Retrievability
Retrievability is whether an AI engine can fetch your page and extract your claims as text. It sits upstream of every other AI visibility problem: a page that cannot be fetched or parsed cannot be cited, however good the content is.
The two failures
Access failure means the fetch never succeeds: a robots.txt disallow, a bot-protection challenge, a login wall, an aggressive rate limit, or a server returning an error to unfamiliar user agents.
Extraction failure means the fetch succeeds but the content does not survive it. The usual causes are content that only exists after client-side JavaScript runs, claims that live inside images or diagrams with no text equivalent, and pages where the substance sits far below navigation and boilerplate.
Why it is worth checking first
Because it is the cheapest thing to fix and it gates everything else. Earning mentions on the sources engines trust is slow work measured in months. Removing a robots.txt line or server-rendering a key page is an afternoon, and until that is done the slow work cannot show up in your own citation rate.
How to test it honestly
Fetch your own page the way a bot would: with the bot's user agent, from outside your network, and read exactly what comes back. Comparing that against what a browser renders shows the extraction gap directly. What a page looks like to you, signed in on your own machine, tells you very little about what a crawler receives.
Related terms
- AI crawlerAn AI crawler is an automated fetcher operated by an AI company to collect web pages for training corpora, retrieval indexes, or live answer grounding.
- Cited rateCited rate is the share of sampled AI answers that link to one of your own domains as a source.
- Supported rateSupported rate is the share of sampled answers that both name your brand and cite one of your own domains in the same answer.
Want this measured on your own domain rather than defined? Run a free report and see the rates, with their sample sizes and ranges, for your own buyer questions.