Check whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and the traditional search engines are actually allowed to read your site. Plenty of sites block them by accident — usually through a plugin default or a copied robots.txt nobody reviewed.
Reads the site's public robots.txt. Nothing is stored.
Blocking GPTBot or ClaudeBot is a legitimate choice — some publishers do it deliberately to keep their content out of training data. The problem is doing it unintentionally. A surprising number of sites carry these blocks because a security plugin added them, or because a robots.txt was copied from somewhere else years ago.
If AI answer engines can't fetch your pages, you can't be cited in their responses. As more people start their research inside ChatGPT or Perplexity rather than a search box, that's a growing share of visibility to be invisible in. It's the practical side of what people now call answer engine optimization.
One nuance worth knowing: Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended don't control search indexing at all. They only govern AI training and generative features. Blocking them will not remove you from Google Search — a distinction that trips people up regularly.
Related: SEO vs GEO vs AEO, canonical health checker, and the SERP snippet preview.
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Feedback like this is how the site gets better.
Pre-written answers, not a live AI. For anything specific, email me.