AI Crawler Checker Tools Compared: 7 Ways to Test Whether AI Bots Can Reach Your Site

An AI crawler checker tells you whether the bots behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google can reach your pages. Most of them check one thing: your robots.txt. That leaves out the firewall, and it matters. When we ran our own check on 43 brand websites on 14 September 2026, 8 of 19 sites behind Cloudflare refused at least one crawler that their robots.txt allowed.

Below are seven tools compared on what each one actually tests. Every capability and price was read off the vendor's own page on 24 October 2026. One of the seven is ours, and the comparison says what it does not do as well.

The four things an AI crawler check can test

"Can AI crawlers reach my site?" covers four separate questions. A tool that answers one of them can still show green while another one fails.

1. robots.txt, per crawler. Does your file allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and the rest, on the path that matters and not only on the homepage?
2. The firewall, per crawler. When a request arrives under that crawler's name, does your CDN or bot protection serve the page, or a 403, a 429 or a challenge? OpenAI treats robots.txt and firewall settings as two separate controls, so passing one says nothing about the other.
3. Snippet controls. A page can be reachable and still unquotable. noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 and data-nosnippet tell engines not to show it, or parts of it.
4. Real crawler traffic. Did the real bots, from the vendors' own IP addresses, actually visit, and what status code did they get? Only your server logs or your CDN can see this.

A robots.txt check alone cannot tell you the second answer. The firewall decides on the request, not on the file.

Comparison table

Tool	robots.txt per AI bot	Requests the page as the crawler	Snippet controls	Real crawler traffic	Price (24 Oct 2026)
99Visibility AI Crawler Checker	Yes, 18 crawlers, on the exact path	Yes, 16 crawlers plus a browser control	Yes, HTML and X-Robots-Tag	No	Free, no signup, 6 checks an hour
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control	Tracks which crawlers follow your directives	Not stated	No	Yes, for traffic through Cloudflare	"Available on all plans"
Google Search Console (URL Inspection)	Google only ("Crawl allowed?")	Google-InspectionTool only	noindex ("Indexing allowed?")	Google only	Free
Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)	Yes, 2,000+ known agents	Not stated	No	Yes, through its analytics setup	Free; $29 or $299 a month for more
Semrush Site Audit	Yes, 8 major AI crawlers	No; it advises checking your firewall	Not stated	No	SEO plan $139 a month
Peec AI	Yes, 40+ bots	No (our teardown, 1 Oct 2026)	No (same teardown)	Yes, from log integrations	From $95/mo (Starter, 50 prompts)
Backlinko robots.txt AI crawler checker	Yes	Not stated	Not stated	No	Free, 3 checks a day

"Not stated" means the vendor's page does not say, not that the feature is missing. Check the tool yourself before relying on that cell.

1. 99Visibility AI Crawler Checker

Our free AI crawler checker runs three tests on one URL. It evaluates your robots.txt for 18 AI crawlers against the exact path you enter. It requests the page once as a normal browser and once as each of the 16 crawlers that fetch pages, with the user-agent each vendor publishes. It then scans the page and its headers for noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 and data-nosnippet.

What it does not do: the probe comes from our servers, not from OpenAI's or Anthropic's IP addresses. A refusal is a strong lead, but a firewall that verifies real crawlers by IP can treat the real bot differently, in either direction. That is why Googlebot and Bingbot results are marked unconfirmed. It does not read your logs or see real bot visits, and it does not render JavaScript. Paid audits run the same check on every audit.

2. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control

If your site runs through Cloudflare, start here. Cloudflare says you can "monitor the dashboard to see crawler activity and request patterns", "track which crawlers follow your directives" and "set allow or block rules for individual crawlers." It is "available on all plans" (docs last updated 14 August 2026).

This is the only tool on the list that shows the real crawlers and also sets the rules that block them. Its limit is scope: it sees only traffic that passes through Cloudflare. Read our breakdown of Cloudflare's 15 September 2026 default change before you assume your settings are the ones you chose.

3. Google Search Console: URL Inspection and the robots.txt report

Search Console is "a free service offered by Google." The URL Inspection live test reports "Crawl allowed?" and "Indexing allowed?", and shows a screenshot of the page "as the Google-InspectionTool sees it." The robots.txt report lists the files Google found for your top 20 hosts and any errors in them.

It is the most reliable source for Google, and it only covers Google. Its help pages do not mention Google-Extended, and it says nothing about OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity.

4. Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors)

darkvisitors.com now redirects to knownagents.com. Its free AI Bot Robots.txt Checker finds "which of 2,000+ known AI agents, crawlers, scrapers, and other bots your robots.txt allows or blocks." The paid product adds agent analytics, an automatic robots.txt, and a WordPress plugin that blocks "agents who ignore your robots.txt rules."

Pricing: Free at $0 (1 project, 100K events), Startup at $29 a month, Growth at $299 a month. It has the widest agent list here. Its page does not describe requesting your page as each agent.

5. Semrush Site Audit: Blocked from AI Search

Semrush's Site Audit shows "how many pages from those checked in your audit are blocked from any specific AI search engine bots via robots.txt," out of "8 major AI crawlers." For the firewall, its help page leaves the job to you: "if you're using a firewall or bot management platform, make sure these user-agent names are also whitelisted there."

Its AI Search Health score also counts schema markup and llms.txt as readiness items. We have found no published evidence that either one makes an AI engine more likely to cite a page; our llms.txt guide and schema write-up go through the sources. The SEO plan is $139 a month ($117.33 a month billed annually).

6. Peec AI

Peec's pricing page lists a crawlability audit, "which AI bots your robots.txt allows, partially allows, or blocks, across 40+ bots", and crawl insights, "which AI bots hit which pages, how often, and the status code returned." Those insights come from your logs. When we went through Peec's product on 1 October 2026, crawlability read robots.txt only, with no firewall probe and no check of snippet controls.

Peec's brand plans start at $95 a month (Starter, 50 prompts) and run to $495 (Advanced), read off its pricing page on 24 October 2026; the page shows euros to EU visitors. If you already pay for Peec to track mentions, its log data covers point 4 well.

7. Backlinko robots.txt AI crawler checker

Backlinko's free checker needs no login and gives three checks a day. It reads your robots.txt and returns "search & AI crawler access rules", "content signals & blocked paths", a crawler access score and a prioritized fix list. It is a quick first pass on the file, and its page says nothing about the firewall.

The free check that needs no tool

You can test the firewall by hand. Run curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" -A "OAI-SearchBot/1.0; +https://openai.com/searchbot" https://www.example.com/, once for each crawler and once with a normal browser user-agent. If the browser gets 200 and the crawler gets 403, 429 or 503, look at your bot settings. Our robots.txt tester guide walks through it step by step.

How to choose

• You want a yes or no in a minute: any of the free checkers. Pick one that requests the page as the crawler, or you have tested the file only.
• You are on Cloudflare: AI Crawl Control, since it is the thing that blocks or allows, and it shows real traffic.
• You care about Google: Search Console URL Inspection. Nothing outside Google can confirm what Googlebot gets.
• You want to see real bot visits over time: a log-based tool, such as Cloudflare, Known Agents or Peec's crawl insights.
• Pages are reachable but never quoted: check snippet controls. Google says nosnippet and max-snippet:0 remove a page's snippet everywhere in Search, AI features included.

Passing every check does not get you cited. It removes a reason you cannot be. No tool on this list, ours included, can show that unblocking a crawler raises citations, and none of them should claim it.

FAQ

How do I check if AI crawlers can access my website?

Check three things: whether your robots.txt allows each AI crawler on the page you care about, whether your firewall serves the page when it is requested under that crawler's name, and whether the page carries noindex or nosnippet. A free checker that requests the page as each crawler covers all three in one run.

If robots.txt allows GPTBot, can ChatGPT read my site?

Not necessarily. GPTBot collects training data; ChatGPT search relies on OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Your firewall can also refuse a crawler that robots.txt allows. Our GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot guide covers which bot does what.

Can any tool prove what the real crawler sees?

Only logs or your CDN can, because they see requests from the vendors' own IP addresses. A checker that sends a crawler's user-agent from elsewhere gives a strong lead, not proof.

See what AI crawlers get from your site. Run the free AI crawler checker: robots.txt, a request as each crawler, and the snippet-control scan, in one run.