Your tracker says you are not cited. This tells you why.
CrawlRaven audits the technical reasons AI engines skip your pages, then ranks them against your Search Console and GA4 data so you fix the ones that actually cost you traffic.
AI search readiness is the technical state of your site as an AI engine sees it: whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can reach your pages, render them without JavaScript, and extract a quotable answer. It is the prerequisite for every GEO tactic. A page that blocks OAI-SearchBot or hides its content behind client-side rendering cannot be cited no matter how good the writing is.
Visibility trackers see the answer. They never see your site.
The AI visibility category has converged on one job: sample a set of prompts, record which brands get named, and chart it over time. Peec AI, Otterly, Profound, Scrunch, and the Semrush and Ahrefs add-ons all do this, and several do it well. We have reviewed most of them.
Every one of them reads the model's output. None of them reads your robots.txt, your rendered HTML, your schema, or your Search Console. So they can tell you that you are absent from an answer, but not one of them can tell you which of the dozen possible causes is the real one.
The difference in practice
A tracker reports: "You are not cited for ‘best seo audit tool’ in ChatGPT." CrawlRaven reports: "That page blocks OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, renders its comparison table client-side, and has an FCP of 1.4s. You already rank position 8 for the query in classic search, so the content is fine. The access is broken."
That second sentence needs three data sources at once: a crawl, your Search Console history, and the rendered page. Joining them is the whole point.
What the audit checks
AI search readiness runs as part of the 200-point audit, not as a separate scan. These are the checks that decide whether an AI engine can use your page at all:
- AI crawler access in robots.txt, checked per user-agent rather than as one group
- Server-side rendering, because almost no AI crawler executes JavaScript
- Answer-first content structure under each H2
- FAQ, Article, and Organization schema validity
- First Contentful Paint against AI-crawler timeout behaviour
- Canonical, noindex, and redirect conflicts that strip a page from retrieval
- llms.txt presence, reported as forward-looking rather than as a ranking factor
- Internal linking depth to the pages you most want cited
Checking a single page
The CrawlRaven Chrome extension runs the rendering half of this in a side panel: it puts raw HTML length next to extracted text length, so you can see a JavaScript-only page for what it is without waiting on a crawl. Useful on staging URLs the crawler cannot reach yet.
Search crawlers, which affect your visibility
Blocking any of these removes you from that engine's answers. They are checked individually, because a single wildcard rule in robots.txt often blocks all of them without anyone intending it:
- OAI-SearchBot · ChatGPT search results
- ChatGPT-User · ChatGPT browsing on a user's behalf
- Claude-SearchBot · Claude search results
- Claude-User · Claude browsing on a user's behalf
- PerplexityBot · Perplexity answers and citations
Training crawlers, which do not
These feed model training rather than live search results. Blocking them protects your content from training use without costing you a single citation, which is a trade many publishers want and few tools surface clearly:
- GPTBot · OpenAI model training
- ClaudeBot · Anthropic model training
- Google-Extended · Gemini model training
Why the ranking is the useful part
A readiness scan on a mid-sized site returns dozens of issues. Fixed in the wrong order, most of that work lands on pages nobody was going to find anyway. CrawlRaven connects Google Search Console and GA4 directly, so every finding arrives with the traffic context attached.
- 01
Connect Search Console and GA4
One-click OAuth. We pull every query, page, impression, click, and position, plus GA4 sessions and engagement, and keep syncing daily.
- 02
Import your keyword lists
Drop in CSV exports from Ahrefs, Semrush, or any keyword tool. They merge with GSC-discovered queries into one keyword map with target pages assigned.
- 03
Run the 200-point crawl
Including every AI readiness check above, on every page rather than a sample.
- 04
Get one ranked plan
Readiness faults are scored by the impressions and revenue sitting behind them, so the page at position 8 with a blocked crawler outranks the orphan page with the same fault.
The output is a list you can work top to bottom: which pages to fix for AI retrieval, which keywords to target, and which content opportunities your existing impressions already point at.
What this is not
CrawlRaven does not sample prompts and does not track whether a given model mentions your brand this week. That is a genuinely useful thing to measure and we would rather say plainly that we do not do it than blur the line.
If citation monitoring is what you need, pair CrawlRaven with a tracker. Our guide to the best AI SEO tools maps the five categories and what each costs, and the LLM SEO tools comparison goes deeper on trackers specifically. The two halves answer different questions: a tracker tells you whether the work is landing, and a readiness audit tells you what to do when it is not.
On llms.txt
We check for it and report it, but we do not present it as a fix. Google's John Mueller has said no AI system currently uses llms.txt, and OpenAI has not confirmed support. It is worth adding because it is cheap, not because it is proven.
AI search readiness FAQ
What the audit covers, and what it deliberately does not.
Find out what is actually blocking your citations
Connect Search Console and GA4, run the 200-point audit, and get AI readiness faults ranked by the traffic behind them. Free for one site, no credit card.