Checking if AI can even see your website
Hi Indie Hackers!
Sharing my latest thing: IsVisible.ai. It's a free tool that checks whether AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot can actually reach your website.
The Hardal team has been building an AI visibility reporting product, so companies can see which AI crawlers are actually visiting their site. While working on that, we kept seeing the same gap: sites expected to show up when people asked ChatGPT or Claude about them, but had no idea they were blocking the exact crawlers that make that happen. Old robots.txt rules, a missing llms.txt, some WAF setting nobody touched in years.
We saw that gap and decided to build something for it together. Paste your URL, it tests against 13 AI crawlers, reads your robots.txt and llms.txt, sends live requests using the real crawler user agents, and gives you a score plus a clear breakdown of what's blocked.
Getting the crawler simulation right took more tweaking than expected. Different bots follow different rules, and there were a bunch of edge cases around redirects and how sites respond to unfamiliar user agents.
No signup, just run it and see your score.
Would genuinely love for people here to try it on their own sites. If you find something blocked that you didn't know about, that's exactly the kind of thing we're trying to catch, let me know what you find.
The 13 user-agent checks need two outputs: declared policy and observed response. A site can allow GPTBot in robots.txt while the WAF still returns 403, or block it in robots while the origin returns 200. Show both and flag disagreement; otherwise one score hides the exact layer to fix.
The interesting opportunity isn't checking whether AI crawlers can reach a website—it's helping businesses distinguish between being technically crawlable and actually becoming part of AI-generated answers. I'd keep validating whether customers ultimately care about crawler access itself or confidence that they're genuinely improving AI visibility. Those are related, but very different outcomes.