Free interactive tool

AI Visibility Simulator

Your robots.txt now has separate switches for search engines, AI search and AI training. Move seven signals and see exactly which of four visibility layers each one controls.

An illustrative model built from platform documentation, not a measurement of any real site. Last verified 11 October 2026. Check your real page free →

Results

Active layers

4 of 4

Visibility

Full Stack Visibility

All four layers active

  • Search Ranking — SEO
  • Answer Features — AEO
  • AI Search Citation — GEO
  • Model Memory — LLMO

Adjust the signals

Try a scenario:

Your content

Medium

Depth and accuracy, original data, cited sources and freshness. Research on generative engines links statistics, citations and quotations to higher visibility.

Medium

Backlinks, third-party mentions and recognised expertise.

Medium

One canonical brand name and matching structured data everywhere. Adds lift, never a hard requirement.

Clean Formatting
Clean

Answer-first structure, clear headings and passages that can be quoted on their own.

Your robots.txt and indexing

Search Engine Indexing
Allowed

Googlebot and Bingbot can crawl and index the page, and it is eligible for snippets (no noindex or nosnippet).

AI Search Crawlers
Allowed
AI Training Crawlers
Allowed

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot, used to collect data for training future models.

What each layer is doing

Search Ranking

SEO

Classic organic results on Google and Bing.

Moderate

Active (moderate). The page is indexable and quality and authority are strong enough to rank.

Answer Features

AEO

Featured snippets, AI Overviews, AI Mode and Copilot answers, all fed by the search index.

Moderate

Active (moderate). The page is indexable and its answers are clean enough to be extracted.

AI Search Citation

GEO

Cited in ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Claude search, which run their own crawlers.

Strong

Active (strong). AI search crawlers can read the page, and clean formatting makes it quotable.

Model Memory

LLMO

Your brand present in what language models learned in training.

Moderate

Active (moderate). Quality and authority give your brand lasting presence in model training data, and training crawlers can collect new content.

How the four layers are defined here

SEO, AEO, GEO and LLMO overlap heavily, and many practitioners treat them as one discipline with different emphasis. They are separated here because each one has different technical gates, which is what the simulator shows. Google's own guidance is that no special optimisation is required for its AI features: strong fundamentals apply.

SEO
Ranking in classic search results. Served by Googlebot and Bingbot.
AEO
Being the passage chosen for a direct answer: featured snippets, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Copilot answers. Fed by the search index.
GEO
Being cited when an AI search engine synthesises an answer from sources it crawled itself: ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude search.
LLMO
Being present in what a language model learned during training, so it can mention your brand without searching.

The rules behind each layer

Each layer has hard requirements that switch it on or off, and lift factors that only change how strong it is. This list is generated from the same code that drives the simulator.

Search Ranking SEO

Needs
Search engines can crawl, index and show the page (Googlebot and Bingbot allowed, no noindex), and Content Quality and Brand Authority are both at Medium or higher.
Lift
Higher quality and authority rank higher.
Platform fact
Ranking is served by search-engine crawlers. Blocking AI crawlers does not touch it.

Answer Features AEO

Needs
Search engines can crawl, index and show the page (snippet-eligible), and the content has Clean, answer-first formatting.
Lift
Content Quality and Brand Authority raise how often your passage is chosen.
Platform fact
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need only an indexed, snippet-eligible page, with no special optimisation or schema. Blocking AI crawlers or Google-Extended does not remove you. Clean formatting is treated here as the selection gate because extractable passages are what get quoted.

AI Search Citation GEO

Needs
AI search crawlers are allowed (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot), and the page is either Clean-formatted or backed by Brand Authority at Medium or higher.
Lift
Clean formatting, authority, entity consistency and quality raise retrieval confidence.
Platform fact
OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic each run a separate search crawler. Blocking the training crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) does not remove you from their search results.

Model Memory LLMO

Needs
Content Quality and Brand Authority add up to at least one Medium. Training-crawler access is not a hard switch, because earlier crawls and third-party mentions can already carry your brand.
Lift
Allowing training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, CCBot) lets future models learn from your new content. Entity consistency adds lift.
Platform fact
Blocking a training crawler only excludes your future content from training sets, and does not undo earlier collection. A byproduct, not a directly engineerable target.

Sources

Checked against the vendors' own documentation on 11 October 2026. Crawler policies change, so confirm against the current pages before editing robots.txt.

Common questions

What does the AI Visibility Simulator show?

It shows which of four visibility layers switch on for a given combination of seven signals: content quality, brand authority, entity consistency, clean formatting, search-engine indexing, AI search crawler access and AI training crawler access. The layers are search ranking (SEO), answer features (AEO), AI search citation (GEO) and model memory (LLMO). Each layer has stated hard requirements, and the page tells you exactly which one is missing when a layer is off.

Does blocking GPTBot remove my site from ChatGPT search?

No. OpenAI documents GPTBot (model training), OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) and ChatGPT-User (user-initiated actions) as independent settings. Blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of future model training but does not remove you from ChatGPT search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot does. Anthropic splits ClaudeBot (training) from Claude-SearchBot (search) the same way, and Perplexity says PerplexityBot builds its search index and is not used for training.

Do I need special optimisation or schema for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode?

Google says no. Its guidance states that a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional requirements, special optimisations or special structured data for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended does not affect Search inclusion or ranking. In this model those features sit in the answer-features layer and depend on search indexing, not on AI crawler settings.

Do ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User follow robots.txt?

Not reliably. These fetchers act when a person asks the assistant to open a page, and the vendors note that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated requests. Perplexity states that Perplexity-User generally ignores robots.txt. The simulator therefore models the automatic search and training crawlers, which do honour it.

Is the simulator a prediction of my real rankings or citations?

No. It is an illustrative model of the Citation Architecture built from platform documentation and published research, not a measurement of any real website. It makes the dependencies visible so you can see which fix unlocks which layer. Content signals such as evidence, citations and clarity are lift factors in the model, and the research behind them (for example the Princeton GEO study) reports effects that vary by domain. To check a real page, run the free AI Visibility Check and test your queries in the answer engines directly.

How do SEO, AEO, GEO and LLMO differ, and are they really separate?

In this model SEO is classic search ranking, AEO is answer placement in search features such as featured snippets, AI Overviews and Copilot answers, GEO is citation by AI search engines that run their own crawlers, and LLMO is presence in what language models learned in training. The terms overlap heavily and many practitioners treat them as one discipline with different emphasis. They are separated here because each has different technical gates, and those gates are what the simulator makes visible.

Now test your real site

The simulator shows how the layers depend on each other. The free check scores your actual page for entity clarity, content depth and citation readiness.

Run the free AI Visibility Check →Read the Citation Architecture

Questions? contact@ideapreneur.io