Frequently asked questions

How long does a check take?

Usually 10–30 seconds. We fetch your homepage, robots.txt, llms.txt files and the Web Bot Auth directory, then probe your site live with 19 core bot User-Agents at bounded concurrency.

Will the check hurt my site or analytics?

No. A full check is roughly 30 lightweight requests — comparable to a single page view with assets. Probes are HEAD requests where possible.

Why does my report show 'robots.txt allows but blocked'?

Your robots.txt permits the bot, but a WAF, CDN bot-management rule, or security plugin returned 403/challenge to its User-Agent. This is the most common cause of accidental AI invisibility — check your WAF's bot rules and any 'block AI crawlers' toggles.

My robots.txt blocks a bot but the live probe says 'reachable'. Is that a bug?

No. robots.txt is voluntary — our probe measures what your server actually serves. Compliant bots will honour the disallow; non-compliant ones won't. If enforcement matters, add a server-level block.

How accurate is UA emulation vs the real crawler?

It measures how your server treats each User-Agent string from Cloudflare's network. It cannot reproduce vendor IP ranges or TLS fingerprints, so an IP-allowlisting WAF may treat real crawlers differently. We say this on every report — for IP-verified evidence from server logs, use Geolify.

What's a good AIVI score?

65+ is good; 85+ is excellent. Most unoptimized sites score 40–65: reachable but missing llms.txt, schema, or markdown alternates. The report links a fix for every gap.

Do you store my report? Can I delete it?

Reports are stored so your link keeps working, and are visible to anyone with the link (IDs are unguessable). Email reports@aibotcheck.tech to delete one.

How does weekly monitoring work?

A scheduled job re-runs your check weekly and emails you a digest with score changes and newly blocked/unblocked bots. One click unsubscribes.

Still curious? Run a check.