| Free tool
Is your website visible to AI?
People are asking ChatGPT and Claude for recommendations instead of searching. If those assistants cannot open your website, they cannot recommend your business — and most owners have no idea whether they can. Check yours below in about twelve seconds.
The check below asks for your page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot and reports what your server actually said to each one. It also runs the full website audit, so you get the speed, security and search findings at the same time.
| The reason this page exists
We found it on our own site, by accident.
On 25 September 2026 we tested this site the way the tool above does it — by asking for a page while pretending to be each AI crawler in turn. This is what came back:
403 GPTBot ← ChatGPT’s crawler, refused
403 ClaudeBot ← Claude’s crawler, refused
403 CCBot ← Common Crawl, refused
200 PerplexityBot
200 GooglebotOur robots.txt explicitly welcomed all of them. The block was a firewall setting we had never opened — switched on by default — and it had been quietly turning away two of the three biggest AI assistants. Claude could not read a single page of this site.
Nothing warned us. Google was fine. Visitors were fine. Analytics looked normal, because a refused crawler is not a visitor and never shows up in a report. The only way to find it was to ask as the crawler, which is precisely what almost nobody does.
| The short answer
How do I check which AI bots can access my website?
Ask your own page for itself, pretending to be each bot, and read the status code that comes back. That is the only check that tells you the truth, because your robots.txt states what you intend and your server does whatever it actually does - and when those two disagree, the server wins.
The audit above does exactly that for the three that matter most: it requests your page as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude) and PerplexityBot, and reports for each one whether your server let it through or turned it away. If you would rather run it yourself, one line per bot does it:
curl -I -A "GPTBot" https://yoursite.com/
curl -I -A "ClaudeBot" https://yoursite.com/
curl -I -A "PerplexityBot" https://yoursite.com/A 200 means that bot can read the page. A 403 means it is being refused - usually by a firewall setting nobody opened, not by anything you wrote. Checking in a browser proves nothing, because your browser is not the bot being blocked.
| How it happens
Four ways a site blocks AI without anyone deciding to.
A firewall default
Cloudflare and several other providers ship with AI-crawler blocking available, and it is easy to switch on without realising it also covers the assistants people ask for recommendations. This is what had happened to us.
A security plugin
WordPress security plugins often bundle "bot protection" that treats unfamiliar crawlers as threats. GPTBot and ClaudeBot are unfamiliar to a plugin written before they existed.
A robots.txt somebody copied
Blocking AI crawlers was widely recommended in 2023 and 2024, and a lot of those lines were pasted into robots.txt files and forgotten. Worth re-reading yours now that the trade-off has changed.
Hosting-level rate limiting
Some shared hosts throttle anything that crawls quickly. The crawler sees 429, gives up, and comes back less often — or stops coming.
| If you are blocked
How to fix it, by cause.
Find which of the four it is before changing anything — unblocking in the wrong place leaves the real block in place and makes you think it is fixed.
- Cloudflare: Security → Bots, and look for the AI scrapers and crawlers setting. Ours was on ai_bots_protection. Turning it off restored every crawler immediately. If you use the API rather than the dashboard, note that
ai_trainingis a read-only field derived from that setting — writing to it directly returns a Bad Request. - A security plugin: find its bot or crawler blocklist and allow
GPTBot,ClaudeBot,OAI-SearchBot,PerplexityBotandGoogle-Extended. - robots.txt: look for
User-agent: GPTBotorClaudeBotfollowed byDisallow: /. Remove those blocks, or keep them deliberately — but then do not also expect to appear in AI answers. - Rate limiting: usually a hosting support ticket rather than a setting you can reach.
robots.txt that says one thing while the server does another — whichever you choose, make the two agree.| Beyond access
Being readable is the floor, not the goal.
Once assistants can open your pages, the question becomes whether they can use what they find.
Answer questions in plain sentences
An assistant lifts a sentence that answers the question directly. "A WordPress care plan covers tested updates, off-site backups and hack clean-up" can be quoted. "Our service is tailored to your needs" cannot be quoted by anyone, about anything.
Mark up your facts
Organization or LocalBusiness markup for your business details, FAQPage for your questions and answers. This is the difference between an assistant finding you and an assistant quoting you with confidence.
Publish the numbers you are willing to publish
Prices, hours, response times, service areas. An assistant asked "who does X in Lahore and what does it cost" will name the business that answered, not the one that said "contact us for a quote".
Add an llms.txt
A plain text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt describing what you do and which pages matter. Nothing requires it. It takes an afternoon, and it means the summary an assistant reads is one you wrote.
Keep it true
Assistants cross-check. A claim on your site that contradicts your Google profile, your invoices or another page of your own is worse than no claim, because it makes everything near it less quotable.
| The words
SEO, AEO, GEO and LLMO, without the jargon.
- SEO — search engine optimisation. Getting your page into a list of blue links.
- AEO — answer engine optimisation. Getting your answer used when somebody asks a question rather than searching for one.
- GEO — generative engine optimisation. Getting your business named inside an answer an AI writes from scratch.
- LLMO — the same idea as GEO, different acronym. The industry has not settled on one yet, and you can safely ignore the distinction.
They are marketed as four disciplines. In practice they rest on three things: pages an assistant can fetch, facts it can lift without guessing, and claims that hold up when checked. Everything else is detail.
| After the check
If you would rather we sorted it.
Core And Solutions is a website studio in Lahore. 300+ websites built, and 27 of them live for anyone to open.
| Questions
Questions people ask about this
How do I check if ChatGPT can read my website?
Run the check on this page. It requests one of your pages while identifying as GPTBot, which is OpenAI's crawler, and reports the status your server returned. Anything in the 400s means you are being refused. Reading your own robots.txt is not enough, because a firewall can refuse a crawler regardless of what robots.txt permits — that is exactly what was happening on this site.
Why is my website blocked from AI crawlers?
Almost always something you did not switch on yourself: a firewall default such as Cloudflare's AI crawler protection, a WordPress security plugin treating unknown bots as threats, a robots.txt rule copied from advice written in 2023, or host-level rate limiting. All four are invisible from the outside, and none of them affect Googlebot or your visitors, so nothing looks wrong.
Should I let AI crawlers read my site?
It is a real trade-off. Letting them in means you can be cited when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation, and it also means your content may be used in training. Blocking them protects the content and costs you the citations. There is no universally right answer — but whichever you choose, make your robots.txt and your firewall agree, because a site that says one thing and does another gets the downsides of both.
Does blocking AI crawlers affect my Google ranking?
Not directly. Googlebot is a separate crawler and is usually unaffected. Google-Extended is the one that governs whether your content is used for Gemini and AI Overviews — blocking that does not remove you from ordinary search results, but it can keep you out of the AI-written answer at the top of them.
What is llms.txt?
A plain text file at the root of your site — yoursite.com/llms.txt — that describes your business and your important pages in ordinary language, for AI assistants to read. It is a convention rather than a standard, nothing enforces it, and no assistant requires one. It takes an afternoon and it means the summary an assistant works from is one you wrote rather than one it assembled.
How long until AI assistants notice a change?
Longer than Google. Unblocking a crawler only means it can come back — it still has to recrawl, and how often varies from days to months. Assistants that search the live web at the time of the question, like ChatGPT Search and Perplexity, will see the change far sooner than anything relying on a training snapshot.
Is this the same as SEO?
It overlaps but is not the same. SEO is about ranking in a list. This is about being fetchable and quotable when an assistant writes the answer itself. A site can rank well on Google and still be invisible to Claude, which is precisely the situation we found ourselves in.
Not sure what your result means?
Send us the address on WhatsApp. We will run it ourselves and tell you plainly whether anything needs doing.