Prospective students are asking an assistant about you. Can it read your site?
Most universities look healthy in Google and are invisible in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The usual cause is not content. It is a bot rule at the edge, a robots.txt line, or course detail that only exists after JavaScript runs. This audit checks all seven in about a minute, from our servers, with real crawler User-Agents.
What we check
- 01
AI crawler policy
Which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows, split by answer engine and training bot.
- 02
Edge and WAF behavior
We replay your homepage as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and GPTBot to see if the edge blocks or challenges them.
- 03
Structured data
Whether CollegeOrUniversity, Course, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage schema exist and parse.
- 04
Course discovery
Whether course pages are in a sitemap and return readable server-rendered HTML.
- 05
PDF dependency
Whether fees, entry requirements and prospectus content are locked in PDFs.
- 06
llms.txt
Whether you publish an llms.txt map of the pages you want quoted.
- 07
Platform fingerprint
The CMS and edge stack, so fixes land in the right place.
What the audit looks at, and why each one decides whether an assistant can quote you
01
AI crawler policy
Which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows, split by answer engine and training bot.
02
Edge and WAF behavior
We replay your homepage as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and GPTBot to see if the edge blocks or challenges them.
03
Structured data
Whether CollegeOrUniversity, Course, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage schema exist and parse.
04
Course discovery
Whether course pages are in a sitemap and return readable server-rendered HTML.
05
PDF dependency
Whether fees, entry requirements and prospectus content are locked in PDFs.
06
llms.txt
Whether you publish an llms.txt map of the pages you want quoted.
07
Platform fingerprint
The CMS and edge stack, so fixes land in the right place.
Why is a university invisible in ChatGPT but fine in Google?
Google renders JavaScript and has crawled the site for years. Answer engines fetch far fewer pages, rarely execute scripts, and are often stopped earlier: a robots.txt line that names GPTBot, a bot-management rule at the edge that challenges OAI-SearchBot, or course detail that only appears after a client-side fetch.
Does blocking AI crawlers protect content?
It separates two different bots. Training crawlers collect data for model training. Retrieval crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot fetch a page at the moment a prospective student asks a question, and that fetch is how you get cited. Blocking the retrieval bot removes you from the answer without changing training exposure.
What does the audit actually request?
Public pages only: robots.txt, sitemaps, the homepage, a sample of course pages and llms.txt, requested from our servers at a polite rate with real crawler User-Agents. It never submits forms, never signs in, and writes nothing to your site.
What do you get at the end?
A score with the evidence behind it, findings ranked by what to change first, and the raw responses we saw so your platform team can reproduce each result from your own network.