Tools
Before paying for an AI-SEO audit tool, run this free check first
A growing category of paid "AI visibility" or "GEO audit" SaaS charges a recurring fee for exactly the kind of check this free tool already runs: whether ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity crawlers can actually reach and parse your site.
Last updated Aug 15 · 10 min read
What a paid GEO audit tool is actually checking
The emerging category of paid GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) audit tools generally checks a handful of specific, well-defined things: whether your robots.txt blocks major AI crawlers, whether your homepage carries identity-level structured data, whether basic on-page signals (title, meta description, headings) are present, and whether an llms.txt file and sitemap exist. These are checkable facts about a page, not proprietary intelligence — which is exactly why a free tool can run the identical checks.
The AI Visibility Checker tests exactly that: ten named crawlers across six companies (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Bytespider, meta-externalagent), structured data, nine on-page basics, llms.txt, and sitemap declaration — a weighted 0-100 score, free, no email gate, no signup.
Where a paid tool might genuinely add something
Being fair about it: some paid platforms in this category also track citation share over time — how often your brand actually gets mentioned in AI-generated answers across many queries — which is a fundamentally different, ongoing monitoring product rather than a one-time crawlability check. That is a real, separate value proposition worth paying for if tracking citation trends across dozens of queries and competitors is genuinely what you need.
But that is a different job from "is my site even reachable by these crawlers right now" — the specific, foundational question this free tool answers, and one worth answering before spending anything on ongoing citation monitoring, since a blocked crawler makes every downstream citation-tracking metric moot.
The check itself, run for free
Paste your homepage URL and the checker returns your score within seconds: crawler access (40 of 100 points, the heaviest-weighted check since a blocked crawler makes everything else irrelevant), structured data (20), on-page basics (20), llms.txt (10), and sitemap declaration (10). Every finding ships with the specific robots.txt line or missing tag behind it, not a vague "improve this" note.
A separate, unscored signal is checked too: a noindex or nofollow directive on the homepage, which can suppress a page from AI answers entirely regardless of every other check passing — often present by accident from a leftover staging-environment setting.
What to do with the result before considering a paid tool
If the score comes back low, the fix is almost always specific and free to execute: correct a robots.txt precedence mistake, add identity schema with the Schema Markup Generator, or publish an llms.txt file, which costs about ten minutes and needs no build tooling. Re-run the check after each fix to confirm it actually landed before considering any paid ongoing-monitoring product on top of a foundation that is not yet fixed.
When ongoing monitoring genuinely becomes worth paying for
Once the foundational crawlability and structured-data issues are fixed, and AI-driven traffic has become a real, meaningful channel for your specific business — not a hypothetical future concern — tracking citation share across competitors and queries over time is a legitimate ongoing need a free one-time checker was never built to serve.
That is exactly the layer Scult's AI agents and automation team works at, building the monitoring and content strategy on top of a foundation this free tool helps you get right first.
Want to talk through whether you are at that stage yet? Book a meeting.
Run it now
The check takes a few seconds, and re-checking the same domain later shows how many points moved since your last visit — kept in this browser's local storage, no account required.
Need this built into your business?
The free tools and prompts on this site handle the small, solved problems. If what you need is bigger — AI agents & automation, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
