googlebot simulator
Free Googlebot Simulator
Fetch any URL exactly as Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot would, and see the raw HTML they receive — status and redirects, robots.txt verdict for that specific bot, title and canonical, and the extractable text a crawler that cannot run JavaScript actually reads.
Built for googlebot simulator
View your page as Googlebot — and as the AI crawlers
This crawler simulator requests your URL from our server using a real published crawler user agent, then shows you the response exactly as that bot receives it: HTTP status, redirect chain, headers, and the raw HTML source. No browser, no JavaScript execution, no rendering — just what the crawler is handed.
Most Googlebot simulators stop at Googlebot. This one also fetches as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot, because those crawlers decide whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can describe your page at all — and unlike Google, they do not come back for a second rendering pass.
Common use cases
- Prove whether a page is JavaScript-dependent and invisible to AI crawlers
- Check whether robots.txt blocks a specific bot on a specific path
- Spot cloaking or crawler-only redirects by comparing bots to a real browser
What a crawler simulator does
A crawler simulator makes an HTTP request to your URL from a server, sending the user-agent string a real crawler sends, and hands you back the untouched response. No browser is involved. Nothing is rendered. You get the status code, the redirect chain, the response headers, and the HTML source exactly as it left your server.
That matters because the page in your browser is not the page a crawler receives. Your browser downloads the HTML, then executes JavaScript, fetches data, and paints a finished interface. What you look at is the end of that process. A crawler that does not render sees only the beginning — and if your content only exists after the JavaScript runs, that crawler sees an empty shell no matter how good the page looks to you.
Why raw HTML is the thing that counts
Everything an AI answer engine can say about your page comes from the text it managed to extract. If the extractable text is 40 words of navigation and a cookie notice, that is your page as far as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are concerned — they cannot quote content they never received. The same logic governs the parts crawlers act on directly: the <title>, the canonical link, meta robots, and JSON-LD structured data all have to be present in the initial HTML response to be reliable.
This tool counts the words a non-rendering crawler can extract and compares that against the size of the HTML it had to download. A large payload that yields almost no readable text is the fingerprint of client-side rendering, and it is the single most useful thing this page can tell you.
What this tool does not do
It fetches raw HTML and never executes JavaScript. So it shows you precisely what a non-rendering crawler sees — no more, no less. Be careful about what you conclude from that:
- Googlebot can render JavaScript. Google indexes the raw HTML first, then queues the page for a second rendering pass in a headless Chromium. So a page that looks empty here can still end up indexed with its full content — later, and only if the render queue gets to it and the JavaScript succeeds.
- GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot largely do not. These crawlers work from the HTML they are served. There is no second pass. What you see in the extractable text above is, for practical purposes, the whole page as far as they are concerned.
- We are not the real bot. We send the published user-agent string, but we request from our own IP addresses. A site that verifies crawlers by reverse DNS will treat us as an impostor and may serve us a different response than it serves Google. For a verified Google fetch, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
- Bandwidth limits apply. We read up to 2 MB of HTML, follow at most three redirects, and give up after ten seconds.
Keep going
- AI crawler check — see every AI bot your robots.txt allows or blocks across the whole site, not one page.
- Guide to AI crawlers — who GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are, and what each one actually does with your pages.
- robots.txt generator — write the rules once this tool shows you which bots are being turned away.
- SEO agent — the part after the diagnosis: writing, publishing, and shipping the fixes.
How to Use the Googlebot Simulator
- 1Paste the URL you want to test (a single page, not just the domain)
- 2Pick a crawler: Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or a regular Chrome browser as the baseline
- 3Read the JavaScript-dependency verdict first — it tells you whether the crawler got any content at all
- 4Check the robots.txt verdict for that exact bot and path, then the status code and redirect chain
- 5Scroll to the extractable text preview: that is the page as a non-rendering crawler reads it
- 6Re-run with a different crawler to compare what each one receives from the same URL
Frequently Asked Questions
AI Search Guides
Connect this tool to the bigger AI-search workflow
Technical fixes and free tools help most when they support a stronger page program. These guides explain how AI-search visibility, answerability, and tracking fit together.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization
The core GEO framework, case study, and operating model for AI search visibility.
AEO
Answer Engine Optimization
How to structure pages so answer engines can retrieve, trust, and cite them.
GEO vs SEO
GEO vs SEO
GEO vs SEO and SEO vs GEO: the difference between generative engine optimization and classic SEO, how much they overlap, and where AEO fits.
GEO SEO
GEO SEO
How generative engine optimization fits into modern SEO and why the overlap matters.
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