QWhat is AI visibility?
AI visibility is whether an answer engine — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google’s AI answers — can reach your pages, read the words on them, and quote a specific fact about you with attribution. CrawlCheck measures those three stages in that order and reports an AI visibility score out of 100. It does not measure whether an engine actually cites you; no server can, and a score that implied otherwise would be invented.
QWhich AI crawlers does CrawlCheck test?
Every scan fetches the homepage as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, Applebot, Amazonbot, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent and CCBot, plus a plain browser, a mobile browser and an unnamed client as controls. It also resolves what robots.txt says to 114 named agents across answer, search, training, regional, social and SEO groups.
QDoes it check llms.txt, robots.txt and structured data?
Yes. It reads robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, sitemap_index.xml and entitymap.json on both the apex and www hosts, by status, content type and body — a robots.txt that returns HTTP 200 with an HTML challenge page is reported as unreadable, not present. Structured data is scored as an entity graph: stable @ids, connected nodes, credentials, locations and whether the name, phone and address agree with the visible page.
QIs CrawlCheck free?
The scan and the full report are free for any domain, with no account. Paid plans (from $29 a month for three domains) keep a dated record, measure twice a day, send change receipts and add branded reports, a defect ledger and an API lane. Nothing a licence unlocks changes a measurement, a finding or a grade.
QDoes this change anything on my site?
No. Every request is a read — the same GET a crawler makes. Nothing is submitted, no form is filled, no page is written to, and nothing is installed.
QWill my domain show up anywhere public?
No. Aggregate findings are published on the dataset page and no scanned domain is ever named there. One line in robots.txt keeps you out of the dataset entirely.
QDoes it work for local businesses and service companies?
Yes, and it was built on them. The quote stage checks street address, coordinates, hours and phone, cross-checks name, phone and city between the structured data and the visible page, and fetches every directory and profile the site declares to see whether each one still resolves and still carries the business’s number. A service business is never docked for having no checkout: a section that does not apply is excluded, not scored zero.
QHow is the grade calculated?
Each of the 24 scored sections is rated 0–100 as the share of its measures inside the optimal range. The three stages average their sections; reach is 40% of the score and also a ceiling, because nothing downstream of a refusal reaches an engine. The letter is set by that score and then capped by the worst finding: a medium finding holds a site at C, high at D, critical at F. A section whose inputs could not be measured is left out rather than counted as zero.
QIs this just an SEO audit with new words on it?
No. An SEO audit reads your page as a browser. This sends the requests an answer engine sends — as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest — and reports what your edge gave each one, next to what a browser got in the same second. The findings it exists for are the ones a browser can never see: a challenge page served with a 200, a crawler handed fewer words than a visitor, a robots.txt that names a sitemap which does not resolve.
QIs this GEO, AEO or LLM SEO?
Those names all describe the same goal: being reachable, readable and quotable by answer engines. CrawlCheck is the measurement layer for that work — it tells you which stage fails and what to change — and it publishes how every number is derived. What it will not do is promise a citation, because no measurement can.
QCan I use it from code or from my own browser?
Yes. POST /api/scan takes a domain and returns the same record the report is rendered from; four endpoints are documented at /docs/api and the OpenAPI file at /openapi.json. The browser extension measures what a crawler is served from your own address and after your JavaScript runs — the half a server cannot see. A free log verifier checks whether a request claiming to be GPTBot or ClaudeBot came from that operator’s published IP ranges.
QDoes CrawlCheck check YouTube?
Yes. Paste a video URL at /video and it is read on the metadata a search result can anchor to: authored chapters, uploaded versus auto-generated captions, description depth, language agreement, topic placement. Watch adds the whole channel, tallied, and whether your own site carries your videos with VideoObject schema.
QCan I pay to improve my score?
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing a licence unlocks changes a measurement, a finding or a grade. The moment a payment can move a result, every result here is worth less — including the ones you would be paying for.
QIs there a mobile app?
One is in build for iPhone and Android from a design frozen on 5 September 2026. It reads the same record the site keeps, follows the site's own tokens and section list live, and adds a field kit of phone-only instruments. It is not on the app stores yet; a plan today is not waiting on it, because the record keeps measuring twice a day either way.
