AI Visibility Checker

Is your site invisible to AI?

An AI visibility check answers three questions: can AI crawlers reach your pages, can answer engines quote what they find, and does AI already cite or describe you. Essel checks all three against your real site — free for any single page, no sign-up — and gives you the fix for every gap.

0+ AI crawlers checked
AIO AI Overview citations
Verbatim what AI thinks of you
Free single page, no sign-up

From invisible to quoted.

Three steps. The first one is free.

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Paste any page

The free scan runs the AI-visibility checks on one URL in about a minute — crawler access, structure, snippet eligibility.

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Get the AI verdict

A 0 to 100 score with the AI-readiness pillar broken out: what AI can reach, read, and quote.

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See presence, then fix

The $10 site audit adds your AI Overview citations and how models describe your brand — plus the fix for every gap.

The three layers

Access, structure, presence.

Most sites fail AI search at the first layer without knowing it — a WAF that challenges every non-Google crawler looks perfectly fine from your browser.

Can AI even see you?

4/4 passed

AI crawler access

robots.txt rules checked for 17+ AI crawlers — GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and more

Bot-challenge gating

edge and WAF setups that answer Googlebot but challenge every other crawler — invisible from your own browser

Server-rendered content

AI crawlers don't run JavaScript; if your content only exists after hydration, they read an empty shell

Snippet controls

nosnippet and max-snippet directives that make pages categorically ineligible for AI Overviews

When AI reads you, can it use you?

4/4 passed

Passage citability

whether your sections are sized and shaped so an engine can lift them whole

Direct answers

answer-first openings and question-shaped headings — the structures answer engines quote

Citable evidence

quantified claims, dates, and named figures a model will attribute to you

Publisher identity

Organization and Person schema plus a named author — the attributable identity engines look for

Where do you already show up?

4/4 passed

AI Overview citations

the keywords where Google's AI Overview already cites your domain, from live ranking data

What AI thinks you are

a model's verbatim read of your brand — how it describes you, to whom, and what it gets wrong

Brand recognition

grounded in real web search, graded well-known to unknown — not model memory

Brand mentions

positive and negative mentions across the web, from content analysis data

One score. Five pillars.

Here's what a real report looks like.

Your shape

TechnicalAI readinessContentPerformanceAuthority
0 / 100 · C

Strong technical foundations, thin where AI engines look.

Your scores

Technical & crawl /100

Search engines can crawl and index it

AI readiness /100

AI engines can find, read, and cite it

Content /100

Clear, complete, well-structured

Performance /100

How fast it loads and responds

Authority /100

Web presence and links

What AI thinks of you

Ask an AI assistant about your site and it says:

A free AI resume builder that imports LinkedIn profiles and turns them into ATS-friendly resumes in minutes.

AI resume builder For job seekers and career changers Somewhat known

Search foundations vs AI readiness

11 categories · renormalized 0–100
0
Search foundations F grade
Indexability & technical –/20
Title & meta –/15
Headings & structure –/10
Images & accessibility –/10
Content quality & E-E-A-T –/15
Core Web Vitals –/15
Authority & web presence –/10
0
AI readiness F grade
Structured data –/15
AI discoverability –/12
AI search (GEO) –/10
Answer engines (AEO) –/5

Page speed

Perf –
Loading
Responsiveness
Visual stability
Interactivity

Authority & web presence

Web presence
Internal links
Outbound links

Fix these first

Highest-impact, with the exact steps
Move structured data into the <head> Your schema sits in <body>. AI crawlers that don't run JavaScript often skip it entirely.
Open with a one-line definition A direct answer up top is what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews lift as the source.
Add question-and-answer sections Mirror how people ask. Answer engines quote Q&A blocks directly.
Add alt text to 6 images Improves accessibility and gives AI more to read from the page.

Also in your report

What AI thinksSite modelCompetitor benchmarksContent AI readsUnderstanding curveEvery check, explained

A report tells you what's broken. Essel also writes what's missing.

The same engine behind this audit researches, writes, and publishes GEO-optimized articles for your site — on a cadence, autonomously.

Start free
SEO, AI search (GEO) and answer engines (AEO) The free score takes seconds, no sign-up

Checker vs tracker

Audit first, track later.

AI visibility platforms monitor share-of-voice over time — useful after your foundation is sound. This audit fixes the foundation. Different jobs; do this one first.

Essel site audit

$0

one-time · free single-page scan first

  • What it is: One-shot AI visibility audit
  • Price: $10 one-time (free single-page scan)
  • Answers: Can AI see you, cite you, describe you correctly — and what to fix
  • Fixes: A pasteable fix for every finding
  • When to use: Diagnose and fix your foundation first

Tracking platforms

$99+/mo

subscription · $1,200+ a year

  • What it is: Continuous prompt-tracking platform
  • Price: $99 to $500+/mo subscriptions
  • Answers: Share-of-voice trends across tracked prompts over time
  • Fixes: Dashboards; fixes are your problem
  • When to use: Monitor after the foundation is fixed

Tracking-platform pricing reflects typical published subscription tiers. Essel's audit is one-time: free for a single page, $10 for up to 100 pages with one re-crawl within 30 days.

FAQ

AI visibility, explained.

The questions people ask when their brand doesn't show up in AI answers.

AI visibility is whether AI systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can find your site, understand it, and cite it when they answer questions in your space. It breaks into three layers: access (can AI crawlers reach your pages), usability (is your content structured so an engine can quote it), and presence (does AI already mention or cite you). Essel's audit measures all three for your actual site.

Run a scan that checks the things AI systems actually depend on: robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, whether your content exists without JavaScript, snippet directives, answer-ready structure, and schema identity. Essel's free scan does this for any page in about a minute, no sign-up. The $10 whole-site audit adds the presence layer — your AI Overview citations, how a model describes your brand, and brand mentions across the web.

No — this is a one-shot audit, not a monitoring subscription. Tracking platforms measure share-of-voice across prompts over time and charge monthly for it; they are worth it after your foundation is fixed. Essel answers the prior question: can AI systems see, quote, and correctly describe your site today, and what exactly do you change where they can't. One re-crawl within 30 days is included to verify your fixes landed.

The usual causes stack: AI crawlers blocked or challenged at your edge, content rendered only client-side so models read an empty page, no attributable identity in your markup, and pages structured so nothing is liftable as an answer. Each of these is checkable and fixable. The audit tests all of them, shows how a model currently describes you — including getting you wrong — and hands you the specific fixes.

AI Overview citations are the clearest signal that Google's generative layer treats your domain as a source, and they appear above every traditional result. The audit pulls the keywords where your domain is already cited in AI Overviews from live ranking data, which tells you what is working — and the striking-distance keywords where one fix could earn the citation next.

Find out what AI sees in the next minute.

Paste a URL, get the AI-readiness verdict free — crawler access, structure, snippet eligibility. The $10 whole-site audit adds your AI Overview citations and how models describe your brand.