Best tool to check if my website is accessible to AI crawlers: free checkers and platforms compared
The best tool to check if your website is accessible to AI crawlers: free robots.txt and readiness checks, log-based proof, and when a platform is worth paying for.
"Is my site accessible to AI crawlers?" sounds like one question and is really two. The first is about permission: does your robots.txt allow GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest? The second is about reality: do those bots actually get your pages when they ask, or does a firewall, a CDN rule or a JavaScript wall turn them away? A free checker can answer the first. Only logs answer the second.
So the best tool depends on how sure you need to be.
Three levels of checking
Level 1: read your rules. Look at robots.txt and any bot-management settings. This tells you what you intended.
Level 2: run a readiness check. A tool fetches your site as a crawler would and reports problems it can see from outside.
Level 3: read real logs. This is the only way to know what bots experienced. Logs show named bots, status codes and which pages they reached.
A rough manual test is to request a page with a bot's user agent string from the command line. It is quick, and it misses anything based on IP verification or bot scoring, so treat a pass as a maybe.
Ranked: the tools worth using
1. Promptwatch (free checks, then logs)
Promptwatch covers all three levels. For the first two, it offers free tools: an Agentic Readiness Check, an AI Visibility Report that needs no login, llms.txt and robots.txt generators, and an AI Bots directory of 440+ crawlers. The GEO Inspector Chrome extension shows ChatGPT's fan-outs and fetched versus cited sources, running locally.
For level 3, Agent Analytics gives real-time, IP-verified AI crawler logs, with spoofed user agents filtered out, error tracking with failure explanations, and a crawl-to-citation path. Tracked bots include GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Agent, GoogleOther, Meta-WebIndexer, Meta-ExternalAgent, Meta-ExternalFetcher and MistralAI-User. Weekly Site Health audits with 21 checks cover crawlability too.
It ranks first because it is the one place that checks access, proves it with logs and then tells you whether fetched pages get cited. Note that logs start on Professional ($245 a month), not Essential ($95).
2. Foglift
Foglift offers an unlimited free Technical Audit covering SEO, AI readiness, performance, security and accessibility, and its Free plan includes AI Crawler Analytics. It is a good level 2 tool at no cost. Paid monitoring starts at $49 a month and is metered in tokens.
3. Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control is a feature of the Cloudflare dashboard, free on every plan. It shows which AI crawlers request your pages, grouped by operator, with request volume, status codes, paths and robots.txt violations. You can also allow or block from the same screen. It only sees traffic through Cloudflare, and on the Free plan detection leans on user-agent strings.
4. Known Agents
Known Agents (formerly Dark Visitors) has a free plan with 100K events and paid plans from $29 a month. It offers agent analytics, AI chat referral tracking, an automatic robots.txt tool and an agent identification API. It does not track prompts, so it cannot say whether a bot's fetch led to a citation.
5. Scrunch AI
Scrunch AI includes site audits and bot traffic reporting in a monitoring platform, with Core at $250 a month. It is more than you need for a pure access check.
Fix-oriented tools
Seology runs 200+ checks and ships fixes as pull requests (Starter is free). Encited offers a site auditor, crawl-log analysis and pre-rendering for JavaScript sites from $19 a month. SEO MCP exposes audit tools to AI agents. These help once you know what is broken.
Comparison
| Tool | Level | Verifies bots by IP | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Promptwatch | 2 and 3 | Yes | Free tools; logs from Professional $245/mo |
| Foglift | 2, plus crawler analytics on Free | Not published | Free; Launch $49/mo |
| Cloudflare AI Crawl Control | 3, Cloudflare traffic only | Deeper detection needs an upgrade | Free |
| Known Agents | 3 | Not published | Free; from $29/mo |
What to do with the results
If a bot is blocked, fix the rule that blocks it. If pages render only in JavaScript, serve the key text in HTML. If bots reach pages but never cite them, the problem is content, and that is a separate job. Decide deliberately which bots you want: you may allow search-style bots and block others, and that is your call.
Who should pick which
For a quick, free first look, use Promptwatch's Agentic Readiness Check and Foglift's audit. If you use Cloudflare, switch on AI Crawl Control. For proof and ongoing monitoring, Promptwatch is the better fit. Nothing here guarantees AI engines will cite you once access is fixed. It removes one common reason they do not.