Most brands that get started with AI visibility begin with the wrong question. They draw up a list of prompts they want to win, measure whether their brand gets mentioned, and start tweaking their content. Logical, but it skips a step. Before a prompt matters at all, there is a harder question: when an AI bot fetches your page, does it even get to see your content? For many sites the answer is uncomfortable. And you don’t notice that in your prompt list, you notice it in your technique.
A technical SEO audit is like a vehicle’s annual inspection: you do it every year, even when nothing is broken.
Giacomo Perticara, founder and SEO strategist at GRP Digital
First, open the bonnet
An AI audit should run in the same order as an MOT. You promise nothing about the drive before you have looked under the bonnet. Concretely that means: first check whether your pages can be found, fetched and read, and only then think about which prompts and topics you want to win. Reverse that order and you are optimising content the bot never gets to see.
The biggest pitfall is in how your site builds its content. If important content only loads in the browser via JavaScript, the crawlers of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity often see none of it; they only fetch the raw HTML and don’t run your JavaScript. You can rank in position 1 in Google and at the same time be invisible in AI answers. We covered that mechanism separately in the visibility gap between your CMS and the crawler. It is the first place an AI audit looks.
AI bots are lazy and wasteful
There is a second reason to keep your technique sharp: these bots are not thorough. Research by Vercel showed that ChatGPT’s crawler wasted nearly 35% of its fetch attempts on pages that don’t exist (404s), versus just over 8% for Googlebot. They choose their paths inefficiently. What they do consistently is visit pages with more organic traffic more often. So importance in the classic sense translates directly into how often an AI bot comes by.
And the volume is enormous. Cloudflare measured that Anthropic’s bot fetched nearly 71,000 pages for every visitor it sent back, and that the share of crawling for training purposes grew from 72% to 79% in a year. These bots consume a lot, often, and with little patience. All the more reason to make the work as easy as possible for them: clean URLs, no needless 404s, and your most important content straight in the HTML.
Hidden is not the same as absent
Here you have to be precise, or you draw the wrong conclusion. Content that is visually tucked away in an accordion or tab, but is already in the HTML source, is read just fine. Hidden from the eye is not the same as absent from the code. The real risk sits one step further: content that is only fetched and loaded after a click, via a JavaScript call. That is the content a bot never sees. So the rule is not “hide nothing”, but “make sure it is in the raw HTML, not behind an interaction”.
The order that does work
An AI visibility audit that holds up therefore runs from the bottom up. First the basics: is your content server-side in the HTML, is nothing crucial loaded only after a click, and can a bot find your pages without running into a wall of 404s? Are you not accidentally blocking the AI crawlers in your robots.txt? Only when that is right does the layer above it make sense: which topics you want to win, how you get mentioned, which prompts you track. That is the world of Generative Engine Optimization, and it builds on a healthy technical foundation.
Because you can have the finest content and the smartest prompt strategy. If the bot sees an empty page on arrival, none of it matters. At GRP Digital we therefore always start an AI project with the technique, not with the prompt list.
Frequently asked questions
Do AI crawlers really not render JavaScript? The major crawlers (of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity) do sometimes fetch JavaScript files, but don’t run them. Google’s Gemini is the exception, because it runs on Googlebot. This measurement comes from Vercel and is widely confirmed into 2026.
Should I allow AI bots in my robots.txt? If you want to appear in AI answers, yes. Block the crawlers and you shut yourself out of the source the answer is built from.
Where do I start with an AI audit? With the technique: findability, rendering and crawl access. Only when the bot can see your content do content and prompt choices have an effect.
Sources: Vercel x Merj (crawl behaviour and JavaScript rendering of AI bots), Cloudflare (crawl volume and training share) and 2026 reconfirmation.
