The 10-minute check: is your site visible to AI?

Sep 30, 2026

Your site can be live for months and still be invisible to the tools people now use to find a business. Here are five checks. Do them in order, in a browser, in about ten minutes.

1. Ask an AI tool for your service in your city

Open ChatGPT or Perplexity. Type what a customer would: your service, your city. Read the answer. A pass names your business. A failure names competitors, or describes the work without naming anyone. Answers change from day to day, so run it a few times over a week and read the pattern, not one reply. Do this with no account logged in, so you see what a stranger sees.

2. Look at your page source

Open your homepage. Right-click and choose View Page Source. Search it (Ctrl+F, Cmd+F on a Mac) for a sentence from the page. A pass shows the words. A failure shows scripts and a nearly empty page: the words are built in the browser after loading, so some crawlers read nothing. The gap is easy to miss, because the page looks complete to you. Your browser runs the code; many crawlers do not.

3. Check for a leftover “do not index” setting

A site is often built on a test address first, set to stay out of search, then moved to its real address with the setting left on. In WordPress, open Settings, then Reading, and look for a checkbox labeled “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. A pass means it is unticked. That setting is meant for sites under construction. It is easy to leave on after launch, and it hides the whole site, not one page.

Make sure it is off on the live site, not only on the test copy.

4. Read robots.txt and ask about the firewall

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. This is the file that tells software which parts of your site it may read. It should load and point to your sitemap. A single rule that blocks everything turns every crawler away. If the page does not load, that is a fail. The file is only half the story: a firewall in front of your site can block AI crawlers even when the file says welcome. The file is a request, not a lock, so a welcome there is not proof a crawler got in.

5. Count your pages two ways

Search site:yourdomain.com in Google and note roughly how many pages come back. Then open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, the list of pages you publish, and count them. A pass means the two are close. A failure means search engines know only a fraction of your site. Do not chase an exact match. Look for a large gap, such as twenty pages listed and two showing. Run it on launch day, then again after a month.