Free AI visibility checkers
An AI visibility checker tells you whether AI engines can reach your site and whether they cite it when buyers ask about your category. Five free checks cover the common failure modes, each takes under a minute, and none require an account. Run the crawler policy check first, because a blocked crawler makes every other signal irrelevant. Then check whether a specific AI answer cited your domain or named a competitor instead, score a page for extractability, and generate the prompt battery worth tracking. Free checks give a snapshot rather than a trend, which is enough to establish whether a visibility problem exists before paying for anything.
What is an AI visibility checker?
An AI visibility checker answers one question quickly: when an AI engine answers a question in your category, does it cite or name your brand? The checks split into two families. Access checks ask whether engines can read the site at all, covering crawler permissions, rendering, and page structure. Presence checks ask what an engine actually said, covering citations, brand mentions, and which competitors appeared instead.
Access problems are the more common cause of invisibility and the cheaper to fix, which is why they are worth checking first. A page can be well written, well structured, and completely unreachable because of a rule nobody remembers adding.
A checker is a snapshot. Because AI answers vary between runs of the same prompt, a single check proves an instant rather than a rate, and presence is better understood as a percentage across repeated runs.
Which checker should you run first?
In this order, because each one rules out a cause the next one would otherwise misattribute.
- Crawler policy check: whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the retrieval crawlers can reach the site, including CDN rules that override robots.txt
- AI citation checker: paste an answer from any engine and see whether it cited your URL, named the brand without linking, or leaned on other sources
- Agent readiness check: whether a page is server-rendered, structured, and extractable enough for an engine to quote
- Prompt gap finder: the buyer-intent prompts worth tracking for your category, since tracking the wrong questions measures the wrong market
- GEO fix preview: the anatomy of a fix for one prompt, so you can see what a change would involve before committing to anything
The five free checks
All five are free, need no account, and store nothing. Each links to the full audit when a snapshot is not enough.
| Check | What it answers | What you need |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler policy check | Can AI crawlers reach the site, and which are blocked | Your domain |
| AI citation checker | Did this answer cite you, name you, or cite someone else | An answer pasted from any engine plus your domain |
| Agent readiness check | Is this page structured and rendered so an engine can quote it | A page URL |
| Prompt gap finder | Which buyer questions should you be tracking | Your domain |
| GEO fix preview | What a fix for one prompt actually contains | A prompt and your domain |
How do you check whether ChatGPT cites your website?
The direct method takes a minute. Ask ChatGPT a question a buyer in your category would ask, without naming your brand, then paste the answer into the citation checker along with your domain. It reports whether the answer linked your URL, mentioned the brand without a link, or used other sources entirely, and lists the domains it did cite.
The result of one check is a single observation, not a verdict. Ask the same question again tomorrow and the answer may cite different sources. What makes the reading meaningful is repetition against a fixed prompt set, which is what turns presence into a rate you can act on.
If the answer never mentions the brand across several runs, work backwards through access before rewriting anything: confirm crawlers reach the site, confirm the page returns real HTML rather than a script shell, and confirm it is indexable.
What a free checker cannot tell you
Three things, and they are the three that decide what to do next.
It cannot tell you your rate, because that needs the same prompts run repeatedly across engines rather than one check. It cannot tell you why a citation is missing, since the cause could be crawler access, a buried answer, weak entity clarity, or a competitor owning the third-party sources engines trust for your category. And it cannot tell you whether a change worked, because that needs a baseline recorded before the change and a re-test of the identical prompt after it.
That is the line between a checker and an audit. The free audit runs a full prompt battery across engines, classifies each miss by cause, and establishes the baseline that later re-tests compare against.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. Five free checks cover crawler access, citation classification for a pasted answer, page readiness, prompt selection, and fix anatomy. None require an account and each takes under a minute. They give a snapshot rather than a trend, which is enough to establish whether a visibility problem exists.
Ask ChatGPT a question a buyer in your category would ask without naming your brand, then paste the answer into a citation checker with your domain. It reports whether the answer cited your URL, named the brand without linking, or used other sources. Repeat across several days, since answers vary between runs.
It depends on which question you have. For access problems, a crawler policy check is the fastest answer and the most common cause of invisibility. For presence, a citation checker classifies what an engine actually said. For a rate rather than a snapshot, you need a tracked prompt set run on a schedule rather than any one-off check.
Not for the free checks, which run without an account. A full audit across a prompt battery and multiple engines requires an email so the result can be sent to you, but no card.
A one-off check answers whether a problem exists. After that, scheduled re-tests of a fixed prompt set are what make movement visible, because AI answers vary run to run and a single reading cannot separate a real change from normal variation.