Can ChatGPT read, trust and quote your site?
Paste a URL. In a few seconds you get a score and the exact fixes that help ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers find and cite your pages.
How a check works
The same three steps an AI crawler takes, done in a few seconds. Free, no sign-up, nothing stored.
Read robots.txt as each crawler
We ask a standards-compliant parser whether OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot and eight others may fetch your page.
Fetch the page without JavaScript
Most AI crawlers never run scripts, so we load the raw HTML the way they do and count what is actually there.
Score it and list the fixes
Nine checks, weighted by how much each one stops assistants quoting you, with the most important fix first.
What it looks at
- AI crawler access
- robots.txt and firewall rules for every AI search and training crawler.
- Content without JavaScript
- How many words are in the HTML before any script runs.
- Indexing rules
- noindex and nosnippet rules that quietly keep a page out of AI answers.
- Structured data
- Organization, Article, Product and other JSON-LD that says who published what.
- Answer-shaped headings
- Headings that match real questions, with the answer right below.
- Dates and authorship
- Machine-readable dates and authors, used to judge what to trust.
- Title, description, canonical
- The basics every search engine and assistant reads first.
- Sitemap and llms.txt
- Whether crawlers can find all your pages, and the optional AI summary file.
Start with the crawlers
The first step on the path. 8 guides in all, each opening with the short answer.
AI crawlers list: every bot name for robots.txt
3 min readTo be cited in AI answers, allow the search crawlers: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Googlebot (AI Overviews and AI Mode). GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are about model training, and blocking them doesn't remove you from AI search.
Block AI training but stay in AI search answers
2 min readDisallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended and CCBot in robots.txt, and keep OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Googlebot allowed. The full file is below.
Does blocking AI crawlers hurt your Google rankings?
2 min readNo. Blocking AI training crawlers, including Google's own Google-Extended token, doesn't change your Google rankings, and it doesn't remove you from AI Overviews or AI Mode. Only blocking Googlebot does that, and that removes you from Google Search altogether.
Who blocks AI crawlers?
We're reading the robots.txt of thousands of popular sites to see which AI crawlers they block and who publishes an llms.txt. The results land here when the first scan is done.
Know when AI assistants start mentioning you
The check shows whether assistants can read you. Surfacepath Pro will ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity your customers' questions every week and show when you're mentioned, cited, or replaced by a competitor.
Questions
What does the AI readiness check look at?
It reads your robots.txt the way each AI crawler does, fetches the page without running JavaScript, and checks indexing rules, structured data, headings, dates, the sitemap and llms.txt. You get a score out of 100 and the fixes, most important first.
Does a high score mean ChatGPT will cite me?
No. It means nothing technical stops assistants from finding and quoting you. Whether they do depends on how well your page answers the question compared with other sources.
Is it free?
Yes, the check is free with no sign-up. A paid plan for weekly monitoring of what assistants actually say about you is in the works.