Search for an AI crawler checker and you will find plenty of free tools. That is useful: a fast check can reveal an obvious robots.txt rule and help a website owner ask a better question. But it is not the same as establishing whether an AI-facing request reaches useful content in practice.
A checker reads published rules. An audit establishes evidence. Use the checker to spot a possible issue. Use a human-reviewed access audit when a commercial decision, developer handoff or remediation program depends on the answer.
What a free AI crawler checker does well
- 01Reads declared policy. It can inspect robots.txt and show whether a named crawler appears allowed or disallowed under those published rules.
- 02Surfaces obvious conflicts. It may reveal blanket blocks, malformed directives, missing sitemaps or inconsistent machine guidance.
- 03Creates a quick starting point. It helps a marketer or developer decide whether deeper investigation is warranted.
That makes a checker a useful screening tool. The limit is that published policy and delivered behavior are different evidence classes. A robots.txt reading alone does not prove what a CDN, WAF, redirect chain or origin returns to a particular request.
What an access audit adds
| Question | Free checker | Human-reviewed audit |
|---|---|---|
| What does robots.txt declare? | Usually | Yes, with cited evidence |
| Are crawler classes interpreted separately? | Varies | Yes |
| What did an identified audit crawler observe? | Usually not | Reported separately |
| Are edge, redirect or challenge behaviors investigated? | No | Full Audit |
| Is there a prioritized developer handoff? | Generic tips | Evidence-linked remediation |
| Is the result human reviewed? | Usually not | Yes |
Why policy and observation must stay separate
Robots.txt expresses a site operator's declared instructions. A live response is an observation from a particular request, route, time and delivery path. Neither should be silently substituted for the other.
Digital Dominator reports those layers separately. That avoids two costly mistakes: treating an “allowed” policy verdict as proof of successful access, or blaming a firewall for a result that the evidence does not support.
When the paid audit makes sense
The paid service is designed for US brands, enterprise marketing teams, agencies and developers with a commercial reason to verify AI access. It is a good fit when a buyer needs evidence that can survive internal review, a clear technical owner and a prioritized next step.
It is not a prompt-monitoring dashboard, share-of-voice tracker or citation guarantee. Those measure different parts of AI visibility. The access audit answers the foundational technical question first: can the relevant website content be reached and interpreted without an avoidable access barrier?
What the customer receives
The AI Access Check includes an executive verdict, an identity-by-identity policy matrix with evidence, sitemap and optional llms.txt observations, a separate identified-crawler observation, prioritized remediation and human QA. The Full AI Access Audit adds deeper CDN, WAF, edge, redirect, TLS, response and challenge investigation, plus a walkthrough and post-fix re-check.
We publish enough for a buyer to understand the standard of evidence. We do not publish internal classification logic, detection signatures, complete test sequencing or the full construction of the audit system.