AI assistants are becoming a referral channel whether sites prepare for it or not. People ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity for recommendations, and those assistants read the web to answer. Which raises a question almost nobody is checking: can they actually read YOUR site?
There are three mundane, checkable things that decide it.
The three checks
llms.txt. A plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that tells AI systems what your site is and where the important content lives, like robots.txt but for guidance instead of prohibition. It went from proposal to quiet standard fast: in our scans this month, Shopify, Stripe's docs, Anthropic's docs and WordPress.org all serve one.
AI crawler access in robots.txt. GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot: each can be allowed or blocked in robots.txt, and many sites block them without remembering they did (often a blanket rule added in 2023). Blocking is a legitimate choice for some businesses. Blocking accidentally while your marketing team invests in "AI visibility" is just self-harm.
