Common questions.

Generative engine optimisation: making sure AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers can find your website, read it and understand it well enough to recommend or cite it. It overlaps with SEO, but it puts more weight on things like letting AI crawlers in, readable HTML and structured data that says who you are.

We check robots.txt access for 16 crawlers, including those behind ChatGPT search, Claude, Perplexity, Google (Search, AI Overviews and Gemini), Bing and Copilot, Apple, DuckDuckGo, Meta and Common Crawl. The rest of the checks apply to any assistant that reads web pages.

No. A high score means your page did well on the checks we can perform, not that every technical obstacle has been ruled out. Citations also depend on your content, your reputation elsewhere on the web and the question being asked. Nobody can promise citations, and we don't.

That is your call. Blocking an AI search crawler can limit its access to your pages. Training crawlers serve a different purpose: blocking them is a legitimate choice about how your content is used. The report distinguishes search access from training access.

Yes. The check and the report are free, with no card and no account needed. There is a fair-use limit on how many scans you can run per hour.

A score out of 100, a breakdown across six areas — crawler access, content structure, structured data, metadata, trust and freshness, and AI discovery — every check explained with how to fix it, your top fixes ranked by impact, and a table of which AI crawlers can read the page.

Each check is worth points, and the score is the share of available points you earned. Checks that decide whether a page can be used at all, such as crawler access and readable HTML, carry the most weight. See every check on the What We Check page.

We read the HTML your server sends without running JavaScript, as many AI crawlers do. If your content is rendered in the browser, server-side rendering or pre-rendering will make it visible to them.

Yes. Every report has a link you can share and a PDF download. If you have an account you can turn the shareable link off for any report.

A crawl of up to 20 pages, and every issue turned into a fix: ranked from critical to optional, with the pages it affects, the steps, a ready-made snippet and where to click on your platform. Every fix comes with a prompt to paste into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or Cursor, plus one prompt that walks you through all of them. You also get a prioritised action plan, a ready-to-publish llms.txt and Organization schema, and a downloadable fix pack. It also includes rewrites for your weakest pages drafted by Claude from their own text, a snapshot of answers from Claude with live web search (whether your site is cited and who is cited instead), and what Claude knows about your brand.

Copy a prompt into the AI assistant you already use. It tells the assistant your site, the issue, the pages affected and our suggested code, and asks it to explain the fix, give you exact steps for your platform, check it worked — and ask you for anything it does not know rather than make it up. Always check what it suggests before you publish.

£1.99, paid once per report, and we never store your card. If you audit often, Footnoted Pro includes up to 10 extensive audits a month for £4.99.

Only if you want one. The extensive audit is a one-off payment. Footnoted Pro is an optional monthly plan — £4.99 a month for up to 10 extensive audits — that you can cancel any time; it runs to the end of the month you've paid for, and unused audits don't roll over.

Usually five to ten minutes. You can leave the page; we email you when it is ready.

You can rerun a failed paid audit from your report at no charge. If that does not work, open a support ticket and we will sort it out or refund you.

No. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so treat the AI visibility test as a snapshot of how things look today.

The address you checked and what the report shows: scores, the checks, page titles, headings and a short text excerpt of the page. We only read public pages, the same way any crawler would.

Anyone you give the link to. Reports are kept out of search engines. With an account you can switch sharing off for any report, and delete it.

Only for the extensive audit's AI steps. The page's address, title, description, headings and a short text excerpt go to Anthropic's Claude API to work out what your site offers; the same details for up to 4 of your weakest pages go to it to draft rewrites; and the audit findings go to it to write the action plan. The free check does not use AI, and the fix prompts are written by us, not by AI.

Delete any report from its page in your dashboard. Deleting your account deletes all of your reports. For a report you ran without an account, contact us with its link.

Not for the free check. A free account keeps every report on your dashboard so you can re-check after each fix, and is needed to buy an extensive audit or Footnoted Pro.

Settings → Profile → Delete account.

Use the "Forgot password" link on the sign-in page and we will email you a reset link.