Short answer
Arcline puts the questions your customers might ask to AI assistants that search the live web, stores every answer, and shows whether each one mentions you, links to your website or names a competitor instead. A second check tests whether AI crawlers can read your pages. Premium tracks 25 questions per website every week; Free gives one snapshot of 5 checks. The numbers are samples, and nothing can promise that an assistant will recommend you.
What are the two checks?
| Check | The question it answers | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Can they read you? | Are AI crawlers allowed in? | It fetches up to three key pages the way ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot and Bingbot do, without running scripts, and compares each with what a normal browser gets. It takes about 20 seconds. |
| What do they say? | Do assistants mention or link to you? | It asks AI assistants that search the live web a set of questions and stores each answer with the assistant, the date and the sources it cited. |
The first check finds blocks that make you invisible whatever your content is like: a host or CDN rule that answers with an error, a verification page shown to bots, a robots.txt rule, or text that only appears after scripts run. This check is on every plan, and you can run it again any time with “Check now”.
Which questions does it ask?
Arcline builds a set of questions from your own website, and the same data always gives the same questions. Premium tracks up to 25 questions per website, and you can add your own, each 8 to 300 characters long. The Free plan runs one snapshot of 5 of them, once for each website address.
- Questions about you, such as what your business is, whether it is a good choice and what its reviews say.
- “Best” searches for your main topics.
- Comparisons with the competitors you have added.
- Real questions that people ask about your topics.
- For local businesses, near-me searches for your town.
How do I read the results?
Each question shows “Mentions you”, “Doesn't mention you” or “Couldn't answer”, plus a chip when the answer links to your website, the competitors it named and the sources it cited. Open a question to read the stored answer in full.
- Measured: whether you were mentioned and whether your domain was cited.
- Rule-based guesses, labelled as such: whether the answer recommends you and its tone.
- Questions that name your brand are kept apart from the main mention share, because an assistant asked about you by name will usually mention you.
A “Seen by AI assistants” score appears once answers exist. It sits beside your other scores and is not part of the overall health score.
What does it deliberately not count?
Answers that come from a model's memory alone are left out, because they do not show what people see in AI search today. Only assistants that search the live web count. Arcline is built to ask Google's Gemini with Google Search, Perplexity and ChatGPT's web search, and which of them are asked depends on the services connected at the time. Arcline does not read Google's AI Overviews or AI Mode results themselves, and it cannot see private or personalized answers.
How often does it run, and what alerts me?
On Premium it asks your questions every week and keeps the history, and you can press “Ask them now”. Every question asked is one AI check, and Premium includes 150 AI checks a month, plus 40 more for each extra website. When the allowance is used up, the app says so and waits for the next month. Change alerts are part of Premium too. Two alerts appear on Home and Activity, never by e-mail:
- An assistant that cited your site for a question stops citing it.
- Your mention share falls by 30 percentage points or more compared with the week before, once there are at least 8 answers in each week.
What should I do with the results?
- Fix access first. A crawler that is turned away cannot read or cite you. See whether to block or allow AI crawlers.
- Look at which competitors are named where you are not, and what those pages answer that yours do not.
- Add direct, factual answers to your pages. Arcline can draft a FAQ page from your own site text for you to read first, and adds it automatically only on a Next.js site connected through GitHub.
- Treat llms.txt as optional: Google says it does not use it for Search, and Ahrefs found that 97% of such files got no requests in May 2026. See whether llms.txt works.
- Check again after a few weeks, because assistants update slowly.
How reliable are the numbers?
AI answers differ from run to run, place to place and person to person, so each result is a sample, and trends matter more than one answer. The basics still count: Ahrefs analyzed 1.9 million AI Overview citations and found that about 76% of the cited pages ranked in Google's top ten. Nobody can promise that an assistant will mention you. For the wider picture, read what AI visibility is, and see Features for the full list of checks.