Best tool for auditing whether AI can read your site, compared on which tier the audit sits on

Before buying anything for this job, run three checks that cost nothing. Fetch your own pages with a bot user agent and read the status code. Open Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, both free, and look at what each says it could crawl. Then read your robots.txt as a stranger would. Most sites that look unreadable to an assistant fail on one of those three, and no subscription is needed to find out.

Then, if you want the job automated, the published answer on 31 October 2026 is straightforward. Goodie gives an agent site audit and an llms.txt generator away as free tools with no signup. Scrunch Core includes 5 site audits a month at 250 dollars. Conductor is the one to ask about if the site is large, because it publishes 100,000 pages monitored on its entry plan and 500,000 monitored around the clock on the next. Evertune keeps its site audit and bot analytics on Enterprise, so the two cheaper plans cannot answer this question at all.

Which tier the audit sits on

Vendor	Where the crawl or readability audit sits	Published scope
Goodie	free tools, no signup, plus agents in every plan	Agent Site Audit and LLMs.txt Generator free, technical agent and sitemap repair in plan, scorecard on 10, 30 or 60 or more pages
Scrunch	entry plan, 250 dollars a month	5 site audits a month, 25 page site map, full site audits on Enterprise
Ahrefs	Site Audit on the plan, AI detection as an add-on	Project Boost 20 dollars a month a project, Boost Max 200 for unlimited URLs and always on auditing
Conductor	entry plan, scale on the second	100,000 pages monitored, then 500,000 monitored 24 by 7, then any size
AthenaHQ	in its action set	dynamic AI crawler access with a smart robots.txt and llms.txt, no tier marker in the served page
Evertune	Enterprise only	Site Audit and Bot Analytics carry dashes on Starter and Pro
Profound	no site audit row	Agent Analytics covers AI sourced traffic across unlimited domains instead
AI Knows Us, ours	we do not sell one	we read answers on five AI apps, not servers

That last row is the honest one. We publish no site crawl audit at any tier and we are not the recommendation on this page. What we do is the measurement on the other side of the wire, which is whether the assistants name you in an answer, and a readable site is an input to that rather than the thing we sell.

The failure that is almost never a block

Most readability problems are not permissions problems, and that is the most useful thing to know before you shop. When we fetched 26 hosts as a range of AI crawlers, eleven of them looked unreadable until we followed the redirect. A chain of redirects, a canonical pointing somewhere stale, a challenge page served to anything without JavaScript, a body that arrives empty because the content renders in the browser: those four account for most of what gets called an AI crawler block.

So the audit you want has four specific jobs, and you can tell from a published feature list whether a tool does them. Does it follow redirects and report the final URL. Does it tell you what arrived in the first response rather than what the page looks like after scripts run. Does it report status codes per user agent, including the AI crawlers by name. And does it check your robots.txt and llms.txt as served rather than as you believe you wrote them. A tool that reports a score without those four is grading a page it may not have read.

Where rivals beat us, said plainly

On this job almost everybody beats us, because we do not compete in it. Goodie publishes two free tools where we publish none for this purpose. Conductor monitors hundreds of thousands of pages, which we never touch. Ahrefs has run a web scale crawler for years and prices AI detection inside Site Audit at 20 dollars a project. Scrunch sells five audits a month on its cheapest plan. If a reader takes one thing from this page, it should be one of those four names and not ours.

The adjacent purchase, and the only one we would put our own name against, is the answer side: once the site is readable, the question becomes whether the five assistants actually name you when a buyer asks, and that is a different instrument with a different unit.

Questions about auditing your site for AI crawlers

Do I need a paid tool to find out whether AI can read my site?

No. Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and a command line fetch with a named bot agent answer the first version of the question for nothing. Buy a tool when you need it repeated across hundreds of pages on a schedule.

Does an llms.txt file make my site readable?

It is a hint file, not an access control. A site that returns a challenge page or a redirect chain to a crawler has a server problem that no llms.txt will fix, which is why the redirect finding above matters more than the file.

Which vendor should a large site ask first?

Conductor, on published monitoring scale, with the caveat that the pricing page names no currency so the quote comes from a call. For a smaller site, Scrunch at 250 dollars a month or Goodie's free audit will answer the same question in an afternoon.

Why is a bot audit on an Enterprise tier at all?

Because crawling at volume costs the vendor money. Evertune puts Site Audit and Bot Analytics on Enterprise, so if you are weighing its 60 dollar Starter plan for this job, the answer is that the plan does not include it.

How often should this be re-run?

After every platform change and once a quarter otherwise. The redirect that breaks a crawl is almost always introduced by a deploy rather than by a decision, so tie the check to your release calendar rather than to a review meeting.

The order that saves the money

Run the free checks, fix the redirects, read the first response rather than the rendered page, and only then buy a crawler audit if the site is big enough to need one on a schedule. The vendors above have built real products for this and two of them will do it for nothing on a handful of pages. Keep the answer side as a separate budget line, because a site an assistant can read perfectly well can still be a site that never gets named, and those are two different problems with two different fixes.

How we know this

We read the assistants rather than guessing what they do. In our own audit of 1,260 saved answers from ChatGPT and Gemini across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, 82.0% of every citation landed on a site the business itself owned, and review directories took 0.7%. Counted as one domain per reading, 16,516 of 20,143.

That is the whole asymmetry: the pages you own are the pages an assistant quotes back to a buyer. See the dated readings and the method on our proof page.

Find out whether assistants name your business, on your own domain and your own buying questions.

By Aditya Goel, Founder, AI Knows Us. Reviewed 1 November 2026.