What is 99Visibility, what does it check, and how much does it cost?

99Visibility is an AI visibility platform published by Torch99. It does four things:

• Audits brand answers. It asks AI platforms questions a buyer would ask and records how each one describes your brand.
• Flags wrong facts. It compares those answers with your brand facts and marks where a platform gets a price, a product or a detail wrong.
• Checks crawler access. It tests whether AI crawlers can actually reach your pages.
• Recommends fixes. Each finding comes with the change that addresses it.

The reasoning behind that mix is simple. An engine can't quote a page it can't fetch, and it often gets specific facts wrong about specific brands. Both problems are checkable. Wrong answers frequently trace back to the brand's own site, which is why it helps to understand how mistakes on your own website cause AI errors.

Paid plans audit five platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. The Free plan audits two. Plans differ by tracked keywords, audits per month and brands.

What this means in practice: one brand checking a handful of buyer questions fits Free or Starter. Teams running several brands look at Growth or Pro, because the brand limit rises with the plan. If you manage clients, read whether the platform suits agencies with several brands. For context on how this category is priced generally, see what drives GEO tool pricing and what AI visibility tools cost per month.

Google AI Overviews and Gemini are separate surfaces. Google states that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models and techniques, so a result on one says nothing certain about another. Scoring each platform on its own keeps those differences visible. If you care most about one engine, tracking Claude's answers about your brand and fixing wrong facts in AI Overviews go deeper.

Crawler access is where the evidence is strongest, and it fails silently. Three gates decide whether an AI crawler gets your content:

1. robots.txt, per bot. OpenAI documents GPTBot as its training crawler and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for ChatGPT search, and says "each setting is independent of the others." Blocking GPTBot doesn't remove you from ChatGPT search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot does. Anthropic and Perplexity run separate bots with separate purposes too.
2. The network layer. OpenAI's help centre says eligibility for ChatGPT search means allowing OAI-SearchBot and confirming your host or CDN allows traffic from its published IP addresses. A firewall can return a 403 to a crawler that robots.txt allows.
3. Rendering. Vercel's crawler study found ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them. Content that only appears after JavaScript runs may be invisible to them. Googlebot renders JavaScript, so this gap is specific to non-Google crawlers.

The platform's access check requests pages as each AI crawler and compares what comes back with what robots.txt says. The free AI Crawler Checker and robots.txt Checker on 99visibility.com run the same idea on a single page. Also check on-page controls: noindex and nosnippet keep content out of Google's AI features, which require a page to be indexed and eligible for a snippet. A noindex audit catches the accidental ones.

An audit shows what platforms said on the day it ran, which facts were wrong, and which crawlers were turned away. It cannot control what a model says next week.

Keep these limits in mind:

• Retrieval varies per query. As of October 2026, ChatGPT searches at the model's discretion and Claude.ai search is a user toggle. Any single visibility score, including this one, averages answers given with and without live web access.
• No rank exists to report. Google's AI reporting exposes impressions only, so no tool has position data to check an "AI rank" against.
• Fixes remove blocks. Opening crawler access, server-rendering key facts and correcting contradictions on your site are in your control. Whether an engine then cites you is not.

Be wary of any tool, this one included, that promises citations or a score. The honest output is a list of what is wrong and what is blocked.

Start with a snapshot before you pick a plan.

1. Run the free checker on this site. It asks up to three buyer questions and scores the answers. It is a one-time snapshot, not ongoing tracking.
2. Check crawler access for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot, and confirm your firewall doesn't block them.
3. Confirm your prices and product names appear in the raw HTML before JavaScript runs.
4. If you want recurring audits across all five platforms, start on the Free plan with no card and upgrade when you need more keywords or brands.

Does 99Visibility track Claude and Google AI Overviews? Yes, on paid plans. Starter, Growth and Pro each audit five platforms: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. The Free plan audits two platforms. Each platform is scored separately, because engines differ in how they retrieve and cite pages, and Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models and techniques.

Is there a free plan, and what are its limits? Yes. The Free plan costs $0 and covers 5 keywords, 1 audit a month and 1 brand, on two platforms. Signup needs no card. It suits a first look at how AI platforms describe one brand. Paid plans start at $49 a month for Starter, with 25 keywords and 15 audits a month across five platforms.

Does allowing GPTBot help my brand appear in ChatGPT? No. OpenAI documents GPTBot as its training crawler. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says each setting is independent. To be eligible for ChatGPT search, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and make sure your host or CDN lets its traffic through. Blocking GPTBot only signals that your content should not be used for training.

Can a crawler be blocked even when robots.txt allows it? Yes. A firewall, CDN or bot-management rule can return a 403 or a challenge page to a crawler your robots.txt allows. Nothing in robots.txt reveals this. The only way to see it is to request your pages as each crawler and record the response, which is what an access check does.

Will fixing what the audit finds guarantee AI citations? No. Fixes remove blocks: crawler access, content hidden behind JavaScript, accidental noindex or nosnippet tags, and contradicting facts on your own site. Those are in your control. Which pages a model retrieves and cites for a given question is decided by the engine, and no tool can promise that outcome.