About AI Readiness Check™
AI Readiness Check looks at how AI systems — training crawlers, citation crawlers, and AI-powered search tools — actually interact with a news website. Not how the site looks to a visitor. How it looks to the automated systems increasingly deciding what gets trained on, what gets cited, and what gets seen.
It checks crawler access and licensing signals, attribution and structured-data markup, and runs a real-world test of whether AI-powered search tools actually cite the site's journalism. Every scan produces a plain-language report with prioritized, role-specific next steps — built for publishers, editors, and technical teams, not developers.
AI Readiness Check was built independently by Yonatan (Yoni) Greenbaum, a product strategist with nearly 30 years of newsroom experience. It's a personal project, built on personal time, and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by any employer.
Have a question, found a bug, or want to talk about what this could do next? See Contact.
Why this is free
AI Readiness Check is free for every newsroom, always. This report exists to make AI-crawler exposure visible — not to sell you a fix. There’s no paywall on individual site reports, no upsell, no “premium tier” for the core check. If you’re an association, network, funder or researcher looking across many newsrooms at once, group views are available by request — but the single-site report stays free for everyone, forever.
A note on sites we can’t fully assess
A small number of sites use bot-protection software (Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX, and similar services) that blocks automated rendering as well as direct requests. These sites cannot be fully assessed for attribution markup, AI policy, or terms-of-service content, and are noted as such in their reports rather than scored as if the content were absent. If your site shows one of these caveats, the fix is on the bot-protection provider’s dashboard, not in robots.txt — see the notice on your report for allowlisting instructions.