Can AI crawlers actually reach my site?
AI access is about whether AI crawlers are allowed in at all, by your robots.txt and by whatever stands in front of your site, whether the page itself says it may be quoted, whether your page arrives before they stop waiting, and how usable its buttons and links are to an agent. It matters to a machine because a crawler that is turned away at the door reads nothing, so every other check on the site stops mattering to it. Below are the 5 checks in this course, what each one looks for, and what good looks like. We can read what your rules say and see what our own signed bot is served; we can't see what each AI company's crawler is served, because a firewall can treat a verified crawler differently from us.
All 5 checks count toward your headline score.
The checks in this course
5 checksButtons, links and fields have names
Can an AI agent tell what my buttons and links do?A program that reads your page, such as a browser agent or a screen reader, finds each control by its name. An icon with no label, or a clickable box that is not a real button, gives it nothing to find.
What good looks like Every button, link and form field has a readable name, and anything clickable is a real button or link.
Read more about buttons, links and fields with namesAI crawlers aren't blocked
Is your site blocking ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity?Blocking the search-and-answer bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended…) stops those crawlers reading your pages. Fetchers that load a page because a person asked may not check robots.txt at all, so this file decides who may crawl you, not every request.
What good looks like The AI crawlers you want are allowed in robots.txt.
Read more about AI crawler accessAutomated visitors can reach your pages
Is my site blocking AI crawlers by accident?AI answer engines can only cite pages they can load. If your site turns away automated visitors indiscriminately, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot go with them and you vanish from AI answers. Note the distinction: most bot-protection vendors allow VERIFIED crawlers while refusing unverified ones, so being refused is not by itself proof that AI crawlers are blocked.
What good looks like Your pages load for honest automated clients — AI crawlers aren't blocked at the door.
Read more about bot accessEngines are allowed to quote the page
Is my page telling engines not to quote it?A page can be indexable and still tell every engine not to quote it. A nosnippet directive keeps your text out of search snippets and out of Google's AI answers, and Bing's noarchive keeps it out of Copilot's answers.
What good looks like No nosnippet, max-snippet:0 or noarchive on pages you want quoted.
Read more about quoting directivesYour page arrives quickly
How slow is too slow for an AI assistant fetching my page?An AI assistant that fetches a page while someone waits will stop waiting if it is slow. This is one fetch of your page from our server: a hint of how a live fetch would go, not a promise.
What good looks like The page's HTML arrives within a few seconds.
Read more about how fast your page arrivesWords you'll meet here
How does your page read to a machine?
A free scan checks these 5 and everything else in about 20 seconds — no signup.
Rather have it handled? No pitch, just a plain-English chat.
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