Can AI engines actually crawl your page?
Before AI can cite you, it has to reach you, read you and be allowed to index you. Paste a URL and get an instant 0-100 crawlability score: which AI bots your robots.txt allows or blocks, whether your answer lives in the server-rendered HTML, and whether anything is quietly telling engines to stay away.
Works on any public URL. We fetch the page and your robots.txt once, the way a crawler would. Nothing is stored.
Free, rate-limited to a few checks per hour per visitor. For continuous AI-crawler monitoring across your whole site, current verified bots, visit intent and alerts when access breaks, see CiteTrack AI’s crawler analytics.
Why crawlability comes before citations
Every guide about getting cited by AI talks about better answers and schema. None of it matters if the engine can’t get to the page in the first place. AI citations depend on a chain of three things going right, in order: an AI crawler has to be allowed to fetch your URL, it has to be able to read your actual answer in the HTML it receives, and the page has to be indexable so the engine is permitted to store and quote it. Break any link in that chain and you are invisible to AI no matter how good the content is.
This checker tests all three. It fetches your page with no JavaScript, exactly the way GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot do, reads your robots.txt rules per bot, and looks for the quiet killers like a stray noindex or an answer that only appears after client-side rendering. You get a 0-100 score and a per-bot allow/block table, so you know precisely where the chain breaks.
What the checker looks at
Access, are AI bots allowed in?
It reads your site’s robots.txt and evaluates the real allow/disallow rules for each major AI user-agent: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and Claude-User (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (Gemini and AI Overviews), Bingbot (Copilot) and CCBot (Common Crawl). Blocking the citation-critical fetchers: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot, is the single most common reason a site never shows up in AI answers, and it’s often added by accident.
Render, is your answer in the HTML?
AI crawlers rarely execute JavaScript. If your main content is injected client-side by a framework, the crawler receives a near-empty shell and has nothing to quote. The checker counts the words of real text in the raw server HTML and warns you when a page looks like it depends on JavaScript to show its answer.
Indexability & discovery
It checks the HTTP status, looks for a noindex directive in both the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag response header, and confirms the basics an engine uses to understand and find the page: a real title and meta description, a single clear H1, a canonical URL, a declared language, an XML sitemap, and an optional llms.txt.
How the score works
Each check is weighted by how much it affects whether AI can cite you. Access and render checks carry the most weight, because they are pass/fail gates, if a bot is blocked or the answer isn’t in the HTML, nothing downstream helps. Discovery and hygiene checks are lighter. The tool blends them into a 0-100 score with a letter grade and a prioritised fix for every failing item. The page is fetched once, analysed in memory and never stored.
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Learn more ?Frequently asked questions
How do I know if my site is blocking AI crawlers?
The most common block lives in your robots.txt as a Disallow rule for AI user-agents like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. This checker reads your robots.txt, evaluates the rules for each major AI bot against the URL you enter, and shows you a clear allowed/blocked table so you can spot an accidental block in seconds.
Is the AI crawlability checker free?
Yes, completely free and with no signup. It is rate-limited to a few checks per hour per visitor. For continuous monitoring of current verified AI crawlers across your whole site, with visit intent and alerts when access breaks, CiteTrack AI does it inside WordPress.
Why can’t AI read my page even though it loads fine in a browser?
Browsers run JavaScript; most AI crawlers do not. If your content is rendered client-side, the crawler receives an almost-empty HTML shell. The checker counts the real text in the raw server HTML and flags pages that appear to depend on JavaScript to display their answer.
Does allowing AI crawlers guarantee citations?
No. Crawlability is necessary but not sufficient: the engine still weighs your answer quality, structure and authority. Think of this tool as removing the technical reasons you would be skipped. Pair it with the AI-Readiness Grader to check the content signals too.
What is the difference between GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User?
GPTBot crawls pages to train OpenAI models. OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT’s search index. ChatGPT-User fetches a page live when a user clicks a link or asks ChatGPT to read a URL. For citations you most want OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User allowed; you can allow or block GPTBot independently depending on your stance on training.
Do you store the pages I check?
No. The tool fetches your URL and robots.txt once, analyses them in memory and returns the result. Nothing is saved.
Check one page free. Monitor every crawler with CiteTrack AI.
See exactly which AI bots reach you, when access breaks, and what those visits earn, inside WordPress, for a flat yearly price.
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