How to check if your website is visible to ChatGPT

You rank well on Google. But when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation in your space, your site doesn't come up. Here's how to check what's going wrong.

The 3-minute manual check

1. llms.txt

Visit yoursite.com/llms.txt. If you get a 404, AI agents have no summary of your site. This is the single highest-impact file you can add - it's essentially a README for AI.

2. robots.txt

Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines mentioning GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot. If you see Disallow: / next to any of these, that AI assistant is completely locked out.

Also check for a blanket block:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This blocks everything - including all AI crawlers.

3. Structured data

Right-click your homepage, select "View Page Source", and search for application/ld+json. If nothing comes up, AI can't extract typed information about your business - it doesn't know if you're a restaurant, a law firm, or a SaaS product.

4. Meta descriptions

Search your page source for <meta name="description". Missing or generic descriptions mean AI has nothing to use when summarizing your page.

5. Sitemap

Visit yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. If it returns a 404, AI crawlers have no map of your content and will only find pages they can reach by following links.

6. Open Graph tags

Search your page source for og:title. Missing OG tags mean AI has no clean title/description to use when referencing your site.

The faster way

The AI Readiness Audit checks all six signals in seconds - enter your URL and get a scored report with a signal-by-signal breakdown showing exactly what's missing.

What to do if you fail

Most websites score poorly. The fix is straightforward:

1. Add llms.txt to your site root (how-to guide)
2. Unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt (guide)
3. Add JSON-LD structured data to your homepage (guide)

Most changes take under 15 minutes and require no developer.