Is this AI visibility checker really free?

Yes, and there is no account, no card and no email gate. It reads four public files from your domain (robots.txt, your homepage, llms.txt and sitemap.xml) and reports what it finds. That costs four HTTP requests and no AI-model spend, which is exactly why it can be free. Cituna, the team behind this tool, is a paid product, but this checker is not gated behind it. We record the domain you check and how you found us, and never the content of your pages.

Does it tell me whether ChatGPT actually cites my brand?

No, and be skeptical of any free tool that claims it does. Finding out whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok or Google AI Overviews name you means putting real questions to those engines and reading the answers, which costs money every time it runs. What this checker proves is the prerequisite: whether those engines can reach your site, read your content without running JavaScript, and parse what you are. If a crawler is blocked, the citation question is already answered.

What is a good AI visibility score?

We deliberately do not give you a score out of 100, because a single number invites you to optimise the number instead of the problem. The check returns three tiers instead: blocking issues (a crawler cannot read you at all), things worth fixing (it can read you but you are hard to quote), and passes. Anything in the blocking tier outranks everything else, because no amount of content or schema work reaches an engine that has been told to stay out.

Which AI crawlers does it check?

Eight, covering the engines that matter: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (which gates Gemini and Google AI Overviews), Applebot-Extended (Apple Intelligence) and CCBot (Common Crawl, a training corpus several models draw on). For each one we report whether robots.txt allows it and which rule decided, so you can see the exact line to change.

Why does blocking an AI crawler matter if I still rank on Google?

Because they are separate gates. Googlebot and Google-Extended are different user agents: you can rank normally in classic search while being invisible to Gemini and AI Overviews, since Google-Extended is what governs generative use. The same split applies elsewhere, GPTBot is not the same as Googlebot. Plenty of sites blocked the AI crawlers in 2023 and 2024 as a precaution and never revisited it, which is the most common cause of a site that ranks well and never gets cited.

Free AI Visibility Checker

The short version

Being cited by an AI engine has a prerequisite most sites never check: the engine’s crawler has to be allowed in. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are all separate user agents from Googlebot, so you can rank normally in classic search and still be invisible to every answer engine.
This checker reads four public files, robots.txt, your homepage, llms.txt and sitemap.xml, and reports what an AI crawler would actually find. It is free, needs no account or card, and stores nothing.
It reports blocking issues, things worth fixing, and passes, rather than a score out of 100. A blocked crawler outranks every other finding: no content or schema work reaches an engine that has been told to stay out.
It cannot tell you whether ChatGPT names you today. That needs real answers from real engines, which costs money every run. Any free tool promising it is guessing.

Run the check

What it checks

Four public files, in the order that determines whether an answer engine can do anything with your site at all.

robots.txt, per crawler. Eight AI user agents are tested individually against your rules, using the same precedence real crawlers apply (longest match wins; Allow beats Disallow at equal length). The result names the exact line that decided each one, so you know what to edit.
Your homepage, as a crawler sees it. We measure how much text is present in the raw HTML response, before any JavaScript runs. Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered page can look completely empty to them while looking fine in your browser.
Structured data, title, description and H1. Schema is how you state what your business is rather than hoping an engine infers it from prose. We list the JSON-LD types found, and flag a missing or duplicated H1.
llms.txt and sitemap.xml. Whether they exist, and whether robots.txt points at your sitemap so engines can find pages that nothing links to.

What no free tool can tell you

The honest limit:

This checker proves engines can cite you. It cannot prove they do. Those are different questions with very different costs.

Finding out whether ChatGPT names your brand when a buyer asks a question means putting that question to ChatGPT and reading the answer. Same for Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, and again tomorrow, because the answers change. Every one of those runs costs money. That is why free “visibility checkers” either check something cheap, as this one does and says so, or quietly show you a number they did not measure.

If the measured version is what you need, that is the product we build: Cituna asks the six engines your buyers’ questions daily, records every answer, and shows which competitor got named instead of you. The plans start at $39/mo. If you would rather read first, how to get cited by ChatGPT covers what actually moves a citation, and our rundown of free checkers compares the other free tools honestly, including where they beat this one.

If a crawler comes back blocked

This is the most common finding and the most valuable one, because the fix is usually three lines and takes effect the next time the crawler visits. Add an explicit allow for the agents you want reading you:

User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /

A caveat worth stating: allowing these crawlers means allowing your content to be read by models, and that is a genuine business decision, not a purely technical one. Publishers who deliberately block AI crawlers to protect licensing revenue are making a defensible choice. The mistake this checker catches is the accidental version: a block added as a precaution years ago, never revisited, quietly costing citations nobody realised were on the table.

Drafted with AI assistance from our own research and Search Console data, and reviewed by Rahul A before publishing. Rules and prices change; check the linked official source before you act.

Free AI visibility checker

Run the check

What it checks

What no free tool can tell you

If a crawler comes back blocked

Frequently asked questions

See how AI engines see your brand