"Is my business visible to AI?" sounds like a yes-or-no question, but it contains several different questions. Can a crawler request your pages? Can it read useful content? Has a service indexed the information? Will it choose to mention your business in a particular answer? A simple website scan cannot establish all four.
Start with access, not a visibility score
The public homepage response, robots.txt rules and indexing directives are useful technical evidence. They can reveal an obstacle worth investigating. They cannot tell you how often your business appears in AI-generated answers or guarantee that changing one setting will produce enquiries.
Our AI Crawler Check inspects a limited set of these signals. It reads the homepage HTML without running JavaScript and reports the rules it can interpret. It does not submit your business to an AI model or ask a model to invent a score.
Search access and training are separate choices
OpenAI describes OAI-SearchBot as a search crawler and GPTBot as a crawler for content that may be used in model training. Its documentation says these settings are independent. Blocking training is therefore not, on its own, evidence that you have blocked ChatGPT search. Read the official crawler descriptions before changing either preference.
There is no good reason to allow every crawler simply to turn a report green. Make a deliberate choice about each purpose. Keep restrictions that protect content you do not intend to publish, and ask for help when existing rules are complicated.
Make the business understandable to people
A clear service description, service area, genuine work examples and accessible contact information are useful starting points. These should answer a visitor's questions even if they never arrived through an AI tool. Avoid filling pages with repetitive claims about expertise or lists of places you do not serve.
Google's helpful-content guidance emphasises useful, reliable information for people. Adding more pages or technical files is not a substitute for explaining the business accurately.
Know when a result needs manual investigation
A firewall may show a checker a challenge while serving the site normally to a browser. Some pages rely on JavaScript for their main content. Repeated crawler groups and complex rules may need closer inspection. A result labelled "manual review" means the tool cannot draw a reliable conclusion, not that your business has disappeared from AI search.
Start with the free technical check, then request three practical recommendations if you want help interpreting the findings. We will distinguish changes that remove a technical barrier from work that improves the website itself. Neither is a promise of rankings, AI citations or sales.