Can AI tools read my website?

Sound familiar?

"What is robots.txt?" "Could my website be blocking ChatGPT?" "My web person set something up years ago and I don't know what it does." "Why would AI recommend a clinic it can't read?" One small file answers all of these.

What's happening

Before ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google can recommend your clinic, their tools need to read your website. Every website can have a small file called robots.txt that tells these tools which parts of the site they may read. Most clinic websites let them in. Some block them without anyone meaning to, often because of an old setting or a plugin. 🤖

Why it matters

AI tools can only recommend what they can read. A website that blocks them keeps your clinicians, your conditions and your expertise out of the answers patients get when they ask who to see. Letting them in is the first step; everything else you publish builds on it.

What to do now

  1. Find out where you stand. The free AI visibility check, the Website & AI Visibility Review and the Clinical Content System all check your robots.txt and tell you which search and AI tools it allows or blocks. Subscribers see it on the Overview page at https://content.co-kinetic.com/my-clinic/overview.
  2. If a tool is blocked, ask whoever looks after your website to change it. It's a short text file, and the change usually takes a few minutes. Your web person will know where it lives.
  3. Check again after the change. The next check or re-measure shows the new result.

The question behind the question

"Is it safe to let AI tools read my website?" Yes. They read the same public pages any patient can see. Nothing private is shared, and you can still keep any area you choose out of bounds.

The next question is usually...

Still stuck? This usually means...