What AI Sees When It Visits Your Website (And How To Fix It)

This post was sponsored by Scrunch. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

AI bots are visiting your website, interpreting your content, and shaping how customers perceive your brand, all before a human ever clicks. Here’s how to take control.

Your first instinct may be to approach AI search optimization the same way you would traditional search, but answer engine optimization (AEO) is not the same thing as SEO.

Yes, content and technical refinements are still essential. But AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews don’t just link out to your brand, they interpret it for the human beings on the other end of the prompt.

You can think of AI search like a game of telephone.

The more AI has to guess to fill in gaps, the farther away from your intended message the output will be, and the easier it will be for competitors to show up for the queries you care about.

That means brands have to ensure every piece of valuable content on their website is easily accessible and readable.

Not just by humans, but by the AI bots synthesizing it on their behalf.

More Than 50% Of All Web Traffic Is Now From Bots

AI crawlers like GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, and many more account for a significant and growing share of website traffic. That makes sense when you consider that 60% of all US web searches are now AI-enabled.

If AI bots can’t access or understand your site content, they can’t represent your brand in AI search results, let alone do so accurately.

In the past, machine visitors were either scraper bots pulling information to be processed and cataloged by Google’s algorithm or malicious bots that brands worked to block.

Not anymore.

In addition to indexer bots of their own, AI platforms also have retrieval bots: user agents that visit your website and fetch content in real time in response to user prompts.

These bots read your webpages, interpret your products and services, and decide whether to recommend you to real customers.

What they deliver back shapes how your brand is perceived—or whether it’s visible at all—without a human ever seeing your site.

The New Search Focus: Questions You Should Ask

In SEO, the main question is: “How are we ranking?”

In AEO, the main question is: “What is AI saying about us?”

Brands need to know:

• Are we visible in AI search?
• Are we represented accurately?
• Are we cited as a trusted source?
• Are our competitors more visible than us?

Those questions are influenced by the answers to other questions, including:

• Which content is AI using to tell people about us?
• Is our most important content accessible to AI crawlers?
• When AI pulls content from our site, can it extract what it needs?

Tracking whether you appear in AI search results—and how you appear—is step one. Step two is understanding why.

Start With An AI Search Gap Analysis

There are free tools that evaluate your current AI search performance, but it’s also possible to run a quick gap analysis by hand.

Step 1: Manually Prompt AI Platforms

The goal is to see firsthand where gaps exist and understand how customers may experience (or not experience) your brand.

1. Open a platform like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity—or use Google and read the AI Overview.
2. Ask questions your customers would ask. Think broad category queries, specific product comparisons, and problem-solution questions.
3. Record what comes back.

Is your brand mentioned? Is your brand cited? Where is it placed in the answer? What’s the sentiment?

Step 2: Compare Your Brand To Competitors

The goal is to understand how AI platforms think about you versus your top competitors—and how your competitors’ content may be shaping responses.

1. Ask AI to compare you directly to your competitors.
2. Ask AI to recommend the best option in your category.
3. Pay attention to which brands show up consistently and which sources get cited.

Are responses favorable to your brand? Are they correct? Is information being pulled from your site, a competitor’s site, or a third-party site?

Step 3: Learn If AI Bots Are Crawling Your Site

This step is more technical. The goal is to confirm whether AI bots are accessing content on your site at all.

1. Review your server logs to see which AI bots are visiting your site.
2. Differentiate between training, indexer, and retrieval bots.
3. Identify which pages bots are consuming (or not consuming).

If you’re not seeing AI crawler traffic, it indicates technical problems with AI accessibility.

Manual prompt analysis doesn’t scale, especially across different models and markets. That’s a problem advanced technology can help you solve.

But these steps are enough to give you an initial idea of how your brand shows up in AI search results, who you’re up against, and whether AI bots are able to access your website.

That last part is important, especially since Cloudflare began blocking AI crawlers by default in July 2025. It’s possible that your site is turning away AI visitors without you even realizing it.

Once you understand what AI is saying about your brand, the next question is: Why?

The answer can be traced back to your website.

Your site may be beautifully built for human eyes: JavaScript-rendered elements, dynamic carousels, and lazy-loaded content.

But each of those may be hiding the copy and context AI needs. Content AI can’t see is content that doesn’t exist.

That’s why it’s not enough to simply unblock AI bots and churn out new content. You also have to give AI a truly optimized experience.

Treat AI Like a VIP Web Visitor

Brands need content to feed AI bots. But creating content that corresponds to brand-relevant prompts is only part of the equation.

AI interprets your site differently from humans. Consider this your essentials checklist for being the answer in AI search results:

Content accessibility

Make sure your website is configured to allow AI bots to access your webpages.

For example:

• Does your site have a robots.txt file?
• Does your robots.txt allow all key AI bots to access your site?

Content delivery

Make sure your content is delivered with the necessary technical hygiene and speed that AI bots can process.

For example:

• Is there meaningful content on your webpages that can be delivered without JavaScript?
• Did the pages successfully return prerendered content when fetched by a retrieval agent?

Content quality

Make sure your content is complete and in a format that is optimized for AI bots.

For example:

• Are your webpages short enough to be completely read by AI?
• Are the page titles and descriptions relevant to page content?
• Are the non-JavaScript versions of the pages substantially the same as the JavaScript versions?

AI cares about whether you have the content it needs to answer a question. It also cares about whether it can access and read that content quickly, easily, and consistently—preferably via bot-friendly, server-side rendered HTML.

Monitoring shows you what story AI is telling about your brand. But your website is ultimately the author.

The way modern brands build websites inherently interferes with AI consumption. The solution isn’t just creating more content—it’s making sure that content is optimized for and delivered to AI user agents.

A platform like Scrunch gives you the tools you need to not only monitor and analyze AI search performance across models at scale, but also automatically detect and prioritize issues that prevent your content from being consumed by AI user agents, optimize it for AI consumption, and serve it up to AI bots without disrupting the human web visitor experience via its Agent Experience Platform (AXP).

Every layer of AI search—from what AI bots see on your site to what they tell customers about you—is visible, measurable, and within your control.

Don’t let AI play telephone with your brand. Take control of the message.

Try a 7-day free trial of Scrunch today.

You can learn more about AI search best practices in this AI Search Guide.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Scrunch. Used with permission.

In-Post Images: Images by Scrunch. Used with permission.