How the AI visibility scan works

The scan in one paragraph

Your site is contacted about a dozen times. The scanner reads your homepage, robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml and a sample of internal pages the way an agent would, then runs each finding against a fixed checklist: can every AI crawler get in? Is there a real 404? Does the site answer an Accept: text/markdown request with markdown instead of HTML? Is your identity declared in structured data? Each check scores points, and the points add up to one number.

The three layers

Checks are organised the way a fix list should be: what matters most at the top.

• Essential — up to 80 points. Can an agent reach you, read you without JavaScript, follow your redirects, and find a recovery path when it hits a dead page. If these fail, nothing else matters.
• Recommended — up to 20 points. The things that decide whether an agent trusts you enough to name you: sitemap freshness, structured data for your entity, llms.txt quality, metadata found on the pages themselves.
• Bonus signals — up to 5 points, positive only. Nice-to-haves like an existing llms.txt or a canonical URL. Bonus signals are never required: their absence can never lower your score.

Every finding carries a fix you can copy

Each check shows three things: the evidence (the raw fact, like a status code or a character count), a recommended fix in plain English, and a copyable fix prompt you can paste straight into your developer workflow. The "Prompt to improve" button above the score bundles every failed and partial finding into one implementation brief, in priority order.

The journey tree

Below the score you can see the scan's actual path: every fetch, its status, and the time it took. A half-empty journey with dead nodes is itself a finding — it shows exactly where an agent would have lost its way.

The crawler check

robots.txt is evaluated with longest-match semantics for 12 user agents, including GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot and Applebot-Extended. A single blank line in the wrong place can open or shut off an entire assistant product, so the scan reports exactly which agents are allowed or blocked.

Markdown negotiation

Agents increasingly ask for text/markdown when they fetch a page — it is cheaper to parse and closer to what a model consumes. The scanner checks whether your server serves a real markdown variant (with the right Content-Type and Vary: Accept), not just whether the page happens to be text.

What we don't do

• We do not execute JavaScript or take screenshots — the scan only sees what a raw HTTP client sees, which is what matters for agentic reachability.
• We do not attempt secret or private areas of your site, and we never submit your URL to any AI model.
• Free scans are rate-limited per IP so the scanner is never a nuisance to the site it is reading.

What the number is not

The score is a snapshot of technical readiness for agentic discovery — not a rank, not a backlink or SEO score, and not a guarantee of citations. It tells you where a fix list should start.