About willaicite
willaicite is a free audit that scores how ready a web page is to be retrieved and cited by AI answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Claude.
How does the audit work?
An audit makes at most ten polite requests to the target site, honoring robots.txt throughout:
- the page itself, fetched twice: once with a normal browser user agent, once with an AI crawler’s, to expose WAF-level bot blocking
- robots.txt, checked against the full roster of AI retrieval and training crawlers
- the sitemap, an about page, the favicon and llms.txt
The scoring is deterministic. There are no LLM calls and no sampling; every point is tied to observable evidence (an HTTP status, a robots.txt rule, a byte count of extractable text). When a check cannot run, the report marks it “could not verify” and leaves it out of the weighted score.
Even the verdict line is deterministic, drawn from fixed score bands: a site in the fifties reads “Needs work: real gaps are limiting how AI engines retrieve and cite this site” while a clean run reads “Excellent: well positioned to be retrieved and cited by AI answer engines”.
What do the seven dimensions measure?
| dimension | weight | question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| AI crawler access | 3 | Can retrieval crawlers fetch the page, and does a WAF treat them differently |
| Renderability | 3 | Is the content readable without executing JavaScript |
| Answer-readiness | 3 | Can an engine lift a definition, a heading, an answer block whole |
| Evidence density | 3 | Does the page carry statistics, quotations and cited sources |
| Structured data | 2 | Does JSON-LD tell engines who wrote what, and when |
| Freshness | 2 | Is there a machine-readable date signal from the last 90 days |
| Entity & E-E-A-T | 2 | Can the author and organization behind the page be identified |
What evidence backs the scoring?
The dimension weights and recommendations follow the GEO research: Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, KDD 2024, which measured that citing sources lifted generative visibility by 24.9%, adding statistics by 25.9%, and quotations by 27.8%. The crawler roster tracks the engines’ own documentation (OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity), and the blocking landscape it grades against is measured, not assumed: Fletcher, Reuters Institute, 2024 found “48% of the most widely used news websites … were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers” by the end of 2023, while 24% blocked Google’s AI crawler. Findings from single studies are presented as directional, never as guarantees.
What happens to your data?
An audit touches only the site you ask it to audit, honoring robots.txt. There are no trackers, no analytics scripts and no external resources on these pages. Questions and corrections are welcome: hello@willaicite.com.
About FAQ
Is willaicite free?
Yes. Audits are free, require no account and set no cookies. Rate limiting keeps the load light: a visitor gets a batch of audits every ten minutes rather than an unlimited firehose.
What does the name mean?
It is the question the audit answers: will AI cite you? Paste a URL and the report answers with evidence, dimension by dimension, plus a fix-first list sorted by impact per effort.
Why does the audit stop at ten requests?
Courtesy to the site being audited. Ten requests are enough to score all seven dimensions (the page twice, robots.txt, the sitemap, an about page, the favicon and llms.txt), and a small fixed cap means an audit can never hammer the site it is inspecting. The audit honors robots.txt while it works.