AI Visibility Checker: Is Your Site Visible to AI Search?

AI Visibility is the degree to which a website is found, crawled, parsed and cited by generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Bing Copilot. Unlike traditional search visibility, which measures rank in a SERP, it measures whether your content gets quoted in a generated answer. A site can rank #1 on Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT if its HTML, schema or robots.txt blocks the AI crawler. SiteTest measures both.

A GEO audit is a structured review of how well a website is positioned to be found and cited by generative AI engines. It checks three layers: (1) access — whether AI crawlers can reach the page; (2) extraction — whether the engine can parse the content into citable passages; (3) citation worthiness — whether the content is factual and structured enough to be quoted in an AI answer. SiteTest runs all 92 checks free (52 affect the A–F grade, including 18 security and accessibility checks; 40 are recommendations) and shows an A-F grade per category, issue counts and one finding in full; the copy-paste developer brief is part of the paid Full Audit.

Yes. SiteTest is free for the core AI visibility audit — paste a URL, get 59 of the 92 checks across 10 categories, A-F grades, per-platform AI scores, issue counts by category and one finding in full. No signup, no credit card, no email gate. The single paid tier (Full Audit, $24.99, one-time, no subscription) unlocks every finding with evidence, the full developer brief with code fixes and re-audit credits. The free tier is enough to know whether your site is AI-ready.

To check ChatGPT visibility for your site, you need to test three things: (1) does GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot have access — check robots.txt and meta tags; (2) does the page render server-side or only after JavaScript — ChatGPT-User retrieves at request time but with limits; (3) is the content structured as citable passages with clear schema. SiteTest checks the first two automatically — they make up its ChatGPT readiness score — and flags citable passages and schema in separate checks (citable passages as recommendations outside the grade), with the exact code to unblock or restructure where needed.

No. SiteTest does not track citations or brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity or other AI answers. It audits whether your site is ready to be cited: AI crawler access, server-rendered HTML and consistent brand naming count toward the A–F grade; citable facts, an answer-first intro, author and date signals and sameAs links are listed as recommendations outside the grade. To see real citations, test prompts manually or use a dedicated tracking tool.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of structuring a website so that generative AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews — find, parse and cite its content in their generated answers. GEO replaces the keyword-and-backlinks frame of traditional SEO with a citability-and-extractability frame: short factual passages, clean schema, accessible HTML, allowed AI crawlers.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is a subset of GEO focused on getting content selected as the answer to a user's question — not just cited as a source. AEO targets featured snippets, AI Overviews answer boxes, voice-assistant responses and ChatGPT direct answers. Tactics include structured Q&A blocks, FAQPage schema, definition-first paragraphs and clean H2/H3 hierarchy. SiteTest's 92-check audit flags the AEO signals your page is missing.

LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is the broader discipline of optimizing content for any LLM-powered surface — generative engines, embedded chatbots, AI assistants, RAG systems. Where GEO targets public AI search engines, LLMO covers private and embedded AI as well. SiteTest covers the public-search slice; the underlying signals (schema, citability, llms.txt) are the same ones LLMO recommends.

An AI-ready website is one that AI crawlers can reach, parse, and confidently cite. The minimum bar: HTTPS, server-rendered HTML, allowed AI bots in robots.txt, valid schema markup, descriptive titles and metas, and an llms.txt file at the root. The fastest way to check is to run the SiteTest AI Visibility Checker — paste your URL, read the A-F grade, fix the F's first.

AI SEO and traditional SEO share the technical foundation — fast pages, clean HTML, valid schema — but diverge at the goal. Traditional SEO optimizes for rank: getting your page to position 1 on a SERP. AI SEO (also called GEO or LLMO SEO) optimizes for citation: getting your content quoted inside an AI-generated answer where there is no SERP to rank in. AI engines weight extractability, citability and entity clarity more heavily than backlinks.

Partly. SiteTest scores readiness separately for three AI search surfaces: ChatGPT (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User) and Perplexity (PerplexityBot) — bot access plus server-rendered HTML — and Bing Copilot (Bingbot access). Google AI Overviews and Gemini have no separate readiness score; the report marks them as not measured. For each measured platform you see what specifically to fix.

No. SiteTest does not monitor brand mentions inside ChatGPT answers. The audit checks that your brand name is used consistently (part of the A–F grade) and recommends sameAs links (Wikipedia, LinkedIn, GitHub, Crunchbase) and Organization schema outside the grade. For live monitoring, test prompts manually or use a dedicated mention-tracking tool.