The problem
A business owner asks whether ChatGPT or Perplexity can read their website, and the market answers with a dashboard. A number out of a hundred, a chart that moves week to week, a claim that the brand was “mentioned” some percentage of the time. Almost none of it says where it came from. Most of these figures are produced by asking a model a handful of questions and treating the replies as if they were a measurement of the whole internet. The owner cannot check any of it, and the one thing they could actually act on — which AI crawlers reach their site, what those crawlers read, and who arrives afterwards — sits unread in their own server’s records.
What it is
PinMeOut is a WordPress plugin that adds an AI layer beside the SEO plugin a site already runs. It lets the owner decide, crawler by crawler, which AI systems may read the site, with a preview of the rules before anything changes and a way back afterwards. It records which AI crawlers actually visited, which pages they fetched and which pages nothing has ever fetched. It counts the people who arrive from assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity and the pages they land on. And it scores every page on whether a passage can be lifted out and still make sense on its own, which is what an assistant has to do before it can quote you.
Around the plugin, pinmeout.com carries six free checks that anyone can run on any address without an account: a site audit, an AI crawler test, a citability checker, an llms.txt generator, a robots.txt checker and a schema checker.
Why it was hard
- The honest version of the headline feature does not exist on standard terms. Knowing whether AI answers name a brand means paying a provider for every question, model and country, and Google’s terms do not allow its AI results to be stored and analysed. Everything the product reports had to be redesigned around what a site can observe about itself.
- Crawlers do not announce themselves consistently. Nineteen of them had to be identified, fourteen AI and five search, each with its own rules, and a mistake in either direction either leaks the site or hides it.
- A plugin that writes robots.txt is touching the one file that can take a site out of search entirely. Every change had to be previewable, reversible and never applied until the owner chooses it.
Measured on the site’s own server
The decision that shaped everything else is that nothing PinMeOut reports is estimated. Crawler visits come from the requests the site actually received. Referrals come from the visitors who actually arrived. Answer readiness comes from reading the page itself. There is no API key, no quota and no third party in the path, which also means there is no monthly bill underneath the product that would push its price up or its claims out.
What it refuses to sell
PinMeOut does not tell a site owner whether AI answers mention their brand, and it says so on its own pricing page. That is the figure most of this market leads with, and it is the one figure that cannot be produced honestly at a price a small business would pay. Refusing to sell it is a product decision, not a gap: a number the vendor cannot stand behind is worse than no number, because the owner will make decisions with it.
What it demonstrates
That a useful product in a noisy category can come from narrowing the claim rather than widening it. The plugin works alongside Rank Math, Yoast, AIOSEO and SEOPress instead of competing with them, which removes the hardest sale in WordPress — asking someone to replace a plugin their site already depends on. And it shows the discipline of designing around what can be measured, then stating plainly what cannot.
Where it is now
PinMeOut is live at pinmeout.com, built under Tothiq AI Services & Solutions in Kuwait. Version 1.0.0 of the plugin can be downloaded from the site, the six free checks are open to anyone, and the free edition is being prepared for the WordPress.org plugin directory. The model is a free plugin that stays free in full for crawler control, with a yearly Pro licence for per-page detail, automation and reporting.