7 free ways to check whether AI search engines can actually see your website
· Technical Guide
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of making your website legible to AI systems rather than just crawlable by traditional search bots. The two overlap, but they're not the same thing — a page can rank perfectly well on Google while being invisible to an LLM that's summarising answers rather than indexing pages.
Here are seven free ways to check where you stand, roughly in order of how much each one actually tells you.
1. Google's Rich Results Test
This checks whether your structured data validates against Schema.org specifications. It's a useful first pass and it's free, but it only confirms that your markup is syntactically correct — not that it's complete, not that an AI crawler can reach it, and not that it covers the entity types that matter for GEO (Organization, Person, FAQPage and so on).
2. Schema.org's own validator
A second opinion on markup validity, useful for catching errors the Rich Results Test misses. Same limitation applies: it tells you your JSON-LD is well-formed, not that it's strategically useful.
3. View source vs rendered DOM
Open your homepage, view source, and compare it against what actually renders in the browser. If your schema, headings and core content only appear after JavaScript executes, many AI crawlers will never see them. This is the single most common reason a well-optimised-looking React or Vue site is invisible to generative search — the crawler sees an empty shell. It's free, it takes thirty seconds, and almost nobody does it.
4. Ask the AI directly
Query ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude with a question your site should plausibly answer, and see whether you're cited. This is the most honest test there is, but it's also the least systematic — one favourable answer doesn't tell you why, and one bad answer doesn't tell you what to fix.
5. An llms.txt check
A growing number of sites now publish an llms.txt file at their root, signalling to AI crawlers what content is available and how it should be interpreted. Checking whether you have one — and whether it's accurate — is a five-minute task that most competitors still haven't done.
6. A manual entity audit
Does your About page clearly state who you are? Do you have consistent sameAs links connecting your website to your LinkedIn, Crunchbase or other verified profiles? AI systems build confidence in citing you through named entity recognition (NER) and corroboration across sources. A page with no entity signals is much harder for a model to trust, however well-written the content is.
7. A weighted, automated audit
Doing the above six manually is informative but slow, and none of them give you a single comparable score across visits. This is the gap CiteSite was built to close: a free, web-based tool that runs your URL through a weighted set of GEO dimensions — structured data coverage, server-side renderability, entity signals, content structure and more — and returns a score with specific, prioritised recommendations.
It doesn't replace the manual checks above; it consolidates them into one pass so you know where to focus first. There's no account required and no data is stored after your report is generated.
Where to start
If you only have ten minutes, do two things: view source on your homepage to check what's actually reaching crawlers, and run your URL through a free audit to get a structured baseline. Everything else on this list is worth doing eventually, but those two will tell you the most for the least effort.
CiteSite is a free AI visibility audit tool. Run your site at citesite.net.