What it is
The site check answers two questions: can AI reach your site, and does your site give AI what it needs to understand and cite you? Every paid audit runs it and gives it one 0-100 score. Each check gets a pass, a warning or a fail, a plain explanation, and the fix.
You can run the first part, the AI bot check, for free on any site at youcited.com/ai-bot-check.
Can AI bots reach your site?
This is the first and most important check. If AI bots can't fetch your pages, nothing else matters.
Cited checks the crawlers of the three engines it audits:
| Bot | Engine | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT | Search index for ChatGPT answers |
| ChatGPT-User | ChatGPT | Fetches a page when a user's chat needs it |
| GPTBot | ChatGPT | Training |
| Claude-SearchBot | Claude | Search index for Claude answers |
| Claude-User | Claude | Fetches a page when a user's chat needs it |
| ClaudeBot | Claude | Training |
| Googlebot | Gemini | Google Search, which Gemini and AI Overviews draw on |
| Google-Extended | Gemini | Lets Google use your pages for Gemini |
For each bot Cited checks two things:
- robots.txt: does your robots.txt allow the bot to read your homepage? A block here is a fail.
- Firewall: does your site turn away a request that identifies as the bot while it serves a normal browser? CDNs (such as Cloudflare's "Block AI bots" setting), firewalls and hosts often do this without the owner knowing. This is a warning, because the real bot comes from its owner's network and may be treated differently from our test.
Search and user bots count more than training bots: blocking training is a reasonable choice, but blocking search bots keeps you out of answers.
The fix tells you exactly what to change, and where Cited can tell which platform runs your site (WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow), it says where that setting lives.
The other checks
| Check | What passes |
|---|---|
| Secure (HTTPS) site | Your site loads over HTTPS. |
| Sitemap | A sitemap.xml that bots can find. |
| llms.txt file | An llms.txt file that tells AI what your site is and where the key pages are. |
| Business details in structured data | Organization or LocalBusiness schema with your name, contact details and links. |
| Structured data on key pages | Schema markup on the pages that matter. |
| Answers to common questions | FAQ content that answers what buyers ask. |
| Page titles and descriptions | Every key page has a clear title and description. |
| One main heading per page | Each page has one clear H1. |
| Enough text for AI to quote | Key pages have enough real text, not just images or a few words. |
| About page | A page that says who you are. |
| Contact details | Phone, email or address that AI can find. |
| Reviews or testimonials | Reviews on your site, ideally marked up. |
The checks look at your homepage and up to about ten of your key pages, scanned fresh for each paid audit.
Fixing what fails
Most failures map straight to a fix Cited can generate: robots.txt rules, an llms.txt file, schema markup, an FAQ block. See Fixes.