Common questions
- What is AI visibility, and how is it different from SEO?
- SEO decides whether you appear in a list of links. AI visibility decides whether an assistant can answer a question about you at all. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI mode for a recommendation, the model is not ranking pages — it is assembling an answer from facts it can extract and trust. A site can rank well and still be invisible to that process, because ranking rewards relevance while an assistant needs unambiguous, machine-readable facts: who you are, where you are, what you sell, and whether anyone else vouches for you.
- What does this tool actually check?
- Eight things, weighted by how much they affect whether an assistant can recommend you: machine-readable business identity (Organization or LocalBusiness structured data), your name, address and phone in structured form, whether you publish an llms.txt summary written for language models, whether your robots.txt blocks AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, whether your services and pricing are machine-readable, whether reviews exist in a form an assistant can cite, the quality of your page description, and whether there is enough content to summarise.
- Is this a real scan or a questionnaire?
- A real scan. It fetches your homepage, llms.txt, robots.txt and sitemap, parses any structured data it finds, and scores what is actually published. Nothing is self-reported. (Our separate Website Health Check is the guided questionnaire — it covers the human judgement calls a crawler cannot make.)
- My score is low. What should I fix first?
- In this order: unblock any AI crawlers you are refusing in robots.txt, because that one is self-inflicted and costs you everything downstream. Then add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data with your name, address and phone. Then collect genuine reviews. Structured data makes you legible; reviews make you recommendable. Both matter, but there is no point being trusted if you cannot be read.
- Does a high score guarantee AI will recommend me?
- No, and treat any tool that claims otherwise with suspicion. A high score means an assistant has everything it needs to describe you accurately and include you in a comparison. Whether it then recommends you over a competitor depends on things no site-level check can measure — reviews, reputation, and how often you are mentioned on sites that are not your own.
- Should I just add a chatbot to my website instead?
- A chatbot helps the people already on your site. It does nothing for the far larger number who ask an assistant and never visit you at all, because that assistant cannot see your chatbot. The work that matters is making your business legible to models that never load your page.
Need the real thing rather than a quick check? See what a Minuswires site costs or book a free call.