You can find out in about five minutes, and the answer is usually not what the owner expects. An AI assistant can only mention your business if its crawler can reach your pages, read them as real text, and, for ChatGPT search specifically, find them in Bing's index. Each of those is checkable with the crawler names the companies publish themselves, and none of it needs a tool you pay for.
Which crawlers are we actually talking about?
Every major AI company runs more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. One collects training data. One surfaces your site inside that company's own search or answer product. One fires only when a live user asks a question that needs your page. Blocking the first does nothing to the second, and it is the second that decides whether you appear in an answer. OpenAI's own crawler documentation puts it plainly: sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers."
| Company | Crawler | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT search answers. This is the one that matters for being cited. |
| OpenAI | ChatGPT-User | A live user's question. OpenAI says robots rules "may not apply" because a person asked. |
| OpenAI | GPTBot | Training data. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search. |
| Anthropic | Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, ClaudeBot | Search quality, live user fetch, training. All three honour robots.txt. |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User | Perplexity answers, and a live user fetch that generally ignores robots.txt. |
| Googlebot, Google-Extended | Search and AI Overviews, and a separate token for Gemini training that does not affect Search. | |
| Microsoft | bingbot | Bing, Copilot, and the index ChatGPT search draws on. |
Sources: OpenAI, Bots and crawlers; Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web; Perplexity crawlers; Google crawlers.
Step one: read your own robots.txt
Open yourdomain.ca/robots.txt in a browser. You are looking for any of the names above followed by Disallow: /. Two things surprise people here. The first is that a web designer or a plugin often added blocks years ago for reasons nobody remembers. The second is that on Cloudflare, a setting called managed robots.txt can insert a block for AI crawlers above the file you wrote, so the live file is not the file in your project. Read the live one.
Step two: fetch the page the way the crawler does
Permission is not access. A firewall, a bot-protection rule or a challenge page can refuse a crawler that your robots file invited, and no ranking report will ever show it. Google's guidance on AI features lists, as the first thing to get right, ensuring that crawling is allowed "in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure." OpenAI goes further and publishes the IP ranges its crawlers use so a site owner can allow them explicitly.
The check is one command per crawler, run from any computer with a terminal:
curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{size_download}\n" -A "OAI-SearchBot/1.4" https://yourdomain.ca/
Run it once with no -A to get the browser's number, then once per crawler name. You want the same status and the same byte count every time. A 403, a 503, or a body a fraction of the browser's size means that assistant is being turned away at the door. On our own domain, twelve crawlers currently receive exactly what a browser receives, and the readout on the AI Visibility Pass page shows every row.
Step three: is the text actually in the page?
Right-click the page and choose View Source. If you can read your own sentences in there, good. If you see a nearly empty shell and a pile of script tags, the words are painted in by JavaScript after the page loads, and most crawlers never see them. Bing names this outright in its Webmaster Guidelines: "hiding critical content behind client-side rendering" is on the list of things to avoid, and "content that cannot be reliably rendered may not be indexed or selected for grounding results." Google is gentler but says the same thing: server-side or pre-rendering is "still a great idea" because "not all bots can run JavaScript."
Step four: is the site in Bing at all?
Search Bing, not Google, for site:yourdomain.ca. ChatGPT's web search runs on Bing's index with OpenAI's own crawler on top, so a site Bing has never indexed cannot be cited there however well it does on Google. If Bing shows nothing, the fix is registration and a sitemap, and it is the subject of why your website needs Bing to appear in ChatGPT.
Step five: look for the two silent blocks
In that same page source, search for noarchive and nosnippet. Either one, in a meta tag or in an HTTP header, removes the page from Copilot citations and from Google's AI answers while leaving every ranking tool green. They are common, they are usually accidental, and they are explained in the two settings that hide a website from AI answers.
What does a pass look like?
Every crawler receives the full page. The words are in the HTML. Bing has the site. Nothing on any page says noarchive or nosnippet. That is the whole floor, and most small-business websites fail at least one step without anyone knowing. Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and that "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" to get there. Bing's guidelines add the honest limit that applies to everyone: "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences." Nobody can buy the citation. What you can do is stop being the business the machine cannot read.
Want this checked and fixed on your site?
The AI Visibility Pass runs every check in this article against your live site, fixes what it finds, and hands you the proof. Fixed quote, written guarantee. On a managed website it is included from launch.
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