How to check if DeepSeek can find your website (free tool)
DeepSeek answers most questions from trained memory and only cites live pages when its search mode is on. That makes checking your visibility trickier than firing off a prompt: you need to know which layer you are testing. Here is how to check both properly, manually and with a free automated test.
Why DeepSeek visibility needs its own check
DeepSeek’s default answers come from what its models learnt in training, and its cited answers come from a live web-search layer. A business can be present in one and absent from the other: an established brand might be named from memory while its blocked website never earns a live citation, and a new brand with a clean site might win live citations while being unknown to the trained models. Your ChatGPT or Gemini results tell you nothing about either.
Method 1: manual prompt testing
Worth doing, with eyes open:
- Ask DeepSeek real buyer questions with search off: “best [your category] in [your city]”, “alternatives to [market leader]”. This probes trained memory.
- Ask the same questions with search on and note which sources it cites.
- Ask directly: “what is [your brand]?” A hedged or empty answer means weak entity signal.
- Repeat across days and phrasings.
The limits: answers shift with wording, with whether search is on, and with which provider is serving DeepSeek’s open-weight models. One prompt tells you whether you appeared, never why, and never what to fix. And if you are absent from trained memory, that will not change until the models are retrained, so testing memory repeatedly is just measuring the same snapshot.
Method 2: test the underlying signals
The reliable check is the signals that decide whether DeepSeek can find, understand and recommend you:
- Crawler access. Are AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, and does bot filtering let automated agents through? 73% of websites block at least one major AI crawler in SearchScore’s 850,000+ audit corpus.
- Retrievability. Is your key content server-rendered and readable, or does it appear only after JavaScript runs?
- Entity and schema clarity. Can DeepSeek confidently tell who you are? 81% of sites are missing structured data and 92% have no llms.txt.
- Citable structure. Answer-first passages, concrete facts and clean headings that a model can quote.
- Third-party reinforcement. The references and mentions that both feed training corpora and reassure the live layer.
SearchScore’s free DeepSeek visibility checker inspects all of these on any URL in about 60 seconds, no email required, and returns a prioritised list of DeepSeek-specific fixes.
Method 3: track your citation rate over time
To know whether fixes are working, put the same questions to DeepSeek on a schedule and count the citations. SearchScore’s Tracker runs weekly scans across six engines including DeepSeek, tracks how often each cites you against your competitors, and charts the trend, so improvement is a number rather than an impression.
Reading the results honestly
If access checks fail, fix those first: they gate everything, including future training snapshots. If access is clean but DeepSeek’s memory does not know you, the work is references and presence, and the payoff arrives on retraining timescales. If the live layer skips you despite clean access, the gap is usually entity clarity or quotable substance. The DeepSeek SEO guide works through the fixes in priority order.