Eligibility: can AI even see your site?

The first of the six layers, and the one that quietly invalidates everything downstream when it fails.

Eligibility is a yes/no question asked before any others

Before an engine can consider naming you, it has to be able to reach and read you. That sounds trivial and is where a surprising number of businesses fail, for want of anything sophisticated: a robots.txt file nobody has read since the site launched, a JavaScript-rendered page that returns nothing to a non-executing fetch, or a CDN rule blocking a crawler someone thought was a scraper.

The failure is invisible from the inside. Your site works perfectly in a browser. It simply is not legible to the thing you are trying to be recommended by.

What we check

Which AI crawlers are allowed. Explicitly, per crawler, as a decision rather than an inherited default.

Whether the page renders without JavaScript. If the content only appears after execution, treat it as content that may not be read.

Whether a CDN or firewall rule is blocking access independently of robots.txt. This one is common and rarely suspected, because the site owner never sees it.

Whether the platform allows the control you think it does. Crawler and structured-data control differ meaningfully between Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento and custom builds, so this is a platform-aware check rather than one robots.txt read.

Why this is layer one

Every other layer assumes the engine can read the page. Entity work, content work, citation work, measurement, all of it is wasted effort if the answer to “can it see you” is no.

It is also the cheapest layer to fix, which is a fortunate combination: highest consequence, lowest cost, and almost never the thing an agency leads with because it does not look like marketing.

Read in order, or jump

Twelve chapters, in the order the work has to happen. The first four are the spine; the platform chapters at the end include two surfaces we deliberately do not score, and say why.

01 How AI search picks local businesses 02 Eligibility: can AI even see your site? 03 Robots.txt: block AI crawlers or allow them? 04 Measuring AI visibility honestly 05 Entity foundations for local businesses 06 Reviews as AI input 07 Citation surfaces: where AI engines look 08 Getting ChatGPT to recommend your business 09 Showing up in Perplexity 10 Showing up in Google AI Overviews 11 Showing up in Gemini 12 Copilot, and why we don't sample it

See where you actually stand

A free Visibility Check runs the measurement described in this guide on your own business.

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