Check three things: your robots.txt must not block the AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, plus Googlebot and Bingbot), your firewall must not refuse them, and your page text must be in the HTML rather than only appearing after JavaScript runs. An AI search visibility checker tests all three for one page.
Free AI search visibility checker. See whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Bing crawlers are allowed to read your site, and what stops AI assistants from citing it.
Open AI Search Visibility Checker → Free toolFree launch readiness check for your website. One click checks HTTPS, title, meta description, social preview, favicon, mobile viewport, H1, indexing and speed, with a score and a fix for each problem.
Open Website Launch Readiness Checker →AI companies run separate crawlers. OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for model training, for example. You can block training crawlers and still allow the search ones, so you can be cited without contributing to training data.
Bot protection and firewall rules can refuse AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them. Single page apps can also serve almost empty HTML, which many crawlers read without running scripts. Both make you invisible to assistants that would otherwise quote you.
It is your choice. GPTBot is used for training; blocking it does not stop ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot.
No. Some AI tools read it, but Google has said it does not use it.
It depends on when their crawlers next visit. There is no way to force it, but a sitemap and good internal links help.