QueryRev AI Readiness

Checks how a site's public files treat AI crawlers: which of 11 AI crawlers robots.txt lets in, whether the llms.txt is a real llms.txt, and what the home page says without running scripts. Every result is a finding with its evidence. There are no scores, no model calls and no telemetry.

npx @queryrev/ai-readiness check www.example.com

Requires Node 22.19 or later. One runtime dependency (undici).

Install

npx @queryrev/ai-readiness <command>      # no install
npm install --global @queryrev/ai-readiness
ai-readiness <command>

Related MCP server: ai-visibility-mcp

Commands

Options: --json, --fail-on fail|warn, --allow-private-network, --no-color, --help, --version. Options go after the command.

check

$ ai-readiness check www.example.com
AI readiness check: https://www.example.com

Crawler access (robots.txt, whole site)
  Crawler             Purpose   Access
  GPTBot              training  allowed
  OAI-SearchBot       search    allowed
  ...

Findings
  PASS  robots-txt                  robots.txt found (77 bytes).
  PASS  sitemap-in-robots           robots.txt lists a sitemap.
        | https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
  PASS  ai-search-crawler-access    All 5 AI search and user-fetch crawlers on the list can read the home page.
  INFO  ai-training-crawler-access  No AI training crawler on the list is blocked. Blocking them is the site's choice.
  WARN  organization-same-as        The Organization has no sameAs link to a profile on another site.
  ...

13 pass, 1 warn, 0 fail, 2 info

check asks for four files, in this order, and only where robots.txt lets this tool in: /robots.txt, the home page, /llms.txt and the sitemap. If robots.txt cannot be read, nothing else is requested and the exit code is 3.

Training crawlers are reported but never counted as a failure: blocking them is the site's choice. A crawler for AI search or for fetching a page when a user asks is a fail when robots.txt keeps it from the home page.

robots test

$ ai-readiness robots test robots.txt --agent OAI-SearchBot --path /account/settings
  FAIL  robots-access  OAI-SearchBot may not fetch /account/settings: the "*" group (line 9), decided by line 10 (Disallow: /account/).
        | line 10: Disallow: /account/

With --agent the exit code answers the question: 0 when the crawler may fetch the path, 1 when it may not. Any token can be tested; the tool suggests only the crawlers it covers. Without --agent it tests every covered crawler.

Matching follows RFC 9309: the group that names the token applies, else the * group; the longest matching rule wins and Allow wins a tie.

llms validate

$ ai-readiness llms validate https://www.example.com --links
  PASS  llms-txt-found     The file is an llms.txt.
  PASS  llms-txt-h1        The file has one H1, as llmstxt.org asks.
  PASS  llms-txt-summary   The file has a summary blockquote.
  PASS  llms-txt-sections  The file has 2 H2 sections of links and 14 links in all.
  FAIL  llms-txt-links     1 of 14 checked links answer 404 or 410.
        | 404 https://www.example.com/old-guide

A 200 alone is not enough: an HTML page, or a robots.txt, served at /llms.txt is reported as not being an llms.txt, and so is text that does not open with a Markdown H1. For a local file, --links needs --base <site address> to resolve the links.

llms generate

$ ai-readiness llms generate https://www.example.com --max-pages 30 --out llms.txt

Reads robots.txt, then the sitemaps it lists (at most 5 files), else the links on the home page. Only pages on the same site are listed; pages that say noindex, redirect elsewhere or are closed to this tool by robots.txt are left out. Each page's title and meta description are used as the page wrote them. The result is a skeleton: read it and edit it before you publish it. With --out the file is written only if it does not exist, unless --force is given. Without --out the file goes to standard output and the notes to standard error.

Crawlers covered

Crawlers covered: the 11 AI crawlers on this list, from OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Common Crawl, Meta, Amazon and ByteDance. Other crawlers are not checked.

The line is printed at the end of check, crawlers, llms validate, llms generate and robots test without --agent, and is the crawlersCovered field of their JSON. robots test --agent tests the one token you name, covered or not. Nothing here says "all AI crawlers".

What it cannot see

It reads public files over HTTP, as one visitor from your machine. It cannot see:

• a CDN or firewall rule that answers AI crawlers differently from how it answers this tool (a crawler that robots.txt allows can still be blocked at the network edge);

• what a crawler actually fetches, how often, or whether a page is cited by an AI answer;

• content that only appears after scripts run: the home page is read as served, without scripts;

• anything behind a login, a bot check or a block of this tool's own address.

Network behaviour

The tool is meant to be run by anyone against any address, so it is strict about what it touches.

• User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; QueryRev-AIReadiness/1.0; +https://queryrev.com/bot). Its robots.txt token is QueryRev-AIReadiness, and it obeys the rules written for that token (or *), including Crawl-delay up to 10 seconds.

• check and llms generate request a file only where robots.txt lets this tool in. robots test and llms validate fetch the one file you point them at; llms validate --links asks robots.txt before it requests each link.

• GET only. No cookies, no credentials, no proxy taken from the environment.

• Only http and https, only ports 80 and 443, no user name or password in the address, no IP-literal hosts, host names of at most 253 characters.

• The host name is resolved once and the connection goes to the address that was checked. Private, loopback, link-local, cloud metadata and other special-purpose ranges are refused.

• At most 3 redirects, each checked again; a redirect to another site is not followed.

• 5 seconds to connect, 10 seconds a request, 30 seconds for check, 120 seconds for llms generate.

• Size limits, counted after decompression and reported when reached: robots.txt 500 KiB, llms.txt 1 MiB, pages 2 MiB, sitemaps 5 MiB.

• One request a second to a host. The tool stops asking a host that answers 429 or 503.

• Text from a site is stripped of control and escape characters before it is printed.

• --allow-private-network lets the command line reach a staging site on a private network. It never opens cloud metadata addresses, IP-literal hosts or other ports. The library entry point has no such option.

• Nothing is sent to queryrev.com or to anyone but the site you ask about. There is no telemetry, no account and no key. The "Full report" link at the end of a report is printed, not opened.

Use in CI

The exit code is the contract:

npx @queryrev/ai-readiness check https://www.example.com --fail-on fail

--json prints one JSON document on standard output and nothing else, for every exit code, errors included:

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "command": "check",
  "exitCode": 0,
  "failOn": "fail",
  "summary": { "pass": 13, "warn": 1, "fail": 0, "info": 2 },
  "site": { "origin": "https://www.example.com", "crawlerAccess": [], "findings": [] }
}

schemaVersion, the flags and the exit codes are the contract: a change to them is a major version. Within version 1, fields may be added. Each finding has a stable id, a level (pass, warn, fail or info), one sentence in message, a docUrl, and its evidence in snippet when there is one.

The examples/ folder has a CI script that acts on the exit codes (ci.sh), a plain-Node consumer of the JSON (read-report.mjs), and a robots.txt with a script that tests it (robots.txt, robots-check.sh).

In an MCP client and in GitHub

• MCP server. @queryrev/ai-readiness-mcp offers the same checks as tools and works with any MCP client that starts a local server: npx -y @queryrev/ai-readiness-mcp. Each tool returns the document that --json prints. Its source is the mcp/ folder of this repository.

• GitHub Action. QueryRevAI/ai-readiness-action fails a pull request when a change to robots.txt or llms.txt closes the site to AI search crawlers. It is offline by default.

Licences

• The code is MIT (see LICENSE).

• The data under data/ is CC BY 4.0 (see data/LICENSE). Credit it by citing the dataset below.

How to cite

Cite the software with the metadata in CITATION.cff (GitHub shows a "Cite this repository" button). The crawler study the covered list comes from is a dataset under CC BY 4.0:

QueryRev Research. State of AI Crawler Access (October 2026). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23424275

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome at https://github.com/QueryRevAI/ai-readiness. This repository is updated by release snapshots, so we apply an accepted change ourselves and credit you as a co-author on the commit; the next release carries it. A pull request is therefore closed with a note instead of being merged.

A new crawler for the covered list needs a link to the vendor's own documentation of its token.

Security

Report a vulnerability to security@queryrev.com, not in a public issue. See SECURITY.md.