Free tool
AEO Checker: Can AI Engines Reach Your Page?
An AI engine can only cite a page it can fetch. Paste a URL to find out whether robots.txt, a firewall, noindex rules or JavaScript are keeping ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews away from it. No sign-up, nothing stored.
Checks one public page at a time. The analysis runs in your browser.
What does the AEO Checker check?
The AEO Checker checks whether AI engines can reach a page, then answers Yes, Mostly or No. It looks at four things that can make a page invisible to AI search without you noticing:
robots.txt rules
Whether the 8 crawlers behind Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity search are allowed on this URL. Training-only bots are listed separately and don’t count.
Firewall and CDN blocks
We request the page as each AI bot. A site can allow a bot in robots.txt and still refuse it at the firewall.
noindex and snippet rules
noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet tags, which keep text out of Google’s AI features.
JavaScript-only content
Whether the main text is in the page’s HTML or only appears after scripts run, which many AI crawlers don’t do.
Below the result there’s an optional checklist for readers: answers near the top, short paragraphs, figures, sources, dates and authorship.
Why does access matter more than page structure?
Access is a requirement; structure isn’t a lever. In a November 2026 test of 51 searches across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, pages that followed more AEO best practices were not cited more often than pages the engines read and skipped. But a page an engine can’t fetch can’t be cited at all. In the same test, 10 of 120 sites refused or challenged a request labelled as PerplexityBot even though their robots.txt allowed it.
Is the reader checklist worth doing?
Yes, for readers, not for AI visibility. Clear answers, short paragraphs and real figures make a page easier to use for the people who land on it and decide whether to buy. Treat the checklist as a quality pass, not a score that predicts citations.
What decides whether AI engines cite a page?
In the test, the type of source mattered more than anything on the page: Google’s AI Overviews drew 36% of their sources from YouTube, and 27% of ChatGPT’s sources were brand homepages, mostly links attached to the brands it recommended. Brand authority and third-party mentions are the other big factors. The checker can’t see any of these, so it doesn’t pretend to score them.
Why does the checker test the page as AI bots?
Because robots.txt only says what a site intends. Firewalls and CDNs such as Cloudflare can block AI bots by name even when robots.txt allows them. The checker requests the page as each bot to catch that. It can’t reproduce the bots’ real IP addresses, so a block it finds is a reason to check your firewall settings, not proof.
Does the checker look at llms.txt?
It reports whether the site has one and nothing more, because no major AI engine has confirmed it reads the file.
Does the checker store my URL?
No. The page is fetched to read its HTML and robots.txt and requested once as each AI bot. The analysis runs in your browser, and the URL is not logged. A hashed IP address is kept for one hour to limit each visitor to 20 checks.