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You can use a focused 30-minute check to find crawl blocks, inspect what Googlebot receives, and review citation data in supported AI search products. It will not produce a universal AI visibility score or prove why a system did—or did not—cite your site.
The title’s “free CLI” cannot be tied confidently to a particular project: Aeolo’s aeo repository describes a generative engine optimization CLI with visibility and traffic commands, but that does not establish it as the intended tool. This workflow therefore uses documented crawler checks and free webmaster tools rather than unverified CLI installation instructions.
What this 30-minute audit can—and cannot—tell you
Keep three kinds of evidence separate. Access checks show whether a crawler appears permitted or whether a request was served. Eligibility and content checks show what a search crawler could receive, not whether a page will be indexed or cited. Visibility checks show citations or referrals observed in a particular product and period.
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- Eligibility and delivery: whether a page can be crawled and whether its substantive content is available to a search crawler.
- Observed visibility: citations, queries, or referral activity recorded by a named platform.
These checks answer different questions; passing one does not establish the others. A robots.txt probe, for example, cannot confirm that a vendor’s crawler reached your site from its own network. AI Search Audit says its user-agent probe cannot test vendor-IP access and describes its report as a sample, not a full crawl (AI Search Audit).
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Minutes 0–5: choose pages and set a reproducible baseline
Select a small set of important pages—such as a core service page, a useful how-to, and a supporting reference—and write down the questions each should answer. Choose the AI or search products relevant to your audience rather than treating “AI search” as one system.
For each check, record the date, locale, URL, platform, and exact prompt or query. This is a practical way to make later comparisons more meaningful, not a validated industry standard. Keep the set small enough to inspect carefully within the time available.
Minutes 5–12: check crawler rules and actual access
Read robots.txt, but don’t mistake it for a security control
Open your site’s root robots.txt file and look for rules affecting the paths you selected. Google describes robots.txt as instructions about which URLs crawlers can access; it is not a reliable way to keep a page out of search. A blocked URL can still appear in results if discovered elsewhere. To prevent public access, use authentication; to request exclusion from Google Search, use an appropriate noindex directive on a crawlable page. See Google’s robots.txt guide.
Check page-level directives as well as the root file. A page can be crawlable in robots.txt but carry a noindex directive, while a disallowed page may prevent a crawler from seeing that directive.
Match the rule to the crawler’s purpose
Do not assume that allowing one bot allows every bot from the same provider. OpenAI distinguishes OAI-SearchBot, used to surface websites in ChatGPT search, from GPTBot, which collects content that may be used for training. Its controls are independent, and robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to be reflected by its search systems. Review OpenAI’s crawler documentation before changing rules.
Anthropic likewise documents separate purposes for ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Claude-User (Anthropic’s crawler information). Decide which crawler roles you intend to permit; don’t make a blanket change based only on a bot name.
Check whether requests are actually served
Review authentication, CDN and WAF rules, rate limits, and JavaScript challenges that could block or degrade crawler requests. If you have server or CDN logs, look for relevant crawler requests and their status codes or block decisions. A matching user-agent string in a log is useful evidence of a request, but a user-agent can be spoofed; it is not, on its own, proof of the requester’s identity. Likewise, a robots.txt rule describes policy, not a successful visit from a vendor’s real crawler.
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Minutes 12–18: inspect what Googlebot can receive
In Google Search Console, use URL Inspection on a representative page and review the inspected page and rendered result. Check whether the page’s main text is available and whether resources needed to render it are blocked. This is evidence about what Googlebot received for that URL—not a direct measurement of how another AI product crawls or interprets the page.
Google says its standard SEO best practices remain relevant to AI features in Google Search. Its AI feature performance is included in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, rather than a separate AI-only report. See Google’s guidance on AI features in Search and the Search Console Performance report documentation.
Minutes 18–25: look for citations and referrals in the right platform
Microsoft AI experiences: Bing Webmaster Tools
Open Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report, if available for your property, and note cited pages, grounding queries, and changes over the selected period. The report covers supported Microsoft AI experiences; it is not a universal measure of AI visibility. Microsoft says the trends reflect aggregated citation activity and cannot be attributed to a specific cause or event. A change could reflect query mix, page changes, or system and model changes. See Bing’s AI Performance documentation.
Google: use the reports Google provides
Use Search Console’s Performance report for Google Search data, with the search type set to Web, and use your analytics platform to review visits and referrals it records. Do not label these as a dedicated Google AI citation count: Google’s documented AI feature performance is reported within Web search data.
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Keep platform and date ranges consistent when comparing periods. Record what the dashboard actually calls a citation, query, or visit; don’t combine unlike metrics into a single score. A missing citation in one report or one prompt is not proof that a site is never surfaced elsewhere.
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Minutes 25–30: log evidence and choose one next fix
For each finding, keep the observation and the proposed action together. Prioritize verifiable access or delivery problems before speculative visibility tactics.
- Record: URL, date and time, platform or crawler, exact query or prompt where applicable, observed status or tool output, and the next action.
- Prioritize: a disallowed path that should be crawlable, a page blocked by authentication, or a response that delivers no useful content to the crawler.
- Retest: rerun the same check after a change and compare the result. Keep the prompt, locale, platform, and date range as stable as practical.
A later increase or decrease in citations is an observation, not proof that a specific change caused it. Bing explicitly cautions that its trends cannot be attributed to a single cause.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to assess a free CLI or audit tool
A CLI can help automate repeatable checks, but its score is only as useful as the evidence behind it. Before relying on any tool, verify its current documentation and assess what it actually checks:
- Does it read robots.txt, request a URL, or inspect the real serving path?
- Does it check one URL or a site-wide sample?
- Does it distinguish search or retrieval crawlers from training crawlers?
- Does it show the observation, source URL, and confidence—or only a score?
- Is a result a direct platform metric, an observed crawl, or a modeled estimate?
- Which engines, locales, languages, and dates does it cover?
AI Search Audit says its findings include an observation, resource, and confidence, and that checks it cannot run are marked unavailable rather than failed (tool documentation). Those are useful reporting distinctions, but they do not make a vendor’s methodology an independently validated predictor of future citations.
Aeolo’s aeo project is a possible CLI to investigate because its repository describes visibility and traffic commands. The available evidence does not confirm it is the CLI intended by the title, so verify the project’s identity and current documentation before installing or relying on it (Aeolo’s aeo repository).
Why might AI systems not mention your site?
This short audit can identify some concrete reasons: a crawler may be disallowed, a request may be blocked by access controls or a CDN, or a crawler may receive a page without its substantive content. It cannot diagnose every reason a system selects other sources, nor can a single prompt establish visibility across products, locations, languages, or model versions. Treat each verified blocker as a testable fix, then compare observations over time.
How often should you repeat the audit?
Repeat the relevant checks after changing crawl rules, page delivery, or important content, and when a meaningful platform or site change makes the previous baseline less useful. Keep the same sample pages and recorded queries when you want a comparison. There is no schedule in the cited platform guidance that guarantees improved visibility from auditing at a particular interval.
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