Are we showing up in ChatGPT?
Ask it what your buyers ask, check that AI tools can read your site, and measure the visits they send. Here is how to run each check and what the results mean.
The question usually arrives after a customer mentions they found a competitor through ChatGPT, or after someone on the team asks it about your business and gets a vague answer. It feels like a new channel with no instructions. Most of what decides whether you show up is familiar, though, and the parts that are new can be checked without special tools.
How do you find out whether ChatGPT mentions you?
Ask it the questions your buyers ask, the same way every month, and write down what comes back. A single answer tells you very little, because assistants phrase things differently each time. A fixed set of questions, asked on a schedule, shows whether you're named, whether you're linked and which sources it trusts.
Write the questions a buyer would type
Use their words, not yours: "who builds custom websites for hotels in Ontario" rather than your service name. Include one question that names your business directly and two or three that only describe the need.
Ask in a clean session
Use a temporary chat or a logged-out browser, so your own history and saved memories do not shape the answer. Ask the same wording each time.
Record three things per answer
Whether your business is named, whether your site is linked, and which other sites are cited. A spreadsheet with one row per question per month is enough.
Repeat monthly and compare
Look for movement over several months, not one good or bad answer. A change you made to the site needs time to be crawled before it can show up.
The cited sources are often the most useful column. If ChatGPT keeps pointing to a directory, a review site or a competitor's guide when it answers your buyers' questions, those pages are what it currently trusts for your topic. Check that your details on them are right, and ask whether your own site answers the question as clearly as they do.
Where does ChatGPT get its answers about businesses?
It draws on two things: what the model learned during training, and pages it finds live when it searches the web. Training happened months ago and you can't change it after the fact. The live search is the part your website can influence, and it depends on whether OpenAI's agents can reach your pages.
When ChatGPT searches, it rewrites the question into one or more search queries. OpenAI says its search uses third-party search providers and content from publishing partners, alongside pages found by its own crawler. OpenAISourceIntroducing ChatGPT search, 2024. That's why the basics of ordinary search still matter here: a page no search engine can find is unlikely to turn up in an AI answer either.
OpenAI runs separate agents for separate jobs, and its documentation says each robots.txt setting is independent of the others. OpenAISourceOverview of OpenAI Crawlers.
OAI-SearchBot
Finds pages to show and link in ChatGPT search answers
Your pages stop appearing in those answers, apart from plain navigational links
ChatGPT-User
Fetches a page when someone asks ChatGPT about it or shares the link
OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, because a person started the request
GPTBot
Collects pages that may be used to train future models
Your content should not be used for training. Search answers are unaffected
Other assistants work the same way. Claude and Perplexity have their own search and user-request agents, and Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing. A site that blocks Bingbot is hard for Copilot to find, and Bing is easy to forget when most of your attention goes to Google.
Can AI tools actually read your site?
Usually yes, but three things quietly get in the way: a robots.txt rule written years ago, a hosting or firewall setting that turns away bots it doesn't recognize, and important content that only appears as an image or after scripts run. Each is quick to check and cheap to fix once you know it's there.
Robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. Look for a Disallow: / under any agent you want to be found by, such as Googlebot, Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot. A rule that blocks everything for User-agent: * blocks all of them. If you use Search Console, its robots.txt report shows the file Google last fetched and any errors in it.
Hosting and security settings. Some hosting platforms and security services offer a switch to block AI crawlers. Cloudflare, which sits in front of a large share of websites, has blocked known AI crawlers by default on new domains since July 2025 unless the owner chooses otherwise at setup. MIT Technology ReviewSourceCloudflare will now block AI bots from crawling its clients' websites by default, 2025. A block like this happens at the server, so robots.txt can look fine while the bots still get turned away. Google's guidance lists allowing crawling "in any CDN or hosting setup" alongside robots.txt for exactly this reason. If you didn't set your site up yourself, ask whoever did.
Content in text. If your service list, prices or location only appear inside an image, a slideshow or a PDF, an assistant may not see them. The same goes for text that only loads after a visitor clicks. Put the facts a buyer needs in plain text on the page.
Training crawlers are a separate decision. Some owners are happy for their pages to inform future models, others aren't, and either is a reasonable business choice. The important thing is that blocking training does not hide you from search, so make that call on its own terms.
Does Google need anything special for AI Overviews?
No. Google's own guidance says "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." A page that can be indexed and shown with a snippet in normal results is eligible. The work is the same technical SEO that already helps your rankings.
Google is specific about what doesn't help: no new machine-readable files, no AI text files such as llms.txt, and no special schema markup. What it does list is familiar: let Googlebot crawl, link your important pages to each other, put key content in text, keep your Business Profile up to date, and make sure any structured data matches what visitors can see on the page. GoogleSourceAI features and your website.
That last point catches more sites than you'd expect. If your FAQ markup lists questions that were later edited or removed from the visible page, the markup now describes something that isn't there. A quick comparison between the markup and the page fixes it.
AI Overviews and AI Mode
- No special schema needed
Bing and Copilot
- Uses schema to help its language models understand a page
Other assistants
- Haven't said either way
Does AI use schema markup? Partly, and Microsoft's use of it matters for Copilot. Treat schema as a way to state your business details clearly, not as a lever for citations. Search Engine LandSourceMicrosoft Bing/Copilot use schema for its LLMs, 2025.
How do you check if your website has schema markup? Paste a page address into Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator at schema.org. Both list the structured data they find. Then read the page itself and confirm every question, price or detail in the markup is also visible to visitors.
If you want to limit how much of a page Google can quote, the controls are the ones that already exist for search snippets: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Check that none of them was added by accident, especially on service pages.
So is SEO dead now with AI? Google's own answer suggests the opposite. The same crawlable, clearly written, well-linked pages that rank in normal results are the pages its AI features draw from.
What makes an assistant more likely to name you?
Clear, consistent facts that it can find in more than one place. No one can promise that an assistant will name a particular business. What you can do is make your site easier for AI answer systems to understand and cite, and make sure the other places that describe you agree with it.
- Say what you do, for whom and where, on your own pages. A home page that says "we craft experiences" gives an assistant nothing to match against "hotel website designer in Ontario". A plain sentence near the top of the page does.
- Answer the questions buyers ask. If your monthly test keeps citing someone else's guide for a question about your service, consider whether a clear page or article of your own would answer it better.
- Keep your details consistent. Your name, address, phone and services should match across your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories that show up as sources in your test.
- Fix what the cited sources get wrong. An outdated listing that an assistant trusts can keep repeating old hours or a closed location.
- Tell search engines when pages change. Submit your sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing also accepts IndexNow, a simple notice your site can send whenever a page is added or updated, so fresh pages reach Copilot sooner.
None of this is separate "AI optimization". It's the same clarity that helps a buyer reading your site for the first time, which is a good sign you're working on the right things.
How do you measure the visits AI tools send?
Use three free tools together, because none of them shows the whole picture. Search Console covers Google's AI features, Bing Webmaster Tools counts Copilot citations, and GA4 shows clicks from assistants such as ChatGPT. Add your monthly question test on top and you have a record you can compare over time.
Search Console
Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, inside the "Web" search type
Part of your overall search traffic. Google does not give them their own line
Bing Webmaster Tools
How often Copilot and Bing AI summaries cite your pages, and the searches behind each citation
Visibility. Bing is clear that a citation is not a click
Google Analytics 4
Visits from assistants, often with chatgpt.com as the source
A floor. App clicks and copied links often carry no source at all
Bing's AI Performance report has been in preview since February 2026. BingSourceIntroducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview, 2026. In GA4, assistant visits land in Referral, Unassigned and Direct by default, so it helps to create a custom channel group that collects AI assistants in one place.
Put the three side by side once a month, next to your question test. A month of noise means little. A trend over a quarter tells you whether the site is becoming easier to find.
What did these checks find on our own site?
We ran the same checks on jardinestudio.com in October 2026 and published the result as a sample audit. Search engines and AI-related agents could reach every public page, and the structured data matched what visitors see. It's a useful picture of what a clean result looks like.
We tested 13 agents on six paths: Googlebot, Bingbot and 11 AI-related agents covering search, user requests and training. All of them could read the public pages. The robots.txt file blocks only /admin/, /api/ and /thanks, none of which a buyer needs to find. All 99 crawled addresses carried structured data with no errors, and all 156 questions in the FAQ markup appeared on the page for visitors, with matching answers.
The same audit found problems elsewhere: key pages were slow to show their main text on a phone, and some titles needed tidying. AI readiness was one section of the report, not the whole story, and that's usually the case. A site that's hard for buyers to use tends to have bigger problems than its robots.txt.
When is it worth paying for an audit?
Start with the free checks in this article and the Free SEO Audit, which scans up to 25 pages for crawl, heading and link problems. Pay for a full audit when you want every agent tested, the structured data compared page by page, and your Search Console and GA4 read alongside the rest of the site.
Can ChatGPT do an SEO audit? It can review a page you paste in and suggest clearer wording. It can't read your Search Console data, test how your server treats each crawler or compare every page's markup with what visitors see. The same question applies to agencies selling AI SEO services: ask which of these checks they actually run, and what you get to keep at the end.
The Website and Search Audit is reviewed by Alex and covers AI search alongside speed, content, the path to an inquiry and measurement. With your read access, it also checks how many visits arrive from AI assistants and whether your analytics are set up to count them. If you're weighing an audit against a one-time project or monthly SEO, SEO audit, focused fixes or ongoing SEO walks through the choice.
For contractors and local services with a small site.
For owner-led businesses weighing a redesign, ads or more SEO.
For bigger sites, or any site moving to new URLs.
Canadian clients pay in CAD and everyone else in USD. The audit fee is credited toward any follow-on work booked within 60 days of report delivery, including new builds and care plans. You pay before work starts, and if you change your mind before we start, you get a full refund. When you're ready, the audit order form takes your site address and a few details about what you need search to do.
References (6)
- Google. AI features and your website. Google Search Central. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers. OpenAI API docs. https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- OpenAI. (2024). Introducing ChatGPT search. OpenAI. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/
- MIT Technology Review. (2025). Cloudflare will now block AI bots from crawling its clients' websites by default. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/01/1119498/cloudflare-will-now-by-default-block-ai-bots-from-crawling-its-clients-websites/
- Search Engine Land. (2025). Microsoft Bing/Copilot use schema for its LLMs. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-bing-copilot-use-schema-for-its-llms-453455
- Microsoft Bing. (2026). Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview. Bing Webmaster Blog. https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview
Hero photograph by Omar Lopez on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash license.
Find out what AI tools see on your site.
The Website and Search Audit tests the main search and AI crawlers, compares your structured data with each page and reads your Search Console and analytics. Alex reviews it and walks you through the report.