Paste your URL. In about 15 seconds you'll see what keeps AI search from using your site, with fixes for the platform you're on. Then a quick test shows whether ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity mention you.
The score covers your site. This shows what AI answers say today. Start with ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, then add the others if you have time. Use a private window where you can (Claude needs you logged in) and keep web search on. Your marks stay in this browser.
My own site, on launch day
97ryandoser.com's score on this audit, October 14, 2026
0 of 12AI answers about free AI visibility tools that mentioned ryandoser.com: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, three questions each, pulled the same day
That's my baseline. Until today, ryandoser.com had no free audit tool, so zero mentions is where it starts. A ready site doesn't put you in an answer by itself, which is why this audit comes with a second step.
The basics
What is an AI visibility audit?
An AI visibility audit checks whether AI search tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity can get into your website, lift useful answers from it and tell who runs it, and then whether they actually mention you.
Most free AI visibility checkers skip straight to that last part. They ask an AI model a handful of prompts, count your mentions and hand you a score. That tells you where you stand today. It doesn't tell you why, or what to fix.
This audit works in the order things break. If an AI search bot can't get in, nothing on your page matters. If it gets in but your page never says who you are in a sentence it can lift, it has less to work with. If it can't tell who runs the site, a business with a clearer footprint is an easier pick.
So you get both halves. The site checks run automatically. The mention check is a short test you run yourself, for reasons covered below.
Under the hood
What this AI visibility audit checks
The audit reads your homepage, robots.txt and sitemap, then up to four more pages picked the way a crawler would find them: your About page, a service or pricing page and your two newest articles. It runs 19 scored checks in three groups.
Can AI reach you?
40 points
If a search bot cannot get in, or your homepage tells it to stay out, nothing else on this list matters.
AI search bots allowedYour robots.txt (the file that tells bots what to crawl) lets Google, Bing and the ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity search bots in
Firewall testTest requests named as the ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude bots get the same page a visitor gets
Readable without JavaScriptYour words are in the page your server sends, before any script runs
Allowed in search indexesNo tags telling search engines to leave your pages or their text out
Can AI quote you?
35 points
AI answers lift one sentence or one table at a time. These checks look for pieces worth lifting, on every page the audit reads.
Opener says who you areThe first lines on your homepage name you and say what you do
Question headingsSection headings phrased the way buyers ask
Tables and listsHTML tables and lists in your main content
Dated, signed, recentArticles show a date and an author, and something is less than a year old
Page labelsEach page carries structured data for what it is: an article, a product or service, your business
Titles and headingsA title and description of sensible length and one main heading per page
Image alt textImages describe themselves in text (decorative ones can stay empty)
Decision pagesComparison, pricing, FAQ and proof pages buyers use to pick
Does AI know who you are?
25 points
These checks look for the basics that show who runs the site: a name, the people, the profiles, the reviews and a way to reach you.
About pageAn About page with some substance, linked from your homepage
A named personAn author or founder tied to the site, with a link to their profile
Profiles tied to youYour LinkedIn, YouTube, Google and review profiles listed in your structured data
Business identityYour homepage label has your name, logo, description, profiles (and address and phone if you are local)
One business nameThe same main name in your title, site name and structured data
Contact detailsAt least two ways to reach you from the homepage
ReviewsReviews or links to the review sites your buyers use
Three more things show up in your report without touching the score: which AI training bots you block (a fair business choice either way), whether your homepage carries Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools tags, and whether you have a sitemap.
Every fix comes with steps for the platform your site runs on. The audit spots WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Framer, HubSpot, Ghost, GoDaddy and Duda, and notices when Cloudflare sits in front. Sites built in code get a prompt to paste into Claude Code instead.
Scoring
How the AI visibility score works
Reach is worth 40 points, Quote 35 and Trust 25. Most checks give partial credit: alt text on 7 of 10 images, or the right labels on 3 of 4 pages, earns most of a check's points, not all of them. A check the audit couldn't run doesn't count either way.
That makes 100 hard on purpose. In October 2026 I ran this audit on 122 small business websites found through Google results for 12 local searches (plumbers, dentists, law firms, bakeries and more). The median score was 78 and none scored 100. Even the sites in the top band still had a median of six checks marked "needs work" or "fail". A 100 would mean a site passes every check here, which is not the same as being mentioned by AI.
One rule overrides the math. If your site blocks the AI search bots, hides its text behind JavaScript or tells search engines not to index the homepage, the score stops at 39. Nothing else on the page matters until that's fixed.
85+Strong foundation. Few issues on the pages the audit checked.
65-84Readable, with gaps. The door is open. A few fixes make your pages easier to use.
40-64Partly visible. AI can get in, but your pages give it little to work with yet.
0-39Hard for AI to use. Usually something is locking AI out. Start there.
The score measures these 19 checks on the pages the audit read, nothing more. There's no black box: open any check in your report and you'll see what the audit fetched and what it found.
Live AI answers
Check your business in live AI answers
The score can't tell you whether AI picks you. For that, ask the AI tools yourself.
After your audit, the page writes three questions from what you sell. Two are the kind a buyer asks before they know your name. One asks about you by name, to see what AI already knows. One click opens each question in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity or Claude (Gemini gets a copy button). Use a private window with web search on, then mark each answer: recommends you, mentions you or not there.
Running it yourself means you read the actual answers instead of a number someone else summarized. AI answers change by person, place and day, so treat any single run, yours included, as a snapshot.
Write down the date. Next month, ask the same questions and compare. That's your scoreboard.
Reading your results
Read your score and your mentions together
Side by side, the two numbers tell you where to work next:
Low score, few mentionsOpen the door first.
Fix the top items in your report, starting with anything that blocks AI search, then run the audit again.
High score, few mentionsYour site is in good shape. Look off your site next.
The usual gap is what other sites say about you: reviews, "best of" lists, directories, podcasts and Reddit threads that name you. Pages that answer buyer questions with specifics help too.
Low score, many mentionsAI already names you. Fix carefully.
Clear the blockers, but don't rewrite the pages AI seems to be pulling from. An edit can cost you the mention.
High score, many mentionsProtect it.
Ask the same questions once a month. AI answers drift, and a competitor can take your spot without you noticing.
Why this audit doesn't scrape Google for your score
Nozzle, a rank tracking company, studied 27.5 million Google result pages it collected and found that since September 2026, Google has been answering bulk scrapers with swapped results: pages that look completely normal, with the usual sites quietly replaced. On the worst days, September 27 to 29, it was a quarter of the pages Nozzle collected. Google hasn't commented.
8.0%of the Google result pages Nozzle collected after September 13 were "poisoned" (swapped), against 0.17% before
58.6%of poisoned pages left out a tracked site that normally sits in the top 10, against 2.7% before
77.9%of poisoned pages had their usual sites back within three days
That matters for any tool that checks your Google rankings or AI Overviews by scraping. A poisoned pull says you vanished when you didn't. While researching this page, I pulled the same Google query twice through a search data API, 23 seconds apart. The two top 10s had only 2 sites in common. One pair of pulls can't prove poisoning, but it's exactly the kind of number you shouldn't build a score on.
So this audit scores only what it can fetch from your own site, and the Google part of the AI answer test runs in your own browser. The full breakdown, with charts rebuilt from Nozzle's data, is in my poisoned Google SERPs research.
Before you trust a ranking drop
Check Search Console. Compare the same search, page and dates. If clicks and impressions held steady there, a tracking error is the likelier story.
Recheck in three days. In Nozzle's data, 77.9% of poisoned pages had their usual sites back within three days.
Look at who replaced you. If most of the sites that usually rank vanished at once, suspect the data before your page. Nozzle saw Reddit and other social sites show up more on poisoned pages, but says that alone isn't a reliable sign.
Comparison
This audit vs. other AI visibility checkers
Most free AI visibility checkers ask an AI model prompts the vendor picked, then turn the mentions into a score. That's a quick snapshot, but it's hard to act on, and many of them are a lead form for an agency or a paid tracker.
Paid trackers like Profound, Otterly and Peec run your prompts on a schedule and chart the trend. That's the right tool once your site basics are done. I compared them in the best AI visibility tools.
This audit checks the site those tools take for granted, shows the evidence behind every check, and gives fixes for your platform. It follows the same order as the audits I run on client sites, starting with whether AI can get in at all.
My AI Agent Readiness Checker scores the newer agent standards Cloudflare tracks. Run it after this one if AI agents using your site matters to you.
Reality check
What an AI visibility audit won't do
No audit can promise you'll show up in ChatGPT.
There's no ChatGPT ranking to promise. Ask the same question twice and you can get two different answers. That's why the test above counts how often you're mentioned across questions and tools, and why anyone selling a guaranteed "ChatGPT ranking" is selling something that doesn't exist.
Same goes for llms.txt. Google says you don't need special AI text files to appear in its AI features, and there's no demonstrated citation benefit, so this audit doesn't score it. The evidence is in the AI search myths post.
What the audit can do is find the problems on your side, so that when AI comes looking, your site lets it in and makes clear who you are. For the next step, here's how to track AI visibility over time.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI visibility audit?
An AI visibility audit checks whether AI search tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity can get into your website and make sense of it, and whether they actually mention you. This one is free. Paste a URL for the site checks, then run the AI answer test for the mentions.
How do I check if ChatGPT mentions my business?
Ask it the way a buyer would, in a private window with search on: "What's the best [what you sell] in [your city]?" Then ask about your business by name. Run the same questions in Google AI Mode and Perplexity too, because the answers often disagree. The test on this page writes the questions for you and keeps the tally.
What is a good AI visibility score?
85 or higher means the audit found few issues on the pages it checked. Under 40 usually means something is locking AI out, and that comes first. The score covers your site only. If you score high and AI still doesn't mention you, look at what other sites say about you: reviews, lists and directories that name you.
Why doesn't the score include my ChatGPT or Google results?
Because those results move around too much to score. AI answers change by person, place and day, and Nozzle found Google sending swapped results to bulk scrapers since September 2026 (8.0% of the result pages it collected). So the score covers what can be checked on your own site, and the mention test runs in your own browser, where you can read the answers yourself.
Should I block AI bots?
Blocking training bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended is a fair business call, and Google says Google-Extended doesn't affect whether your site appears in Google Search. Blocking the search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) keeps your pages out of those tools' search answers, with small exceptions each company documents. The audit scores the search bots only and shows the training bots as your choice.
How is this different from the AI Agent Readiness Checker?
The AI Agent Readiness Checker scores the newer standards Cloudflare tracks for AI agents, like serving a markdown copy of each page. This audit covers whether AI search can get in, find something worth repeating and tell who runs the site. They overlap on bot access. Most business sites should start here.
Is the audit free? Do you store my results?
It's free, with no signup and no email. Results are cached for 10 minutes so share links load fast, then they expire. Your answers in the AI answer test are saved only in your own browser. The audit only makes read-only requests to public pages on the site you enter.
Search data on this page comes from Nozzle's study Poisoned Google SERPs (October 10, 2026, data through October 9). The ryandoser.com figures are from October 14, 2026. AI answers change, so a re-run may differ.
The AI SEO System I use to rank in Google & AI search. Runs in Claude or any AI setup.
