vercel.com — AI Search Visibility Report

A page that is missing from an AI answer usually failed at one of three stages, in this order. Each stage only matters once the one before it passes.

1. 1 · Access — can AI crawlers reach the page?

   An engine can only cite a page its crawler is allowed to fetch. A robots.txt rule against GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, a noindex tag, or content behind a login removes the page from consideration before anything else is weighed. The AI-crawler and robots.txt checks above cover this stage.

2. 2 · Extraction — can the content be parsed once fetched?

   A fetched page still has to yield clean, machine-readable text. Copy that appears only after client-side rendering, an unclear heading structure, or absent structured data all make the answer harder to lift cleanly. The JSON-LD, FAQ-schema and llms.txt checks above cover this stage.

3. 3 · Grounding — is the page worth citing for that question?

   Reachable and parseable is not the same as chosen. Engines tend to cite the source that answers the question most directly and carries the clearest authority signals: a specific answer near the top of the page, a stated author or methodology, and corroboration elsewhere on the web. This is the stage a single scan can see the least of.

   See how TriRank writes citation-ready content

This is a diagnostic order, not a guarantee. Which sources an engine cites varies by question, by engine, and between runs of the same query — nothing on this list can promise a citation.