Guides to AI Search Visibility
Longer pieces on the parts of AI visibility that are easy to get wrong — including the ones we got wrong ourselves and had to fix.
What these are for
The tools on this site answer narrow questions in a few seconds. These guides cover the parts that need more than a score: where the specifications actually disagree with common practice, and where a tool can report something confidently without having measured it.
Everything here is tested rather than summarised. Where we make a claim about how a site behaves, we ran the request and recorded the date, because this layer of the web changes week to week. Where we got something wrong in our own checker, that is written up too — those are the most useful cases, because they show what the failure looks like from the inside.
- When a checker says “all AI crawlers allowed”, it might mean “we could not tell”RFC 9309 says an unreachable robots.txt means disallow everything — the opposite of a 404. Most AI visibility checkers get this backwards. Here is how to tell.
- Five questions to ask an AI visibility tool before you trust its scoreAI visibility tools disagree because they measure different things. Five questions that separate a real measurement from a plausible-looking number.