AI Visibility

AI Visibility is a WordPress plugin by Freestyle Web Solutions that shows you which AI assistants read your website and scores every page on how likely they are to cite it. It logs 13 AI crawlers, grades your site against the research on what AI engines actually quote, and turns the gaps into a prioritized work queue. It is installed and configured as part of our AI readability engagements.

Why would AI assistants read my website?

Because your next customer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini before they ever search. The assistant reads your site on their behalf, compares you to your competitors, and includes you in the answer or doesn't. Two kinds of AI crawlers decide that: training crawlers that teach future models who you are, and retrieval crawlers that fetch your pages mid-conversation to answer a real person's question right now. AI Visibility logs both, separately, so you can see not just that you're being read but how you're being used.

What does the plugin actually do?

• Proves you're being read, and proves it was real. A crawler log records every visit from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Bingbot, Meta-ExternalAgent and eight more, labeled training versus live answers. Every hit is identity-checked against the crawler IP ranges the vendors publish, so impersonators never inflate your numbers. Your most-read pages, your most active crawlers, on one dashboard.
• Verifies nothing is blocking them. A robots.txt check confirms all 13 crawlers can actually reach your content. More sites fail this than you'd think; template defaults block AI crawlers without anyone deciding to.
• Grades your site. A five-category scorecard built on our AI Visibility audit framework: content structure, entity clarity, technical readiness, off-site authority, measurement.
• Scores every page. Each post and page gets a 0 to 100 citability score in the editor, checked against published research: answer-first intros, question-form headings, FAQ blocks, quotations, concrete statistics, entity density. Research on generative engine optimization (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) found that adding citations, direct quotations, and concrete statistics were the three highest-performing changes tested, improving visibility in AI answers by 30 to 40 percent. The checks target exactly that.
• Prioritizes the work. A content queue ranks every page worst-first, and an Opportunities view finds the pages where an hour of editing buys the most: decent scores, real gaps, and URLs AI crawlers already visit. Exports as CSV.
• Ships the plumbing. Entity statement placement, a Key Takeaways block assistants can quote whole, an llms-full.txt file serving your full content to answer engines, and schema where your SEO plugin doesn't already provide it.

It runs alongside Yoast, Rank Math, or All in One SEO and defers to them for everything they already handle. No API keys and no generated content. Every piece of analysis runs locally on your own server; your content never leaves it. The plugin makes two outbound requests: it downloads the public crawler IP lists it verifies against, and it checks its license once a day.

How does the plugin know a crawler is really a crawler?

It checks the source, not the label. A user agent header is a claim anyone can make, and vulnerability scanners routinely claim to be GPTBot because many sites wave that name through. On our own site, requests for files like /firebase-credentials.json and /.bash_history arrived wearing AI crawler names.

OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft publish the IP ranges their crawlers operate from. AI Visibility fetches those lists and checks the source of every logged request against them. A request claiming to be GPTBot that does not come from OpenAI's network is marked spoofed and excluded from every number on the dashboard. Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended are labeled fake on sight: those names exist only as robots.txt tokens for opting out of training, and no crawler uses them as a user agent.

Anthropic and Meta do not publish ranges, so their crawlers are labeled "claimed" rather than "verified." The dashboard tells you which is which instead of quietly guessing. That distinction is the difference between a number you can take to a meeting and a number that just looks good.

How do I get it?

AI Visibility is not sold off the shelf. It's installed, configured, and interpreted as part of a Freestyle AI readability engagement: we run the audit, install the plugin, fix what's mechanical, and hand your team a dashboard and a prioritized queue for the rest. The tool keeps measuring after we leave; the discipline it enforces is the engagement's lasting deliverable.

We take on a small number of design partners who get the plugin free in exchange for real-world feedback. If that sounds like you, say so when you get in touch.

What does an engagement include?

he audit (how AI assistants currently see you, with receipts), the plugin installed and configured, your entity and schema layer set up, mechanical fixes applied, and a working session with whoever writes your content so the editor scores mean something to them. Scoped from discovery like everything we do.

Freestyle Web Solutions is an AI consulting and automation practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. We build workflow automation, AI agents, data dashboards, and websites for organizations that have outgrown their manual processes.

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