WebDoctor
Diagnostic tool

AI readiness checker

AI assistants are becoming the front page of the web. This check tells you whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI can crawl your site, understand it and cite it: llms.txt, robots.txt rules for AI crawlers, structured data, sitemap and metadata, each scored with a fix.

The check fetches a handful of public files (homepage, robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap) through our server. Nothing is stored.

What "AI ready" means

Search used to mean ten blue links; increasingly it means one synthesized answer from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI results. Those systems only recommend sites they can crawl, parse and trust, and the signals they rely on are not identical to classic SEO.

Three layers matter. Access: your robots.txt decides which AI crawlers may read the site at all, and blocking the wrong bot removes you from its answers entirely. Understanding: structured data (JSON-LD) and clean metadata are what answer engines parse most reliably when deciding what your pages are about. Guidance: an llms.txt file at your site root gives AI systems a curated map of what matters, in a format made for language models.

This checker reads exactly what an AI crawler would read and scores all three layers, with a concrete fix for everything it flags.

What gets checked

  • llms.txt: present at the site root and valid llmstxt.org format (title, summary, linked sections)
  • robots.txt: access rules for 11 major AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and more), with search vs training impact explained
  • Structured data: JSON-LD blocks on the homepage and which schema.org types they declare
  • Sitemap: discoverable via robots.txt or the default location
  • Metadata: title, meta description, canonical URL, Open Graph tags and H1

No llms.txt yet?

Generate a valid one from your sitemap in about a minute, free.

Open the llms.txt generator →

From the blog

robots.txt

robots.txt for AI Crawlers: Allow and Deny Recipes

Three recipes and a bot-by-bot table for controlling GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest from one small text file.

22 July 2026 · 4 min read Sitemaps

XML Sitemap Errors: Every Common Failure and Its Fix

Nine failures cause almost every broken sitemap. Here is how to recognize each one from its symptom and fix it for good.

16 July 2026 · 4 min read Sitemaps

XML Sitemap Best Practices That Actually Matter

Half of the standard sitemap advice is folklore. These are the practices search engines actually respond to, and the fields they ignore.

16 July 2026 · 3 min read

All guides →

Frequently asked questions

What is llms.txt?
A plain-markdown file at your site root (like robots.txt, but for language models) that names your site, summarizes it and links your most important pages. AI systems that support it use the file as a curated map instead of guessing from raw HTML. The format is defined at llmstxt.org.
Does blocking GPTBot hurt my Google rankings?
No. Google's classic ranking does not care about GPTBot. But blocking an AI search crawler removes you from that engine's answers: block PerplexityBot and Perplexity cannot cite you; block GPTBot and ChatGPT search skips you. Google-Extended is the exception, it only controls Gemini training, not search.
Is llms.txt an official standard?
It is a community proposal (llmstxt.org) with growing but uneven adoption. It costs one small text file, several AI tools already read it, and none are harmed by it, which makes it cheap insurance rather than a gamble.
How is this different from normal SEO?
Classic SEO optimizes for ranking algorithms; AI readiness optimizes for being read, understood and quoted by answer engines. They overlap (sitemaps, structured data, good metadata) but AI readiness adds crawler-access policy and llms.txt, and cares less about links and keywords.
My score is low. What do I fix first?
In order of impact: unblock the AI search crawlers you want citing you, add JSON-LD structured data to key pages, then add an llms.txt. Metadata issues (title, description, canonical) are quick wins you can usually clear in an afternoon.