What is AI search?
A plain-English definition, and the tools that work with it.
AI search is any system that answers a question in prose instead of returning a list of links, usually citing the sources it drew on. ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude's web search and Google's AI Overviews are all examples, and each retrieves live pages rather than answering purely from training.
- Being cited is the new click. These systems link their sources, so appearing as a citation is a real referral channel rather than a vanity metric.
- Most of them retrieve through an existing search index. ChatGPT Search and Copilot lean on Bing, which is why ordinary search hygiene still matters for AI visibility.
- Answers are assembled from fragments, so a page that opens with a direct answer in its first sentences is far more usable than one that warms up for two paragraphs.
- Citation is not guaranteed by anything. What you control is whether crawlers can reach you, whether the content exists without JavaScript, and whether there is anything specific enough to quote.
Tools for AI search
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GigAI GEO Audit
One URL in, one AI-visibility report out: crawler access with Cloudflare detection, JS rendering, citability scored with published methodology, retrieval chunks, answer snippets and schema. Each finding linked to the free tool that fixes it.
Answer Snippet Checker
Check whether every section of your page opens with a self-contained answer in 40 words or fewer. Flags throat-clearing intros, buried answers and openings that depend on missing context, with a rewrite target for each failure.
Content Citability Scorer
Score any page or draft on the factors a published study (KDD 2024) measured as increasing AI citation: fact density, source citations, quotability, answer-first openings, question headings and self-containment. Every sub-score shows its formula and what it counted.
AI Crawler Access Checker
Check whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot and every other AI crawler can read your site. Real RFC 9309 robots.txt matching with the deciding rule quoted, plus Cloudflare default-blocking detection. Free, instant, no signup.
AI search problems we solve
Hit one of these? Here's the fix.
- ChatGPT and other AI tools can't see my websiteWork through the three causes in order. Access first, rendering second, content last, because fixing content on a page crawlers can't reach changes nothing.
- AI tools can read my page but never quote itBeing readable isn't the same as being quotable. These checks measure whether there's anything on the page a model could safely repeat.
Frequently asked questions
Related terms
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website usable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI features, so they can crawl it, read it without JavaScript, and quote it as a source. It overlaps with SEO but optimizes for being cited rather than ranked.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is how an AI answers using sources it was never trained on: it splits documents into chunks, finds the chunks that match the question, and hands only those fragments to the model. It is why your page is read as pieces rather than as a whole.
- AI crawlerAn AI crawler is an automated bot that fetches web pages on behalf of an AI company, either to train a model, to build a search index that AI answers cite from, or to read a page live when a user asks about it. Each purpose is a separate bot with its own name in robots.txt.
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