Avid Collective

For media owners

How ready is your title to be cited?

Eight questions, about three minutes, no sign-up. You get a score across six dimensions, a plain read on where you stand, and the next steps for each gap. Your answers stay in your browser, and nothing reaches us unless you choose to send it.

Answer for the title you know best. Pick the statement closest to how things are today, not how you would like them to be. The result is only useful if it is honest.

Access · Can AI crawlers read you?

Question 1 of 8

In robots.txt, do you allow the AI crawlers that fetch a page in order to answer someone's question?

AI crawlers do different jobs, and only some of them decide whether you can appear in an answer. The answering ones either build the retrieval index or fetch the page as the question is asked: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User for ChatGPT, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User for Claude, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User for Perplexity. Block any of those and you are out of that answer. The training ones, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot, collect text for future models and have nothing to do with today's answer. Google-Extended is neither: it is a robots.txt token covering training and grounding in Gemini apps, so blocking it costs you Gemini but has no bearing on Google Search. AI Overviews reads you as ordinary Googlebot and has no separate switch.

Or let us read your robots.txt

Access is the one answer on this page we can check rather than ask about. Give us your domain and we will read your public robots.txt, work out whether the crawlers that answer questions can reach an article, and show you the lines that decide it.

We read one public file and show you what is in it. Nothing is stored, and the domain is not kept.

Your answers stay in this browser. Nothing is sent unless you choose to send it. Privacy

What it checks

Six things that decide whether a model can cite you.

An AI answer is written from pages a model can read, understand and trust. It settles once the same claim turns up on several of them. The check follows that order.

  • Access

    Whether AI crawlers can read your pages at all, and whether you can open a single article to them as a commercial term.

  • Readability

    Whether the page makes sense to a machine: structured data, stable addresses, the text in the HTML, speed.

  • Content standard

    Whether the writing carries something a model can quote: a number, a comparison, a named product, a direct answer, an expert byline.

  • Evidence

    Whether you know where you are cited today, and how much traffic arrives from AI answers.

  • Commercial

    Whether you sell a product that includes access, the standard and a citation report, and whether editorial stays in charge of the writing.

  • Partnership fit

    Whether you can turn a brief around quickly and carry a claim alongside other titles in the same window, which is what moves an answer.

Questions

What publishers ask first.

Will allowing AI crawlers cost me traffic?

Blocking them does not stop the answer being written. It gets written from other sources instead. Allowing them, on the pages you choose, is the precondition for being named in the answer and for AI referral traffic to arrive. It does not earn the citation on its own.

Do I have to allow AI crawlers across the whole site?

No. The useful capability is opening a single commissioned article, agreed as a term of the deal, the same way a publish date is agreed. Your site-wide stance can stay whatever your rights position needs it to be.

Does a high domain authority mean I will be cited?

No. Authority scores do not decide whether AI cites you. What matters is whether the page can be read, whether it carries a specific claim, and whether the same claim appears on other trusted titles.

What happens after the check?

That is your call. Your answers stay in your browser, so nothing reaches us unless you send them. Work through the steps on your own, or send us your results and we will come back to you on where your title fits and what a first commissioned piece would look like.

Ready to be the title a campaign is built around?

Tell us your band. We will tell you what a planner needs to see before they put your title in a campaign.

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