Can AI assistants find and cite your website?

An AI assistant can only cite a page it can crawl, read without JavaScript, and lift a clean answer from. This scanner checks fourteen of those conditions on any public URL and returns a score out of one hundred, the checks you failed, and the three fixes worth the most points.

A buyer asks an assistant about your category. Here is what it can see.

Free, no email required. Scanning one specific page gives a fairer reading than a homepage, because homepages are written to sell rather than to answer.

What does this scanner actually check?

Fourteen conditions in three groups. Answer readiness is worth 40 points and covers whether the page contains a passage an assistant can lift: a question headline, a direct answer near the top, question subheadings, and a real question and answer section. Machine trust is worth 35 points and covers structured data, a named author, and a visible date. Crawl access is worth 25 points and covers whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are permitted in robots.txt, whether an llms.txt file exists, and whether your text survives without JavaScript.

Why do most homepages score badly?

A homepage is written to position a company. An answer page is written to settle a question. Assistants retrieve passages, not brands, so a page of taglines and product tiles gives them nothing to quote. That is why the input above accepts a full URL. Point it at a service page or an article and the reading gets fairer.

Proof, without asking you to take my word for it: run this page through its own scanner. It was built to satisfy every one of the fourteen checks it applies to yours, and you can verify that in about ten seconds.

When I scanned hottestcommodity.com on September 2, 2026 before this rebuild, the homepage scored 44. Publishing the number I am least proud of is cheaper than claiming one I cannot show you.

How is this different from an SEO audit?

An SEO audit asks whether a page can rank in a list of ten blue links. This asks whether a page can be quoted inside an answer where there are no links at all, only a sentence and an attribution. The two overlap on crawlability and diverge everywhere else, which is why a site with strong rankings can still score under 50 here.

What each surface rewards
RequirementRanking in searchCited in an answer
BacklinksHeavily weightedIndirect at best
Keyword targetingCentralReplaced by question matching
A liftable 40 to 60 word passageOptionalRequired
FAQPage structured dataHelpful for rich resultsPrimary answer source
Named author and visible dateMinor signalAttribution and recency filter
Text rendered by JavaScriptUsually indexedFrequently never seen

What happens after the scan?

Most of the fourteen items are an afternoon of work for whoever owns your site, and the scan result is specific enough to hand over as a task list. If you would rather not write the replacements yourself, the $49 Fix Report builds them on screen the moment you pay. If the deeper problem is that the whole funnel leaks, the X-Ray Audit starts at $2,500 and delivers in seven days from data access, with a CFO Financial Impact Summary attached.

Frequently asked questions

Does the scanner store my site data?

It does not keep your page content. It fetches the page, scores it in memory, and discards it. The address you scanned and the score it received are recorded, the same way any site records its traffic. An email address is only stored if you submit the form.

Can I scan a competitor?

Yes. It reads only what any crawler can already reach. Nothing behind a login is accessible to it.

Why does my score change between pages on the same site?

Nine of the fourteen checks are page-level and five are site-level. Two pages on one domain share the robots.txt and llms.txt results and can still differ by 40 points on everything else.

Is a perfect 100 the goal?

No. Above 80 the page is citable, and past that the returns come from publishing more answer pages rather than perfecting one. Treat the remaining points as optional.

Who built this?

Jordan B. Allodi at Hottest Commodity, a fractional CMO firm in Chicago. Seventeen years in sales and marketing, and more than $5M in ad spend managed. Questions go to jallodi@hottestcommodity.com.

Last updated .