Can AI see your site? Here's what's actually going on (+ free tool to check)
Been seeing a lot of confusion about this lately so figured I'd share what I learned the hard way.
When people ask "can AI see my site?" they usually mean two different things:
Training data: did AI models learn from your site when they were trained? That ship has mostly sailed. Cutoffs are real. If your site launched after mid-2024, most models have no clue it exists.
Real-time crawling: can AI assistants browse your site right now? Some can (Bing-integrated stuff, Perplexity, etc). Some can't and are just pattern-matching from old training data.
The dirty secret: when an AI "summarizes your site" it might just be hallucinating a plausible-sounding version based on your domain name and general industry knowledge. Sounds confident. Completely made up.
Things that actually matter: being indexed by Google, having clean crawlable HTML (not everything locked behind JS), and making sure your robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot.
This is the whole idea behind AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — making your site readable and quotable by AI, not just by Google. Different signals, different rules.
If you want to see exactly where your site stands, we have built this free AEO scanner: gempixel.com/free-tools/aeo-audit — it scans your site in seconds and emails you a full report on AI discoverability signals. Takes 30 seconds, no account needed.