Updated November 10, 2026.
“Can ChatGPT see my website?” It’s often the first question a small business asks when it starts paying attention to AI assistants. Ranking well in Google doesn’t answer it: ChatGPT has its own crawlers, and your website can shut them out without anyone noticing.
Letting those crawlers in is the starting condition to show up in ChatGPT. To check it without reading code, I built a free robots.txt and llms.txt checker. Here’s how to use it, how to read its results and what to fix.
Three situations come up often:
In all three cases, the website works normally for people. Nothing alerts the owner.
By default, the tool tests the homepage (the “/” path). To check a specific page, such as your services page, change the path tested. And if your website turns away automated visitors, use the “Paste a file” tab: copy your robots.txt from your browser, and the analysis runs without sending anything.
The table sorts crawlers into three families: search (your visibility), visits requested by a user, and model training. A blocked training crawler, such as GPTBot, isn’t a visibility problem: it’s a choice.
Don’t worry if the tool says other paths are blocked. Most websites disallow their admin area, and that’s perfectly fine.
The tool shows the exact rule doing the blocking, for example “Disallow: /” in the “*” group. Depending on the case:
After a fix, run the check again. OpenAI says its search systems reflect a robots.txt change in about 24 hours.
The checker also looks for an llms.txt file and whether it follows the proposed format: a title, a summary, sections and link lists. If you don’t have one, that’s fine: the file is optional, and neither Google nor OpenAI says it uses it to decide whom to cite. I explain its real role in the article on the llms.txt file.
While writing this series, I was checking robots.txt files by hand, crawler by crawler. It’s slow and easy to get wrong: a file can contain several groups, wildcards and exceptions. So I coded a tool that applies the rules the way the robots.txt standard specifies, for the main crawlers from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity.
It’s free, with no sign-up, and it keeps no list of the websites it checks. It also has limits, which it states clearly: it can’t see an IP-based block, and some crawlers acting on a user’s request don’t always follow robots.txt.
Yes, it’s free with no sign-up. To prevent abuse, checks are limited to a few per ten minutes per visitor.
No. The tool only reads the public /robots.txt and /llms.txt files and keeps the result in memory for ten minutes, to avoid reloading the same website. Text pasted in the “Paste a file” tab is analyzed in your browser.
Yes. Robots.txt and llms.txt are public files any visitor can open. Comparing with your competitors can be instructive.
After every redesign, host change or security plugin install. Those are the moments when a blocking rule most often slips in unnoticed.
No. A readable website is a starting condition, not a guarantee. Being cited then depends on your pages, your presence in Bing and, if it’s available to you, your business profile in ChatGPT.