A lot of AI visibility advice starts too late. Before prompts, schema tweaks, or any clever optimization, there is a more basic question: can AI systems actually reach your pages, read them, and find enough there to cite? If the answer is no, nothing downstream matters.
We built three free tools to answer that question, no account required. Each one checks a different layer of AI readiness, and you can run all three against any domain in a minute.
Can AI reach you? The Robots AI Bot Checker
The first layer is access. AI systems use named crawlers, and your robots.txt decides which ones get in. The trouble is that there are now more than twenty AI bots, they do different jobs, and a single blanket rule can quietly block the ones that matter. The Robots AI Bot Checker fetches your robots.txt and shows, bot by bot, who is allowed and who is blocked.
The grouping matters because the bots are not interchangeable. A crawler that fetches a page when a user pastes a link into ChatGPT is doing live retrieval; one that trains a foundation model is doing something you may feel differently about. Blocking the training bot while keeping the retrieval bot is a perfectly reasonable stance, but you can only make that choice if you can see the difference. One honest caveat: letting a bot in does not guarantee a citation. Access is the floor, not the finish line. We wrote more about that in checking whether AI crawlers can reach your site.
Hand AI a map: the llms.txt generator
The second tool builds an llms.txt file for you. Point the llms.txt generator at a domain and it discovers your key pages, then assembles a clean, structured file that describes the site and links the pages worth reading, ready to edit before you download it.
Be clear-eyed about what this does. An llms.txt is a helper and a documentation signal, not a ranking factor: Google has said it is not required for AI Search, while tools like Lighthouse now check for it as part of agentic browsing. It is cheap to add and it cannot hurt, but treat it as making your site easier to understand, not as a lever that forces citations. We went deeper on the debate in does llms.txt matter for AI visibility.
Is the page worth citing? The content checker
Access and structure get AI to your page; the content has to earn the citation. The content checker runs on-page diagnostics on a single URL: is the answer to the obvious question actually on the page, is it structured so a model can lift it cleanly, is the brand and product clear, and is there schema where it helps. It flags the thin spots that keep a page from being source-worthy, the same checks behind the page intelligence in the dashboard.
The readiness checklist
Run end to end, the three tools cover the readiness basics in order:
- Crawl access. The right AI bots can reach the pages that explain your brand.
- Structure. Pages answer the question directly, in a shape a model can quote.
- Documentation. An llms.txt points to the pages worth reading.
- Schema and clarity. Markup and plain language make the brand and product unambiguous.
- Source-worthy depth. The page says something complete enough to be worth citing.
None of this is a trick, and that is the point. It is the unglamorous groundwork that everything else in AI search optimization sits on top of.
A note on timing
SurfacedBy changes often. We build from a mix of customer requests, our own research, and keeping pace as new AI crawlers appear and standards like llms.txt evolve, so the bot list and checks here reflect how the tools looked at launch. The crawler catalog grows as new AI bots show up, and the diagnostics keep getting stricter about what counts as a real readiness problem. The tools are free at surfacedby.com/tools.
