AI Visibility Check: Website Readiness & AI Answers Explained
MIRDAT clearly separates the free technical website check (crawler permissions, Schema.org entity, /llms.txt) from documented AI answer measurement in the paid Guard subscription across ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.
How mirdat Measures AI Readiness — and What No One Can Guarantee
1. Technical AI Readiness (Instant Check): We inspect your live source code to verify whether AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot) are permitted in robots.txt, whether a structured Schema.org entity with postal address exists, and whether content follows an answer-first structure.
2. Mention vs. Citation (Reported Separately): In active benchmark queries (executed only with explicit opt-in in the customer area), we strictly separate brand mentions from linked source citations, recording the exact prompt, model version, and measurement date.
3. Honest Boundary: Whether an AI system cites your business depends on model weights, live retrieval indexes, and user prompts. No one can guarantee AI placements. Our check removes the technical barriers that prevent retrieval in the first place.
Why Many Business Websites Are Missing from AI Answers
Based on our analysis of reachable websites from public directories (n = 13,682 total, including n = 10,620 in Germany, measured September–October 2026, non-representative), three technical bottlenecks stand out:
No Schema.org Organization Graph
73.0% of analyzed German home pages (n = 10,620) lack a structured Organization or LocalBusiness JSON-LD block. Among those with an entity, only 21.3% include a nested PostalAddress.
Blocked AI Search Bots
2.3% of inspected domains block AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot in robots.txt, while 0.6% block all crawlers globally via Disallow: /.
Few Machine-Readable Overviews
Only 4.7% of analyzed German domains provide a valid /llms.txt file (filtered for soft-404 HTML pages) to guide AI agents to core service pages.
Frequently Asked Questions on AI Visibility
What does AI visibility (GEO) mean in practice?
AI visibility describes whether AI search engines such as ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews are allowed to crawl your website, can identify your business as a structured entity, and cite your pages as a source.
What is the difference between a mention and a source citation?
A mention means your brand name appears in the generated answer text. A source citation means the AI system additionally links directly to your URL as a verified reference. Our methodology reports both separately with the exact measurement date.
Can mirdat guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my company?
No — nobody can guarantee that. Large Language Models are probabilistic and update continuously. However, clean crawler permissions, Schema.org entities, and structured facts significantly improve your technical prerequisites.
Is /llms.txt required for Google AI Overviews?
No. According to Google Search Central, /llms.txt is not required for Google AI Overviews. It is an open community proposal (llmstxt.org) that provides AI agents and developer tools with a compact overview of your key pages.