Type in your domain and we'll load it the way the answer engines do. You'll find out which AI crawlers your robots.txt lets in, whether your server really hands them the page, and what an engine can quote from your home page. It's quick, around fifteen seconds, and there's nothing to sign up for.
Free. No account. We only read public files.
Put simply, the bots behind ChatGPT search and Perplexity have to get in, find your other pages, and come away with answers they can use. Claude runs its own crawler, and so do Google and Bing. The same bar applies to all of them. That's three separate things, and a site can fail any one without anyone on the team noticing.
Access is the one that breaks without anyone seeing it. Each engine has its own bot. A robots.txt rule, a firewall setting or a bot-protection service can shut one of them out, and your site still loads fine in your browser, so nobody finds out. Discovery is next: a sitemap the crawler can find, pages that aren't marked noindex, a declared language. Then there's the page. Does it have a clear title and a single main heading? Is there structured data saying who you are? Is there enough actual text for a model to quote?
None of this gets you recommended on its own. It only makes sure nothing is in the way when the engines decide.
We read your robots.txt the way each bot does, group by group, then fetch your home page as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity's crawlers. Robots.txt allows a bot but the server still refuses it? You'll see that here. Most checkers miss it.
We don't just guess at /sitemap.xml. We follow whatever sitemaps you declare in robots.txt. We also look for noindex tags and headers, the page language and an llms.txt, and we test whether every version of your domain ends up at the same HTTPS address.
Here we read the page the way a model would. Is the title any good, and is there a meta description? One main heading or five? We count the readable words, look for structured data and for headings phrased as questions, and check whether your images are described.
If robots.txt or your firewall turns away OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot, nothing else matters yet. Training bots like GPTBot are a separate choice and don't affect whether you get cited.
We see this more than you'd think: a noindex tag copied over from a staging site, quietly keeping the page out of the index the engines search.
Point robots.txt at your sitemap and keep it current. Add an llms.txt if you want, it's cheap, but nobody can promise an engine reads it yet.
Use one H1 that says what you do. Add Organization markup. Write a description a person would actually read, and describe the images that matter.
Most of your competitors will pass this check too. What decides who gets named is what the engines find about you on other sites, how well your pages answer the questions buyers actually ask, and how you compare with the brands they mention instead. A readiness score can't measure any of that.
When we run the questions buyers in your market actually ask through ChatGPT and Perplexity (Gemini, Claude and Google AI get the same treatment), we record who gets named and which pages get cited, then turn the gaps into a plan you can work through. That's the free RankCited visibility report.
Many checkers only request /sitemap.xml. Crawlers start with the Sitemap lines in robots.txt, and lots of sites keep their sitemaps on a CDN or a subdomain. If yours does, a tool that only tries /sitemap.xml will tell you it's missing. We read robots.txt first, like the crawlers.
That's a business decision, not a visibility one. GPTBot collects training data. ChatGPT's search answers come from OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User. You can block the first and keep the other two, and you'll still be eligible to be cited.
It doesn't hurt and it takes ten minutes to write. But no major engine has confirmed it reads one, so we count a missing llms.txt as something to improve, never as a blocker.
Something in front of your site is turning it away, usually a CDN bot-protection setting or a firewall rule. Cloudflare's AI crawler controls are the most common cause. Our fetch doesn't come from the bot's own IP addresses, so confirm in your CDN logs before you change anything.
It helps an engine pin down who you are. Organization or LocalBusiness markup with your name, logo and profiles connects your site to the same entity mentioned elsewhere. FAQ markup won't get you cited by itself, but it makes your answers easier to lift.
Crawler access is worth 40 points, discoverability 25, page signals 35, and a warning costs you half of a check's points. But if an answer engine is blocked or the home page is noindexed, nothing else matters until that's fixed, so the score can't go above 40.
It's the page every crawler hits first and the one that usually carries your organization markup. Page-by-page audits run inside a RankCited account.
We keep the result for 30 days so the share link works, and the same domain checked again within 24 hours gets the saved result. If you ask for the result by email, we use the address to send that one email and nothing else.
Check your site for free, then get the full report on which brands ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI recommend in your market.
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