
Alrebro
Free website scanner that finds what's broken and fixes it
A few weeks ago I tested something on my own company (Alrebro — we scan websites
and fix what's broken). I asked ChatGPT to recommend us for what we do.
It said it wasn't familiar with us. Even though we rank fine on Google.
That led me down a real rabbit hole into why ranking on Google and getting
recommended by AI are becoming two different things — and what actually seems
to move the needle (spoiler: it's less about tricks, more about your business
info being consistent everywhere).
Wrote up the full story here if anyone's curious:
https://alrebro.com/blog/how-to-get-your-business-recommended-by-chatgpt
Curious if anyone else here has tried this on their own product/business —
what did you find?
While digging into why some client sites weren't showing up in ChatGPT/Perplexity
answers, I kept running into the same confusion: people either block every AI
bot out of general unease, or leave everything wide open without knowing what
each one actually does.
Turns out there are really only 3 kinds of AI crawlers:
1. Training crawlers (collect data for future models) — blocking these is a
privacy choice, doesn't affect visibility today
2. Search/retrieval crawlers (the ones that actually feed live AI answers) —
block these and you're just invisible, full stop
3. User-triggered fetchers (fire when someone in a chat asks the AI to check
your page right now)
The mix-up between #1 and #2 is apparently the most common reason a business
quietly disappears from AI answers with zero explanation.
Put together a full reference list (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot,
Google-Extended, and a bunch of lesser-known ones) with a block-or-allow call
for each, plus a ready-to-copy robots.txt template:
https://alrebro.com/blog/ai-crawlers-list
Curious if anyone here has checked their own robots.txt for this recently —
I was honestly surprised how often this gets set wrong by accident (old
plugin, template default, etc.) rather than on purpose.
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Alrebro scans websites for free and shows exactly what's broken — technical SEO, on-page content, AI search readiness, and local trust signals. No blurred report, no signup wall. If something's worth fixing

6 Comments
Good question, and worth being precise about — in our case it was specifically
the second one: not a lack of visibility exactly, but a lack of *confident,
consistent* information for the AI to work with.
The business genuinely existed on Google's radar and ranked fine. The problem
was that different sources (Google Business Profile vs. the website) gave
slightly different service-area info, and the AI seemed to just play it safe
and not mention the business rather than guess which version was right.
So less "invisible," more "the AI didn't trust what it could see well enough
to say the name out loud."