AI visibility on four engines, AI crawler access, and checks that match what PageSpeed now measures

Search changed a lot this year, and some of our checks had not kept up. This release brings the audit in line with how Google, OpenAI and Chrome work in October 2026.

AI Search Visibility: four engines

• Perplexity and Google AI Mode join ChatGPT and Gemini. Every prompt now goes to all four, each with live web search, and the report shows mentions, citations and the sources each engine relied on.
• The ChatGPT check runs on the GPT-5 family. ChatGPT itself searches several times per answer; the older model we used searched once and cited differently.
• An engine that fails no longer counts against you. A timeout, or a market where Google does not offer AI Mode, is left out of the score instead of being counted as "not mentioned".

New AI readiness checks

• AI search crawlers allowed. We read robots.txt the way crawlers do and test whether OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot and Bingbot may read the site. Blocking a training-only bot (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) is reported but never penalised.
• Snippet rules. A page with nosnippet or max-snippet:0 is not used by Google as a source for AI Overviews and AI Mode; the audit now says so.
• llms.txt, read properly. A file that exists is not enough any more: we check for a title line and Markdown links, the same rules as the llms.txt audit in Lighthouse. A site that answers /llms.txt with its own HTML page no longer passes.
• AI agent browsing. Lighthouse's new Agentic Browsing category checks whether buttons, links and fields have names an AI agent can use. Its result is now part of every audit.

More accurate SEO and performance

• noindex is caught. A homepage that tells search engines not to index it is now a critical finding.
• robots.txt and sitemaps. We follow the Sitemap line in robots.txt, so a sitemap at a custom address is found, and we flag a robots.txt that blocks Google.
• Structured data by type. The check now looks for the Organization behind the site, with its logo and social profiles. FAQ rich results are gone from Google since May 2026, so we no longer promise them.
• Real-visitor Core Web Vitals. Load time, click response and server response for real Chrome visitors now appear whenever Google has enough data for the site, and the Core Web Vitals row uses them, as Google does.
• Colour contrast measured by Lighthouse on the rendered mobile page, instead of a scan of inline styles.

Some scores move a little because of these changes. Monitoring alerts skip the first comparison across them, so a method change never shows up as a change on your site.