How to check if AI can read your website.
Your customers are starting to ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for recommendations instead of scrolling Google. If those assistants can't read your site, you're invisible in the answer. Here's how to check — in plain English — and a free 30-second test you can run right now.
Key takeaways
- AI reads your site's text and markup — not your design, video or images.
- An audit of 1,700 businesses found 88% don't appear at all when you ask ChatGPT for a recommendation.
- Around 27% of websites unintentionally block AI crawlers through robots.txt, CDN or firewall rules.
- You can check in three ways: ask the assistants, read your site as plain text, and run a scan.
- The fastest check is a free AI visibility scan — it shows the exact answer an AI gives about your business.
Short answer: to check if AI can read your website, read your homepage as plain text with the
design stripped away, confirm your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers, and ask ChatGPT or
Perplexity for a recommendation in your category and area to see whether you appear. The quickest single
check is an AI visibility scan, which tests all of this at once and shows you, word-for-word, what an AI
understood from your site.
Why "can AI read my website?" is suddenly the question that matters
For twenty years the goal was to rank on Google. That's changing fast. People now ask an assistant a direct question — "who's a good electrician in Geelong?" — and act on the single answer it gives, instead of comparing ten blue links. If your business isn't in that answer, the customer never knows you exist. They don't bounce off your site; they never reach it.
And the gap is wide. When 1,700 businesses across 32 industries were queried directly in ChatGPT, 88% didn't appear at all. Not because they were rejected — because the assistant couldn't read and verify them well enough to name them. That's the difference between being invisible and being recommended, and it usually comes down to a handful of signals on your own website.
What an AI actually "sees" on your website
Feed a beautiful homepage to an AI system and here's what it keeps: the raw text and the machine-readable markup. The hero video, the animations, the photography — gone. A site can cost $15,000 and read like three vague sentences to a machine. These are the signals that survive:
| Signal | What it tells an AI |
|---|---|
| Title tag | The single strongest label of what this page and business is. |
| Main heading (H1) | The page's subject, stated in one line. A slogan says nothing. |
| Meta description | The summary used when your page is quoted or previewed. |
| Structured data (schema.org) | Verified facts — business type, location, services, hours — a machine can quote with confidence. |
| llms.txt | A curated plain-text summary written for AI crawlers. Almost no site has one. |
| robots.txt | Whether crawlers are even allowed to read you. |
| Mobile speed | Slow pages get crawled less and abandoned more. |
Three ways to check if AI can read your website
1. Ask the assistants directly
Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Ask each one the questions a real customer would: "best [your service] in [your city]", "how much does [your service] usually cost", "how do I choose a good [your service] provider". Note whether your business is named, and whether the details are right. This is the honest test — it's exactly what your customers are doing.
2. Read your site as plain text
Turn off the visuals in your head and read only the words on your homepage. Do the title, the main heading and the first paragraph clearly state what you do, where you operate, and who you serve? If a stranger couldn't answer those three questions from the text alone, neither can an AI. Slogans like "Love Is In The Hair" are charming to people and meaningless to machines.
3. Check your robots.txt (the silent killer)
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If you see broad Disallow rules, or your CDN or
firewall is configured to block bots, you may be turning away the exact crawlers that feed AI answers —
GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (Google AI). Around
27% of sites block AI crawlers by accident. It's the cheapest thing on this list to get wrong.
The fastest check: a free AI visibility scan
Doing all three by hand takes time and still leaves gaps. Our free scanner runs every check above in about 30 seconds, then shows you the part owners never expect: the exact answer an AI gives when it reads your homepage, and when it's asked to recommend a business like yours. No credit card, nothing installed, and you keep the report.
What to do if AI can't read your site
Almost everything on the list is fixable, and none of it is exotic. In order of impact:
- Rewrite your title tag and main heading to state the facts: what you are, where, for whom.
- Add schema.org structured data for your business, services and FAQ.
- Put a plain-language summary and FAQ on the page — the facts an assistant needs to describe you.
- Add an llms.txt file (here's how).
- Unblock AI crawlers and improve mobile speed.
If your assistant test came back empty, read why ChatGPT doesn't recommend your business next — it explains what turns "readable" into "recommended".
FAQ
How do I know if AI can read my website?
Read your homepage as plain text, check that your robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers, and ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for a recommendation in your category and area. The fastest single check is a free AI visibility scan.
Can ChatGPT see my website?
Only if crawlers aren't blocked and the page states its facts in text. If your content is locked in images or scripts, or your robots.txt turns bots away, ChatGPT sees little or nothing.
Is my website AI-readable?
It's AI-readable when the title, heading and text plainly state what you do, where and for whom, and it carries structured data, an llms.txt file and open crawler access.
Does this cost anything?
The scan is free, takes about 30 seconds, and needs no credit card. You only pay if you choose the optional fix.