By Battal, founder of PerfBee
Short answer: an AI search readiness checker tells you whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI features can reach, read and quote your pages. PerfBee is the best pick for most sites. It checks every crawled page against 14 AI agents and alerts you when an AI search bot gets locked out of your homepage. Most free checkers look at one page or one robots.txt file, once.
PerfBee is our product. Details about the other tools come from each vendor's own pages, checked on 8 November 2026.
The 7 best AI search readiness checkers in 2026
- PerfBee: every crawled page, 14 AI agents, an alert when an AI search bot gets locked out. Free plan.
- Semrush Site Audit: robots.txt check for 8 AI crawlers, inside a $139/month SEO suite.
- Ahrefs Site Audit: a first batch of AI checks. The bot list is not published.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: a desktop crawler. Test robots.txt for a user agent you choose.
- 365i AI Bot Checker: homepage only, one check at a time.
- GEO Toolbox AI Crawler Checker: robots.txt only.
- Backlinko AI Crawler Checker: robots.txt, three free checks a day.
AI search readiness checkers compared
| Tool | Checks | AI bots | Alert when a bot is blocked | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PerfBee | Every crawled page | 14 | Yes | Free plan; Starter $19/mo |
| Semrush | Whole site | 8 | Not listed | From $139/mo |
| Ahrefs | Whole site | Not listed | Not listed | Free for verified sites; from $129/mo |
| Screaming Frog | Your crawl | One you choose | Not listed | £199/year |
| 365i | Homepage | 14 | Not listed | Free |
| GEO Toolbox | robots.txt | 34 | Not listed | Free |
| Backlinko | robots.txt | 19 crawlers | Not listed | Free, 3 checks/day |
What an AI search readiness check should cover
- Access per bot. robots.txt rules for each AI agent. Search bots such as OAI-SearchBot are separate from training bots such as GPTBot. Blocking one does not block the other.
- Quotable pages. noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet:0 keep a page out of Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Text in the server HTML. Many AI crawlers read only the HTML your server sends. A page that needs JavaScript to show its text looks empty to them.
- Clean structured data. Broken or duplicate JSON-LD can give AI answers the wrong facts about you.
- Changes over time. One robots.txt edit or plugin update can lock out ChatGPT search overnight. A one-time check misses it.
PerfBee is the only tool on this list whose documentation covers all five.
1. PerfBee
PerfBee crawls your site and writes an AI search readiness report after every completed detailed crawl. The report is on every plan, Free included, and uses no credits of its own. See the full list of checks.
What PerfBee checks
- robots.txt for 14 AI agents, grouped by AI search, page visits a user asked for and model training. For each bot you see whether it may read your homepage and how many crawled pages are closed to it.
- Pages AI answers cannot quote: not indexable, or nosnippet or max-snippet:0 in the robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header. A short max-snippet shows as a warning.
- Pages whose HTML is an empty JavaScript shell. The report also compares two sample pages before and after JavaScript runs.
- Duplicate, invalid or incomplete JSON-LD. Organization markup with sameAs links on the homepage.
- Content-Signal lines in robots.txt, per user-agent group.
- Whether llms.txt exists.
The AI bot lockout alert
PerfBee compares each report with the one before. It alerts you when one of the 8 AI search and answer bots could read your homepage last time and cannot now. The alert shows in the app on every plan, and comes by email from the Starter plan. The 8 bots are Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User. Training bots are left out, because blocking them is a choice.
Schedule the crawl and the check repeats on its own.
Ask Claude or ChatGPT for the report
Connect PerfBee to Claude or ChatGPT and ask "Which AI bots can read my site?" The assistant reads your latest report. Set up the PerfBee MCP server.
Price
The Free plan has 500 credits a month and needs no card. A detailed crawl costs 2 credits a page, or 4 for a page rendered with JavaScript. Starter is $19 a month.
Limits
The report follows a detailed crawl, so it is not instant. It does not test firewall or CDN blocks. It does not track how often AI tools mention you.
2. Semrush Site Audit
Semrush Site Audit shows which of 8 AI crawlers your robots.txt blocks: ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot, Google-Extended, Perplexity-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. It also flags a missing or badly formatted llms.txt.
What's missing: training bots such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot are not in its table of checked bots. Semrush's pages do not mention an alert when a bot gets blocked, or checks for nosnippet and JavaScript-only pages. Site Audit starts with the SEO plan at $139 a month.
3. Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahrefs added an "AI Discoverability" group to Site Audit in autumn 2026. It flags pages blocked from AI bots in robots.txt and pages that need JavaScript rendering. Ahrefs calls it a first batch.
What's missing: Ahrefs does not say which AI bots it checks. Structured data checks are listed as planned. Its pages mention no snippet-rule checks and no alert. Site Audit is free for sites you verify, with 5,000 crawl credits a month per project. Paid plans start at $129 a month.
4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A desktop crawler. You can crawl as an AI crawler or a custom user agent, and test robots.txt rules for it.
What's missing: its pages describe no AI readiness report. You pick the user agent and read the results yourself. No alert for AI bot access is listed. The free version stops at 500 URLs. A licence is £199 a year.
5. 365i AI Bot Checker
A free web tool. It reads your robots.txt for 14 AI bots. Then it fetches your homepage once as a normal browser and once as each bot.
What's missing: it checks the homepage only, one run at a time. The requests come from 365i's own servers with each bot's user agent, not from the AI companies. A firewall that verifies bot IP addresses can treat the real bot differently. The result may not match what the real bot gets.
6. GEO Toolbox AI Crawler Checker
Free. Paste a domain and see which of 34 AI crawlers your robots.txt allows or blocks.
What's missing: by its own description, it covers the robots.txt layer only. Your pages are not checked.
7. Backlinko AI Crawler Checker
A free robots.txt checker from Backlinko, which Semrush owns. It covers 19 crawlers, Googlebot and Bingbot among them.
What's missing: three free checks a day. One domain at a time.
What robots.txt checkers cannot see
- Firewall and CDN blocks. Cloudflare and other CDNs can block AI bots before robots.txt is read. That rule is not written in robots.txt, so no robots.txt check shows it. Look in your CDN's bot settings. PerfBee never sends another company's crawler user agent, so it does not test this either. The report says where to look.
- GPTBot is not ChatGPT search. OpenAI says GPTBot collects training data, while OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT search.
- Google-Extended does not control AI Overviews. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the normal Search rules: a page must be indexed and allowed to show a snippet. Google-Extended is a separate control for Gemini.
- llms.txt does not help with Google. Google's guide to its AI features says no special file or markup is needed.
Questions about AI search readiness checkers
What is an AI search readiness checker?
A tool that checks whether AI search tools can reach your pages, read them and quote them. It looks at robots.txt access, indexability, snippet rules, text in the server HTML and structured data. It is not AI visibility tracking, which counts how often AI tools mention your brand.
How often should I check AI bot access?
After every robots.txt, CMS, CDN or plugin change. A scheduled crawl with an alert catches the changes nobody announced.
Does blocking GPTBot remove my site from ChatGPT?
Not from ChatGPT search. GPTBot collects training data. OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT search, and robots.txt treats each one on its own line.
Do I need llms.txt to appear in Google AI Overviews?
No. Google says its AI features need no special file. A page needs to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet.
Which AI bots should I allow?
To be cited in AI answers, allow the search and answer bots: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and the user-visit agents such as ChatGPT-User. Training bots such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot are a separate choice.
Start a free detailed crawl and the AI search readiness report follows it. The Free plan needs no card.
