Everything buyers ask before trying AI Ranked Monitor
Short, direct answers about what Monitor checks, how setup and alerts work, what it costs and who it suits. If a question is missing, write to editors@airanked.ai.
Written by Robin Marksman, founder and CEO33 questions
The product
What is AI Ranked Monitor?
AI Ranked Monitor is software that looks at your site daily through the eyes of AI crawlers and sends a Slack or email alert when something stops them getting in. It reads robots.txt for 18 AI agents, tests your firewall as 7 of them and rechecks up to 100 key pages for errors, noindex, JavaScript-only copy and missing schema. The features page shows each check with real screenshots.
Does Monitor show whether ChatGPT mentions my brand?
No. Monitor doesn't run prompts, record AI answers or report how often a brand gets named or cited. It answers an earlier question: can the crawlers and fetchers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity actually load and read your pages? If they can't, content work alone won't get those pages quoted. For answer tracking you need a different kind of tool.
Which AI engines does it cover?
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. For OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, Monitor reads their robots.txt rules and sends test requests as their agents. Gemini is covered through the Google-Extended rule, which controls whether Gemini apps can ground answers in your pages, plus the status, noindex and JavaScript checks Google's crawler also relies on. It doesn't test Googlebot itself or track Gemini answers.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Every daily check runs from our servers, the way a crawler reaches your site from outside, so all Monitor needs is your domain. The only optional install is a log connector, a short snippet that records real AI bot visits. The platform integration guides cover Cloudflare, Vercel and Next.js, WordPress and Webflow.
What it checks
Which AI crawlers does Monitor check?
Monitor reads your robots.txt rules for 18 AI user agents from 11 companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Apple, Meta, DuckDuckGo, Mistral AI, Amazon, Common Crawl and ByteDance. Search agents, user-triggered fetchers and training crawlers sit in separate groups, because blocking a training crawler is often deliberate while blocking a search agent usually isn't. Our AI crawler directory explains what each agent does.
How does the firewall test work?
Each day Monitor requests your homepage once as a normal browser and once as each of 7 agents: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, Claude-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. If the browser gets the page but an agent gets an error, a challenge page or nothing, that agent is flagged, and a second request confirms the block before you're alerted. Sites behind Cloudflare can start with the bot settings in the Cloudflare setup guide.
Which page problems does it catch?
On up to 100 key pages, Monitor checks the status code, new redirects, noindex in the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag header, and canonical changes. Each result is compared with the previous check, so a page that starts returning 404 or quietly picks up a noindex tag after a release gets flagged the next time it's checked.
How does it find copy that AI crawlers can't see?
It counts the words in each page's raw HTML, before any JavaScript runs, because most AI crawlers don't render scripts. A page is flagged as JavaScript-only when it has fewer than 120 words and either an empty app container or four or more scripts. You also get an alert when a page loses more than half its text.
Does it check structured data and llms.txt?
Yes. Monitor records the JSON-LD types on every key page and raises an alert when a type disappears, for example when a template change drops FAQPage from a pricing page. It also checks that /llms.txt still loads as a text file with real content, not an HTML page. Our llms.txt explainer covers what the file is and what the evidence says.
How is the AI Access Score calculated?
The score adds six parts to a total of 100: 35 points for robots.txt access, 25 for the firewall and CDN, 20 for healthy key pages, 10 for copy that loads without JavaScript, 5 for JSON-LD and 5 for llms.txt. Blocking training crawlers costs nothing. Homepage findings cap the total: a critical one at 60, a JavaScript-only homepage at 40 and any warning at 95. The score breakdown in the docs walks through a worked example.
Can I track competitors?
Yes, on the trial, Pro and Agency. Add up to 2 competitor domains per monitored site, and Monitor checks their robots.txt, firewall, llms.txt and homepage once a day, with their score next to yours. A move of 15 points or more gets a low-severity note in the dashboard, never an email on its own. For a one-off look, the free scan includes a side-by-side compare.
How does Monitor see real AI bot visits?
Through an optional log connector for a Cloudflare Worker, Next.js, WordPress or Node. It reports only AI agent requests, and visits claiming to come from OpenAI, Anthropic or Perplexity are matched to the IP ranges each of those companies publishes. Spoofed ones are dropped; other vendors count as unverified. When you test it, send the request as MistralAI-User, since a Claude-User or ChatGPT-User test from your own machine is dropped as spoofed. Connector setup has the code.
What doesn't Monitor check?
It doesn't check nosnippet or max-snippet directives, it doesn't test Googlebot, and it doesn't run prompts or record what any AI engine says about you. It also can't make an engine cite or rank you. Monitor reports whether AI crawlers get into your pages and can read them; what happens after that depends on your content and on the engines.
Setup and alerts
How do I get started?
Run a free homepage scan if you only want a snapshot, or sign up for the 14-day trial with your work email to monitor the site daily. Once you add a domain, Monitor reads your sitemaps, ranks the URLs and picks up to 100 key pages, putting pricing, product, comparison and integration pages ahead of blog posts. The getting started guide covers each step.
How long does setup take?
Most sites take about 2 minutes and no code. The first key pages are checked right after you add the domain, and the rest finish within the hour. Those first results become your baseline: day one shows what's already broken, and alerts start from the next check, so every later alert reports a change.
Can I choose which pages are monitored?
Yes. Open Settings, then Key pages, and edit the list: one URL per line, up to 100, all on the site you added. New pages are checked within the hour. The automatic list from your sitemap is a starting point, so swap in the pages your buyers and your pipeline depend on.
Where do alerts go, and how quickly?
Every alert lands in the dashboard's Alerts feed. Paste a Slack incoming webhook and add up to 10 email addresses, and critical alerts and warnings reach both, usually within 10 minutes of the check that found them. Several problems arrive as one message, and minor changes such as an edited title stay in the dashboard. The alerts reference lists every alert and its severity.
Is there a weekly report?
Yes. Every Monday the email addresses on a site get a weekly report showing the AI Access Score, the count of healthy key pages and whether anything critical happened that week. With logs connected, it also lists the AI agents that visited over the last 7 days and the pages AI assistants fetched for real users.
Can I see Monitor before signing up?
Yes, in two ways. The live demo is a read-only dashboard watching airanked.ai, with no signup. The free scan checks any homepage once, also without an account, and returns a report with its own shareable link in about 15 seconds. The scan box is at the bottom of this page.
Pricing and billing
How much does AI Ranked Monitor cost?
Pro is $99 a month for one site and Agency is $199 a month for up to 10 sites, and every site gets daily checks on as many as 100 key pages. Both start with a 14-day free trial with no card, and both run month to month in US dollars, with any sales tax or VAT added on top. The free homepage scan costs nothing. The plan comparison lists every feature.
What's the difference between Pro and Agency?
Only the number of sites. Pro covers one and Agency covers 10, and both include every check, Slack and email alerts, competitor tracking for 2 domains per site and verified bot visit analytics. On Agency each site keeps its own score, alert feed and Slack channel, which is how agencies keep client alerts apart.
How does the free trial work, and what happens when it ends?
The trial runs 14 days with Agency limits, so you can add up to 10 sites with 100 key pages each, and nobody asks for a card. When it ends, monitoring pauses, nothing is charged and your data stays. Pick Agency and every site resumes; pick Pro and the first site you added resumes while the rest stay paused. The billing guide explains switching plans.
Who handles payments?
Lemon Squeezy, which resells Monitor for us as merchant of record. It processes the card, collects any tax due in your country and sends the receipt, so we never see your card details. Plans renew monthly until you cancel, and a price change is emailed at least 30 days before it applies. The Monitor subscription terms spell out the rest.
Can I cancel or get a refund?
Yes to both. Cancel any time from the billing page or by emailing editors@airanked.ai, and your plan keeps working to the end of the paid month, with no partial refunds for unused days. Your first payment comes back in full if you request it within 14 days. Duplicate charges, charges after you cancelled and errors on our side are always refunded. The refund policy has the details.
Data and security
What data does Monitor store?
Your email, plan and trial end date; the domains, pages and competitor domains you monitor; the results of each daily check, such as status codes, titles, word counts, JSON-LD types and your robots.txt; the alerts sent; and your alert addresses and Slack webhook. One cookie keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. The privacy policy covers the rest.
Does the log connector send visitor data?
No. The connector reports only requests from AI agents, and for each one it sends the time, the page path, the status code, the user agent and the IP address. Requests from people are never sent. The IP address is what lets Monitor check visits against the lists OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish. The report goes out in the background after the response, so pages aren't slowed down.
How long is data kept, and can I delete it?
Individual bot visits are deleted after 14 days and daily totals after 120 days. Free scan reports are kept for 60 days and open to anyone with the link. Delete a site in the dashboard and its pages, alerts and visit history go with it straight away, and you can email us to delete the whole account. The data is stored in Cloudflare's database service.
Fit and alternatives
Who is AI Ranked Monitor for?
Three groups: B2B marketing and SEO teams who need their pricing, product and comparison pages readable for AI assistants; agencies running AI search work for several clients; and web teams who own the CDN, firewall rules and deploys that can block AI agents without anyone noticing. The use case pages go through each one.
Who is it not for?
Monitor isn't the right tool if what you need is prompt tracking, share of voice or a record of what ChatGPT says about your brand, because it never runs prompts. It's also more than you need for a site you only want to check once: the free scan covers a single homepage without an account.
How does Monitor fit next to a prompt tracker?
They measure different things. A prompt tracker runs buyer questions through AI engines and records which brands get named and which pages get cited. Monitor checks whether those engines' crawlers can reach and read your pages in the first place. If a firewall rule starts blocking PerplexityBot, a tracker can only show the effect once answers change; Monitor flags the block on its next daily check. Our comparison of AI visibility tools covers trackers.
Can I run these checks by hand instead?
You can. Read robots.txt and look up every agent token, curl your homepage once per user agent, view source to count words, and crawl the site to spot noindex and status changes. That works for one page on one day. Repeating it daily across 100 pages is the part Monitor automates, and our free robots.txt checker for AI agents handles the first step.
The company
Who makes AI Ranked Monitor?
AI Ranked, a software company founded by Robin Marksman, its CEO. AI Ranked builds and runs Monitor at monitor.airanked.ai, and this site is its home. Robin's background is 12 years in marketing, including VP of Marketing at Tech Stack Crunch. The about page covers the company and its editorial standards.
What else does AI Ranked publish?
Alongside Monitor, AI Ranked publishes original research, guides, free tools and a glossary on AI search, GEO and AEO, all written by Robin. The research includes a study of how 261 top sites treat AI crawlers. Questions about Monitor, billing or anything on the site go to editors@airanked.ai or through the contact page.
See what AI crawlers get from your site.
Run a free homepage scan (results take about 15 seconds), or start a 14-day trial to watch up to 100 key pages every day. No card either way.