Check Your AI Visibility in 30 Minutes. No Tools Required.

Most owners guess whether ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity mention their business. You can check in 30 minutes with a notebook or spreadsheet, a browser and your own robots.txt file. This is the same first look behind our not showing up in AI answers page: ask the questions your buyers ask, write down what comes back, and rule out the technical blocks. It will not make you appear in anything. It will tell you which problem you have before you spend money. If you want the measurement side first, read how to measure SEO and AI answers before the click.

Why is it hard to show up in AI answers?

It is hard because nobody controls the answer and no engine has a list you can apply to. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and no special files or markup are needed. So the work is the same SEO work Google recommends for regular Search, and Google adds that meeting the requirements does not guarantee a page will be shown.

The other engines add their own uncertainty. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, and that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models, so the answers and links they show will vary, and that AI Overviews often do not appear at all. That is why this self-check uses three engines and repeats every question.

When a business is missing, the cause usually falls into one of four groups: AI crawlers are blocked, the pages are not indexed by the search engine the AI draws on, the pages describe the business in marketing language instead of stating answers, or nobody outside your own site mentions you. The steps below test the first two directly.

Minutes 1 to 10: Run the prompts

Ask each engine the questions a buyer would ask before hiring you, and ask each one twice. Use ChatGPT with search turned on (OpenAI says you can type / in the message composer and select Search), Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. Use a private window or a logged-out session; OpenAI says ChatGPT may use saved memories when it rewrites a search query, and signed-out people can still use ChatGPT search. Write five prompts, one of each type:

1. Category plus place: "best [what you do] in [your city]".
2. Problem: "how do I fix [the problem you solve]".
3. Comparison: "[your business] vs [a competitor]".
4. Brand: "what does [your business] do, and is it any good".
5. Buying criteria: "what should I look for when hiring a [your type of business]".

Run each prompt twice on each engine. That is thirty answers at most, and you only need to skim each one for your name and your link.

Minutes 11 to 15: Write down what you see

Record facts, not impressions. A spreadsheet with one row per answer is enough, with these columns:

• The exact prompt, the engine, the date and the run number.
• Whether you were named, linked as a source, or absent.
• Which businesses and which pages were named or cited instead of you.
• Anything stated about you that is wrong, such as an old address or a retired service.

Minutes 16 to 25: Check whether AI crawlers can reach the site

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser and look for rules that block the crawlers by name, or a blanket block under User-agent: * with Disallow: /. Then compare it with what each vendor documents.

• OpenAI: its crawler documentation lists OAI-SearchBot, used to surface sites in ChatGPT search, and GPTBot, used for model training. Disallowing GPTBot tells OpenAI not to use your content for training, and each setting is independent. To appear in ChatGPT search answers, OAI-SearchBot must be allowed, and OpenAI's help center adds that your host or CDN must allow traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses. OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours after a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust.
• OpenAI also lists ChatGPT-User, which may visit a page when a person asks ChatGPT a question. OpenAI says that because these visits are started by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply, and that ChatGPT-User is not used to decide whether content may appear in search. It is not the agent to check for search visibility.
• Perplexity: its documentation says PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity results and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. It also asks sites to permit its published IP ranges, which matters if a firewall sits in front of your site. Perplexity-User, its user-triggered fetcher, generally ignores robots.txt.
• Google: AI Overviews and AI Mode follow the same rules as Search. Google's AI features guide says a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, that robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control for crawling access, and that nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what is shown. Google-Extended, by contrast, manages whether Google may use your content to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI, and Google states it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

A clean robots.txt does not prove access, because a CDN or security plugin can still block requests. Run your most important page through the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, which Google recommends for checking the HTML Googlebot received when it crawled the page. If you do not own that access, ask whoever manages your site to check the firewall and the page's robots meta tag.

Minutes 26 to 30: Read the result

Sort your spreadsheet by what happened, then match the pattern to the likely cause. Treat it as a snapshot of thirty answers, not a ranking.

• Absent everywhere, even on brand prompts: start with access and indexing.
• Named on brand prompts but absent on category and problem prompts: the engines know you exist but have no reason to pick you. Check whether your pages state plain answers and whether anyone else mentions you.
• Named but with wrong facts: the detail is probably repeated from an old page or directory. Correct the source, then re-run.
• Cited but with no visits: a citation inside an answer is not a click, and the reader may never click at all. The measurement post linked above covers how to measure visibility that does not produce a visit.
• The same competitors every time: open the pages cited for them to see what a quotable answer looks like in your market.

What to do this week

Fix access first, because it is the only cause you can remove in a day. Then pick one answer to improve and re-run the same prompts later.

1. If OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot is blocked, change the rule or have your developer do it. OpenAI and Perplexity each say changes can take up to about 24 hours to reflect, and Google says recrawling can take from several days to several months.
2. If a page you care about is not indexed, treat that as a search problem. Our SEO service covers making a site easy for Google and Bing to crawl, understand and rank.
3. Pick one prompt where a competitor is cited and you are not. Write or rewrite a page so its first two sentences answer that question.
4. Correct any wrong fact at its source, starting with your own site and your Google Business Profile.
5. Repeat the 30 minutes in two weeks and compare. If you want twenty buyer questions run three times each across four engines, with a citation map and a written fix list, that is the AI Visibility Audit on our GEO service page.