The best AI readiness tools for 2026, compared honestly. Composite graders, free bot-access checkers, and the score-to-fix gap most checkers leave open.
An agent-readiness checker exists to answer a single, narrow question: can an AI assistant or an autonomous agent find your site, read its content, and act on it? That is a different question from "do I rank on Google" and a different question from "does ChatGPT mention my brand." This roundup compares the named tools that answer it, what each actually inspects, and where each stops short.
One disclosure up front, the same one you would want from any vendor-published list: Crawlytics published this post, and Crawlytics ranks itself #1. I have tried to earn that with a real edge and real cons rather than a pitch, and you will see exactly where the free Crawlytics scan is weaker than what a paid monitor gives you. Every competitor fact here is current as of June 2026, and pricing in this space moves, so confirm on each vendor's own page before you buy.
AI readiness is whether AI systems can do three things with your site: find it, read it, and act on it. Find means an AI crawler can discover your URLs and is allowed in. Read means the content an assistant needs is in the HTML it receives, not hidden behind client-side JavaScript it never runs. Act means an agent can take the next step, follow a clean link, pull a structured fact, or in the emerging case, invoke an action.
"Agent readiness" is the same idea with the emphasis on that third verb. As more traffic comes from autonomous agents rather than a human reading an answer, "can it act" stops being theoretical. The term you see depends on the vendor. The underlying checks overlap heavily, which is why a good readiness tool scores all three dimensions instead of one.
This is not the same as a brand-mention monitor. A monitor samples prompts and tells you how often ChatGPT names you. A readiness tool inspects your actual pages and tells you whether the machinery underneath would let an AI use them at all. You can be invisible in answers because your readiness is broken, and no amount of prompt monitoring will tell you that, which is the gap this category fills.
Every serious readiness checker looks at some subset of the same handful of signals. Knowing them tells you whether a tool's score is meaningful or just crawlability with a new label.
Five tools, ranked by how completely they answer "can AI find, read, and act on my site," and how usefully they tell you what to fix.
The grader at /agent-ready runs a live scan, not a cached lookup. It fetches your robots.txt, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, sitemap.xml, and homepage in parallel, then scores you 0-100 across five categories from about 25 checks: Discoverability, Content Accessibility, Bot Access Control, Protocol Discovery, and Attribution. You get an overall score, a score per category with the reasons behind it, an A-to-F band, and a severity-sorted list of findings, so the worst problems sit at the top. Every scan gets a shareable per-domain URL at /agent-ready/<domain>, plus an embeddable badge.
Who it's for: anyone who wants a single composite number and an ordered fix list in about 30 seconds, before spending anything.
Pro: it is the only free tool here that combines a live multi-file scan, a composite score across five distinct categories, and a severity-ranked fix list. Most free checkers give you a pass/fail on bot access or a bare number. This gives you a number and the next moves under it.
Con, stated plainly: the free grader is a point-in-time scan, not continuous monitoring. It tells you where you stand today. To watch for regressions, catch a new page that lost its schema, or track readiness over weeks, you need the paid tier (Visibility, $29.99/mo as of June 2026). The free scan is a snapshot, not a watchdog.
Cloudflare publishes a free agent-readiness checker at isitagentready.com that evaluates whether your site is set up for AI agents. As the company sitting in front of a large share of web traffic, Cloudflare has a credible vantage point on what agents actually request, which makes it a strong free second opinion to run alongside a composite grader. We dug into its methodology and what its verdict does and does not cover in our breakdown of the Cloudflare agent-readiness score (as of June 2026).
Who it's for: anyone who wants a free, independent read from an infrastructure provider to confirm or challenge another tool's result.
Pro: free, fast, and backed by a company with real visibility into agent traffic patterns.
Con: it is a focused check rather than a five-category composite with an itemized, severity-ranked fix queue. Use it to confirm a verdict, not as your only diagnostic.
Knowatoa is primarily a prompt-sampling brand monitor, but its standout feature for readiness is the AI Search Console, which actively probes whether 24 named AI user-agents can access your site, checking robots.txt and configuration blocks and handing you fix guidance (as of June 2026). That is an access audit, not log analytics, Knowatoa itself notes it lacks traffic attribution, but for the specific "is my site reachable by named AI bots" question it is the most thorough free probe in this list. Entry pricing starts around $59/mo for the monitor, with a free one-off audit.
Who it's for: someone whose main worry is bot access, who wants to know exactly which of the major AI crawlers can and cannot reach them.
Pro: the 24-user-agent access probe is genuinely deeper than a generic robots.txt check, and it comes with fix guidance.
Con: it scores access, not the full readiness picture. No composite across content accessibility, schema, or protocol discovery, and no llms.txt generation. If access is one of five things you want graded, you still need a composite tool for the other four. We compare the two directly in our roundup of AI bot-tracking tools.
Several brand-monitoring and SEO suites bolt a crawlability check onto their main product. Otterly.ai includes a Crawlability Checker that examines AI-readiness factors (Lite tier around $29/mo). Semrush's Site Audit and Ahrefs's site tools both flag blocked AI crawlers as part of a wider audit. All three are useful if you already pay for the suite. None of them, as of June 2026, produces a composite agent-readiness score the way a dedicated grader does, and Semrush and Ahrefs have both publicly argued llms.txt is not worth bothering with, so they will not grade it.
Who it's for: existing Otterly, Semrush, or Ahrefs customers who want a readiness signal without adding a tool.
Pro: zero extra cost if you already subscribe, and the crawler-block flag is real and useful.
Con: a flagged blocked-crawler line is not a readiness score. You get a warning, not a 0-100 verdict across five categories, and the llms.txt dimension is missing by design.
Scrunch AI is the closest competitor to a full readiness platform: it does prompt-sampling, reads agent traffic from logs, serves clean HTML to agents through its AXP edge layer, and runs page audits that assess AI-readiness factors. For the readiness question specifically, the page audits are the relevant piece. The catch as of June 2026: Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore (around $225M, early June 2026) and is moving upmarket to enterprise, vacating the affordable self-serve lane, and it does not do llms.txt or WebMCP. Core pricing started around $250/mo.
Who it's for: mid-market and enterprise teams that want page audits inside a broader AI-visibility platform.
Pro: the widest feature overlap of any tool here, audits plus agent-traffic logs plus clean-HTML serving.
Con: price and direction. The move to enterprise after the Sitecore deal makes it a poor fit for a small team that just wants a readiness number, and it skips llms.txt entirely.
A free one-time scan is the right first move, and it is also a snapshot that goes stale. The moment you ship a new page, swap a theme, or edit robots.txt, your readiness can change without anyone running a check. That is the structural limit of every free tool in this roundup, including the Crawlytics grader: it grades the site as it exists in that one request.
Continuous monitoring is the paid half of the category. Instead of a snapshot, it re-scans on a schedule and alerts you when a score drops, when a previously allowed crawler gets blocked, or when a new section ships without schema. The honest framing is that a free scan tells you where you stand and a monitor tells you when you slip. The Cloudflare checker is worth re-running too, since an infrastructure-level view can catch access changes from a different angle, and we walk through reading its verdict over time in the Cloudflare agent-readiness score guide.
For most small sites, the right pattern is: free scan now, fix the high-severity findings, re-scan to confirm, then turn on monitoring once you have something worth protecting. Paying for continuous monitoring before you have fixed the obvious problems is spending money to watch a number you already know is low.
The recurring weakness across this category is the same one I flagged in our roundup of budget AI-visibility tools: most tools diagnose and then go quiet. They hand you a readiness score and leave the "now what" to you. A number that says "your readiness is 47/100" is a thermometer, not a treatment.
Two things narrow that gap. The first is a severity-ranked fix list, so you know the order to work in instead of staring at a flat report. The second is a tool that can serve the fix, not just name it. Crawlytics, beyond the free grader, generates and serves your llms.txt and ships clean HTML to AI fetchers, which means some of the findings have a one-step remedy inside the same product rather than a homework assignment. That is the line between scoring readiness and actually moving it.
When you evaluate any tool here, ask the same question every time: after it shows me a problem, does it tell me the next step, and ideally help me take it? If a checker only ever produces a number, treat it as one input, not your whole plan. If a specific symptom is that ChatGPT's agent cannot reach you at all, our piece on why ChatGPT agents cannot access a website walks through the usual culprits.
The fastest path to an answer is to scan, not to read more comparison posts. Drop your homepage URL into a free composite grader, get your 0-100 score and the five category breakdowns, and read the top three findings, since those are almost always the ones holding the number down. That whole loop takes about half a minute.
This post is the named-tool comparison. If you would rather follow the end-to-end process yourself, checking each signal by hand and interpreting the results, our companion AI search visibility audit walks through the DIY version step by step. For the conceptual background on optimizing for assistants, the AI search optimization resource is the deeper read. Either way, run the free scan first, then decide whether you need a paid monitor on top of it.
Written by Crawlytics Team. Crawlytics tracks AI bots, generates llms.txt, and powers WebMCP commerce, all from one snippet on any stack. See how it works →
Run a free agent-readiness scanner against your homepage. A composite grader like Crawlytics fetches your robots.txt, llms.txt, sitemap.xml, and homepage in one pass and returns a 0-100 score plus an itemized fix list across discoverability, content accessibility, bot access, protocol discovery, and attribution. Confirm the result with a second free checker that probes bot access, such as Cloudflare's isitagentready.com or Knowatoa's AI Search Console.
Yes, several. Crawlytics's grader at /agent-ready runs a live scan and returns a composite 0-100 score with severity-sorted fixes, no account needed for the public result. Cloudflare publishes isitagentready.com for free, and Knowatoa offers a free one-off audit through its AI Search Console. Ahrefs also has a free AI Visibility Checker, though it leans toward brand mentions rather than site readiness (as of June 2026).
On a 0-100 composite scale, aim for 80 or above (an A or B band). Below 60 usually means a structural problem: no llms.txt, key content rendered only client-side, or AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt. The score matters less than the itemized findings under it, since a single high-severity fix, like unblocking GPTBot or server-rendering your prices, can move you up a band.
An SEO audit asks whether Google can rank you; an AI-readiness audit asks whether AI assistants and agents can find, read, and act on your pages. They overlap on basics like crawlability and clean HTML, but readiness adds AI-specific signals an SEO tool ignores: llms.txt presence, whether named AI user-agents are allowed, protocol discovery, and citation attribution. A page can pass a full SEO audit and still score poorly for AI readiness.
Re-scan after any change that touches content delivery, robots.txt, or your CMS, and otherwise monthly. A one-time free scan is a snapshot; new pages, a theme update, or an accidental crawler block can quietly lower your readiness between checks. Continuous monitoring (a paid tier in most tools) catches regressions you would not think to look for.
This page is part of Crawlytics.app. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt