You don't need a paid tool to get a first answer. Here's the manual check that takes under a minute and tells you whether AI search engines can read your site at all.
The one-command test
If you have access to a terminal (Mac, Linux, or Windows with WSL), run this:
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/ | grep -c '[a-zA-Z]'
If the number returned is very low — single digits — your site is almost certainly returning empty HTML to AI crawlers. If it's in the hundreds, your core content is likely readable.
No terminal? Use your browser
This works in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari:
- Go to your site
- Right-click anywhere → "View Page Source" (not Inspect — View Source)
- Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) and search for a sentence from your homepage
If you can find your content in the source, AI crawlers can probably read it. If the source shows mostly script tags and an empty div, you have the rendering problem.
The three outcomes
Outcome 1: Your content is in the source
Good news. The basic crawlability problem doesn't apply to you. You may still have issues with structured data, llms.txt, or robots.txt — run a full audit to check — but the hardest problem isn't yours.
Outcome 2: You see an empty div
Your site is client-side rendered. AI crawlers get back a blank page. This is the most common failure pattern we see — six in ten vibe-coded sites fail basic AI-crawlability checks in our internal audit data. The fix requires a technical change at the rendering level.
Outcome 3: You see a loading screen or error
Your site may be blocking bots entirely, or it may be behind authentication. Either way, AI crawlers can't access your content. Check your robots.txt and any Cloudflare bot-blocking settings.
What comes after the manual check?
The manual check tells you about crawlability — but that's only one of six things we measure. A site can have readable HTML and still score poorly because of missing structured data, no llms.txt, thin metadata, or bot-blocking headers.
For the full picture, run a free audit at searchaudit.io. You get a 0–100 AI Visibility Score with itemized issues across all six categories — in under 60 seconds.
This check simulates what AI crawlers see when they fetch your page. It's a fast signal on the most critical issue, not a substitute for a full technical audit. Related: Vibe-Coded Sites That ARE Visible to AI.