Can AI search
engines read and
quote your site?

What AI search engines actually need

• Access: their search crawlers — OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Googlebot and Bingbot for Google’s and Microsoft’s AI features — must be allowed in robots.txt and not stopped by bot protection.
• Indexing and snippets: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on pages that are indexed and may be shown with a snippet; noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet limit that.
• Content: a clear answer early on the page, facts with their sources and text a machine can read make a page easier to quote.
• No special files: Google says its AI features need no AI text files or special markup. llms.txt is optional, and no major AI search engine documents reading it.

What no tool can tell you

Whether an assistant cites you for a given question changes from one answer to the next, and the operators do not publish it. No tool, ours included, can measure it reliably across assistants. What can be checked is whether your pages are open to AI search and worth quoting — that is what these tools do.

Where to start

1. Run the AI readiness check on your most important page.
2. Fix any crawler or snippet block it reports, with the robots.txt checker and generator.
3. Read our guide to AI and GEO and our monthly study of how popular EU websites treat AI crawlers.