerplexityBot Blocked
Claude ClaudeBot Allowed Claude-SearchBot Allowed
Example report. Yours shows 16 crawlers, a live firewall test and a ranked fix list.

What does the AI search readiness score measure?

About 25 checks in six areas, each weighted by how much it affects whether an AI engine can use the page. Show-stoppers, like a noindex tag or a blocked Googlebot, cap the score no matter how well the rest scores.

AI crawler access 29 pts
Whether robots.txt and your firewall let in the crawlers behind ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Copilot.
Indexing and snippets 27 pts
Noindex and nosnippet directives, canonical tags, HTTPS and an XML sitemap engines can find.
Content structure 31 pts
A direct answer near the top, question-style headings, lists and tables, and text that loads without JavaScript.
Structured data 14 pts
Organization and page-type schema that tell engines who publishes the page and what it is.
Freshness and authorship 7 pts
Visible publish or update dates and a named author, two signals engines use to judge trust.
llms.txt 3 pts
An optional Markdown summary of your site for language models. Weighted lightly because no engine confirms using it yet.

How do AI search engines choose which pages to cite?

AI search engines such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google AI Mode break a question into several searches, retrieve the best-matching pages, and quote the passages that answer each part most directly. A page has to clear three bars to be cited: the engine’s crawler must be allowed to fetch it, the text must be readable in the raw HTML, and the answer must sit in a clear, self-contained passage the model can lift.

This checker covers the first two bars completely and the structural side of the third. It cannot judge whether your answer is the best one on the web, so a high score removes obstacles rather than guaranteeing citations.

Which AI crawlers should you allow?

Each AI company runs separate crawlers for model training, for search indexing, and for fetching a page when a user asks about it. You can block training and still be cited in AI search.

CrawlerCompanyWhat it doesFor AI visibility
OAI-SearchBot OpenAI Indexes pages for ChatGPT search Allow
ChatGPT-User OpenAI Fetches a page when a user asks about it Allow
GPTBot OpenAI Collects training data Your choice
Googlebot Google Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode Allow
Google-Extended Google Gemini training and grounding control Your choice
PerplexityBot Perplexity Indexes pages for Perplexity answers Allow
Claude-SearchBot Anthropic Indexes pages for Claude web search Allow
ClaudeBot Anthropic Collects training data Your choice
Bingbot Microsoft Bing index, used by Copilot Allow
CCBot Common Crawl Public dataset used to train many models Your choice

How do you improve your AI search readiness score?

  1. Unblock search crawlers. Remove robots.txt rules and firewall settings that stop OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot.
  2. Remove noindex and nosnippet from every page you want quoted.
  3. Open with the answer. Put a 40–60 word direct answer to the page's main question right under the H1.
  4. Write headings as questions people actually ask, and answer each one in the first sentence below it.
  5. Use lists and tables. Steps and options as lists, comparisons as tables. AI answers often lift them directly.
  6. Add schema. Organization with sameAs links for your brand, plus Article, Product or Service for the page.
  7. Show who and when. A named author and a last-updated date, and refresh important pages regularly.

Frequently asked questions

What does this AEO and GEO checker test?

It checks the four things that decide whether an AI engine can use a page: whether AI crawlers are allowed in (robots.txt and your firewall), whether the page can be indexed and quoted, whether the content is structured so a passage can be lifted as an answer, and whether structured data, dates and authorship make the source easy to trust. It also checks for an llms.txt file.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) describe the same goal: getting your content cited in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. AEO grew out of featured-snippet work; GEO is the newer term for generative AI search. The technical basics this tool checks apply to both.

Should I block GPTBot and other AI crawlers?

Separate training crawlers from search crawlers. Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or CCBot keeps your content out of model training, and is a valid choice. Blocking search and user crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot stops those products from citing you. Most businesses that want AI visibility allow the search crawlers even if they block training.

Does llms.txt help me show up in ChatGPT?

Not proven. llms.txt is a proposed standard: a Markdown file at /llms.txt that lists your most important pages for language models. No major AI engine has confirmed it uses the file for ranking or citations, so the checker weighs it lightly. It is quick to add and does no harm.

Why does my robots.txt pass but the firewall test fails?

robots.txt is a request; your CDN or security plugin decides who actually gets in. Services like Cloudflare can block AI crawlers by user agent even when robots.txt allows them. Some firewalls only let in crawlers coming from verified IP addresses, so a failure here can be a false alarm. Check your server logs for successful GPTBot or PerplexityBot visits to confirm.

Does a high score guarantee AI citations?

No. A high score means nothing technical is stopping AI engines from finding, reading and quoting the page. Whether they choose to cite it also depends on how well it answers the question, how authoritative your site is, and whether other sources mention you.

Is the checker free, and do you store my results?

It is free with no signup. Results are cached for one hour so repeat checks of the same page load instantly. Nothing else is stored.

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