Connect a website

A project is a website VisibleMax will crawl, analyze, and probe against. Connecting the right URL — public, HTTPS, and representative of what buyers see — is the highest-leverage setup step before your first scan.

Add a project URL

1. 1

   Open the app

   Sign in at /app. If onboarding is active, you will be prompted for a site URL immediately.

2. 2

   Enter the canonical site URL

   Use the homepage or marketing root customers would type — for example https://example.com. Prefer the domain you want AI systems to associate with your brand entity.

3. 3

   Confirm and create the project

   Save the project. On Free you can create one project. Double-check spelling; a wrong host wastes your lifetime Free scan.

Public sites only

The crawler must reach your pages from the public internet. Private staging behind VPN, IP allowlists, basic auth walls without crawl credentials, or localhost URLs will not produce a useful report.

• Good — production marketing site, public docs, public product homepage.
• Risky — password-gated demos, geo-blocked origins, challenge pages that never render HTML for bots.
• Bad — localhost, private IPs, intranet hostnames, expired TLS that browsers reject.

What the crawler needs

VisibleMax’s crawl stage fetches publicly reachable HTML (and related signals) to assess structural readiness. To succeed, your site should:

• Resolve DNS to a reachable host and return successful responses for key pages.
• Present meaningful HTML content for the homepage and important entity pages (About, Pricing, Product, Docs).
• Allow reputable crawlers in robots.txt when you want AI retrieval bots to see the same content (see free tools and technical audit guides).
• Avoid blocking all unknown user agents if you want any automated audit to work.
• Serve stable canonical URLs (minimize soft-404s and infinite redirect loops).

robots.txt and AI bots

Blocking every bot will also block useful AI retrieval agents. If your goal is AI visibility, review whether OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and related agents are allowed for the pages you want recommended. Use /tools for quick robots and llms.txt checks.

SPA and JavaScript-heavy sites

Single-page apps and heavily client-rendered sites are a common edge case. If critical copy only appears after client-side JavaScript runs, a crawl that primarily sees the shell HTML may under-read your entity clarity and answer coverage.

• Prefer server-rendered or statically generated HTML for marketing and entity pages you care about.
• Ensure Open Graph / title / meta description and main body text exist in the initial HTML where possible.
• If the public site is an app shell, point the project at a marketing subdomain that is crawl-friendly.
• After major rendering changes, Pro users should rescan — Free users get only one completed scan lifetime.

URL hygiene checklist

1. Use the final HTTPS hostname (after www vs apex preference is settled).
2. Omit tracking query parameters from the project URL.
3. Avoid deep links into ephemeral campaign pages as the project root.
4. Confirm the URL loads in an incognito window without login.
5. Confirm robots.txt and a sample product page load without CAPTCHA dead-ends.

Optional: check with free tools first

Before spending your Free lifetime scan, you can spot-check crawlability and machine-readable signals at /tools (llms.txt, robots, schema, and related utilities). These tools do not replace a full scan, but they catch obvious blocks early.