AI Search Audit: How to Check Your Site's Visibility

You publish content, it ranks fine on Google, and it still never shows up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity the same question. Before you rewrite anything, you need to know why — and guessing wastes weeks. An AI search audit is a structured check of whether AI crawlers can reach your site, whether your pages are built in a format AI engines can quote, and whether your technical performance clears the bar these engines use to decide what to trust. AskEO is an AI-powered audit tool that runs this check automatically and grades any page's SEO and AEO in about 30 seconds.

This guide walks through what a real AI search audit checks, how to run one by hand if you want to see every step, and when it makes sense to automate it instead.

What Does an AI Search Audit Actually Check?

A complete audit looks at four layers, in this order: crawler access, content structure, structured data, and page performance. Each layer answers a different question an AI engine asks before it will cite you.

Crawler access asks whether the bot can even fetch the page. Content structure asks whether the page answers a question directly enough to quote. Structured data asks whether the page tells the engine what kind of content it is looking at. Performance asks whether the page loads reliably enough to bother indexing. Skipping any one layer means you are optimizing blind — a perfectly structured page behind a blocked crawler never gets read in the first place.

How Do You Check If AI Crawlers Can Access Your Site?

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for explicit Allow rules for the AI user agents: GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended (Google's AI training and Gemini access), and Applebot-Extended. A missing rule is not neutral — several of these bots treat "not mentioned" as "not allowed" for AI use, even if your general crawl rules are wide open.

Then check for an llms.txt file at your site root. It is a plain-Markdown summary of what your site is and does, aimed at AI agents the same way a sitemap is aimed at search engines. It will not force a citation, but it removes the ambiguity a bot faces when your page alone does not make your purpose obvious in the first few lines.

What Core Web Vitals Thresholds Matter for AI Search?

AI engines lean on the same Core Web Vitals data Google already collects, because a slow or unstable page is a bad citation source. The published thresholds from web.dev's Core Web Vitals guide are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1, and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds. Pages that miss all three are not automatically excluded from AI answers, but they are competing at a disadvantage against pages that pass.

You can pull these numbers yourself from Google PageSpeed Insights, or read them off any audit report that already queries the PageSpeed API for you.

Should You Run a Manual or Automated AI Search Audit?

A manual audit is free and teaches you the mechanics, which is worth doing at least once. Where it breaks down is repetition — checking robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, headings, and Core Web Vitals for even five pages by hand takes the better part of an afternoon, and you will not remember to redo it after your next content update.

Once you are checking more than one or two pages, or checking the same page after every content change, the manual process stops being a reasonable use of your time. That is the point where an automated audit like AskEO's Pro plan pays for itself in time saved, not just convenience.

How Do You Run a Manual AI Search Audit Step by Step?

If you want to see the mechanics before you automate anything, here is the sequence:

1. Fetch /robots.txt and confirm explicit Allow rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Applebot-Extended.
2. Check whether /llms.txt exists and summarizes the page in plain language.
3. View page source and confirm a definition sentence sits in the first 150 words — the sentence an AI engine would quote verbatim.
4. Count your headings and confirm at least a few are phrased as real questions, since that is the format answer engines pattern-match against.
5. Validate any JSON-LD with a schema testing tool and confirm FAQPage or Article markup is present and error-free.
6. Run the page through Google PageSpeed Insights and record LCP, CLS, and INP against the web.dev thresholds.

Do this for your top ten pages by traffic first. That is usually enough to spot a pattern — most sites fail the same one or two checks across every page, which means one fix clears most of the backlog at once. The AskEO blog covers each of these checks — crawler access, llms.txt, and structured data — in more depth if you want to go deeper on any single one.

How Often Should You Re-Audit Your Site?

Re-audit after any change to a page's headings, schema, or robots.txt, and at minimum once a month even with no changes, since AI crawler rules and ranking behavior shift without your site doing anything. A one-time audit tells you where you stand today; it says nothing about next month, when a CMS update or a plugin silently rewrites your robots.txt.

Is a Paid Audit Tool Worth It Over Free Checks?

The honest objection here is real: robots.txt, PageSpeed Insights, and a schema validator are all free on their own, so paying for an audit tool can look like paying for something you could assemble yourself. The trade is time and consistency, not access to hidden data — AskEO's free tier gives you three lifetime homepage audits with full SEO and AEO scores at no cost, so you can see exactly what it checks before deciding whether the time savings on Pro's 50 monthly audits and AI-written fix instructions are worth $29 a month to you. If it is not, the free scans and the manual steps above check the same things.

Run Your First Audit

Create a free AskEO account and run a homepage scan against the checks in this guide — it takes about a minute and returns full SEO and AEO scores plus every issue it finds. Sign up and run your first audit to see where your site actually stands before you change anything.

Frequently Asked Questions