Seeing is not the same as rendering
Many vibe coders ship apps with a front end that assembles entirely in the browser with JavaScript. To a human it looks perfect. But several AI bots request the HTML and read what arrives before running anything. If your content only appears after the JS, those bots see an almost empty page.
Step 1: look at your raw HTML
Open your site, right-click and choose view source (not inspect, which shows the rendered DOM). Look for your main headline and a couple of paragraphs. If they are not in that HTML, AI probably will not see them either. Another quick test: disable JavaScript in your browser and reload. What remains is roughly what a basic bot sees.
Step 2: check your robots.txt
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Make sure you are not blocking AI bots by accident. Common names are GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. A generic Disallow: / or an inherited template may be shutting the door on them. Blocking is a legitimate choice, but make it on purpose, not by accident.
Step 3: offer an llms.txt
The llms.txt file at the root of your domain is a plain-text summary of what you are and which pages matter. It is neither mandatory nor magic, but it gives a model a clean entry point to your site. Think of it as an index built for machines.
Step 4: ask the AI directly
Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask about your brand: what is X, what does X do, alternatives to X. Watch three things: whether it mentions you, whether what it says is correct, and whether it confuses you with someone else. Repeat across assistants, because each uses different sources. This is your real baseline.
Step 5: feed it citable content
Models cite paragraphs that answer a question without depending on the rest of the page. Clear headings, direct answers up front, concrete facts. If your best information lives in a video or an image, for AI it does not exist.
Scanaris automates this check
The Scanaris AI-visibility pillar reviews whether your content is readable without JS, whether you block AI bots in robots.txt, whether you have llms.txt, and even how a model describes you when asked about your brand, with a fix prompt for each issue. All read-only, on public information.