Before spending anything on visibility, find out whether the machines can open your pages at all. This takes about twenty minutes and rules out the reasons most stores are invisible.
- Most invisibility has a boring technical cause that takes minutes to find.
- Run the checks in order. Each one rules out a whole category of problem.
- If the first check fails, nothing further up the stack can help until it is fixed.
Check one: are AI crawlers allowed in?
Open your site with /robots.txt on the end and read it. You are looking for rules that disallow the assistant crawlers by name. Blocking them is a legitimate choice, but many stores do it accidentally by copying a robots file from somewhere else. The crawler user agents lists who to look for.
Check two: does your content exist without scripts?
View the page source rather than the rendered page, then search it for a sentence you can see on screen. If the sentence is not in the source, your content is being assembled by scripts, and some assistants will never see it.
Check three: is anything actually indexed?
Search for a distinctive sentence from one of your pages in quotation marks. If your own page does not come back, that page is not indexed, and being quoted by an assistant is unlikely.
Check four: can a machine tell what your products are?
Run a product page through a structured data testing tool. You want a product type with a name, price and availability, and you want those to match what the page says. A mismatch is worse than nothing, which is the point of schema content mismatch.
Check five: does the assistant know who you are?
Ask one who you are, by brand name plus category. Wrong or empty answers usually mean your identity is not corroborated anywhere it can check, rather than that your site is broken.
Check six: would it recommend you?
Ask the buying question a customer would ask, and see whether you are named. This is the outcome measure. The five checks above are the reasons it may not be happening.
If you would rather not do this by hand, our free scan runs the same checks across a whole site and returns a score with the failures ranked. It is the automated version of this article.
Common questions
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
Several exist, and they measure different things. Some check whether your brand is mentioned in AI answers. Ours checks whether your site can be read and what specifically is blocking it, which is the part you can act on.
How often should I check?
Monthly is enough for most stores. Check again after a theme change, an app install or a migration, since those are when access quietly breaks.
What if everything passes and I am still not recommended?
Then the constraint is corroboration rather than readability. Being readable makes you eligible. Being mentioned elsewhere is what makes you chosen.
Related reading
Run a free scan and get your reproducible 0 to 100 score with a prioritized fix list. Run the free scan.
Your buyers are already asking AI. This is how you get recommended.
Everything in this article is measurable on a live storefront. The Full Assessment and Roadmap reads your website the way ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity read it, and hands you every fix in plain English, ranked by what it is costing you, so the buyers who ask AI get sent to you.