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Is my website visible to AI? Five things that must be true

Your website is visible to AI search when five things are true. AI crawlers can fetch your pages. A search index lists them. Your text is in the raw HTML. A page answers the question being asked. Other sites mention your brand. You can check the first four in about 15 minutes. The fifth takes ongoing work.

By SeenLens · Last updated

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What must be true for AI to see my website?

AI search engines build answers from pages that they fetched or found in a search index. A failure at any step below can keep your page out of an answer. The table lists the five conditions, a way to check each one, and the guide for the fix.

Five conditions for AI visibility and how to check each
ConditionHow you check itFix guide
1. AI crawlers can fetch the pageRead robots.txt and compare responses for AI user agentsRobots.txt for AI crawlers
2. A search index lists the pageGoogle URL Inspection, Bing Webmaster Tools, a search for the exact URLNoindex blocks AI answers
3. The text is in the raw HTMLView the page source or fetch it with curlContent needs JavaScript
4. A page answers the questionSearch the questions your customers ask and read your first paragraphFirst paragraph does not answer
5. Other sites mention your brandSearch your brand name and ask AI assistants about itEarned over time, see below

1. Can AI crawlers fetch your pages?

A crawler that cannot fetch a page cannot read it. Two things block crawlers: a robots.txt rule and a firewall. OpenAI says that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Anthropic and Perplexity document the same kind of control for Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.

  1. Open https://your-site/robots.txt. Look for Disallow: / under User-agent: *, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
  2. Run the AI crawler checker. It shows the rule that matched for each crawler.
  3. Read the firewall comparison in the checker. A 403, a 429 or a challenge page for an AI user agent means a firewall block. See AI crawlers blocked by a firewall.

2. Is your page in a search index?

AI answers often start from search results. In an Ahrefs study of 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts (published 2026-04-15), the search channel had an 88.46% citation rate. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Microsoft's AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools covers Copilot and AI summaries in Bing. So check the index of each engine you care about.

  • Google: paste the URL into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. It tells you whether the URL is on Google, whether crawling is allowed and whether indexing is allowed. A page marked noindex is out.
  • Bing: verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and inspect the URL there. You can submit changed URLs with IndexNow. See IndexNow.
  • Brave and others: search for your exact page title on search.brave.com. If the page is missing, submit your site to that engine.

OpenAI's bots page does not list which other search indexes ChatGPT uses, so the most that you control is OAI-SearchBot access and being indexed by major search engines. Read how to check your AI visibility for reports that show citations.

3. Is your text in the raw HTML?

Some crawlers read only the HTML that the server sends. They do not run JavaScript. In December 2024, Vercel analysed traffic on its network and reported that the crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, ByteDance and Perplexity did not render JavaScript. It reported that Google's Gemini (through Googlebot) and Applebot did. This is 2024 data, so check each operator's current documentation.

A page built as a JavaScript app can look complete in a browser and empty to these crawlers. To test it, fetch the page without a browser and search for a sentence from your main text.

Terminal: is a sentence from my page in the raw HTML?
curl -s https://your-site/your-page | grep -c "a sentence from your page"

A result of 0 means the text is not in the raw HTML. Use server-side rendering or pre-rendering. The fix guide main content needs JavaScript shows how.

4. Does one page answer the question?

Being fetchable is not enough. The AI system must find your page useful for the question. Ahrefs found that ChatGPT cited only about half of the URLs it retrieved. Cited page titles matched the prompt more closely (0.602 similarity against 0.484) and matched the related sub-queries ChatGPT issued even more closely (0.656). Google describes the same pattern as query fan-out: its AI features issue several related searches across subtopics. See query fan-out.

  • List five questions your customers ask. Search each one.
  • Check that one page on your site answers each question in its first paragraph.
  • Give the page a title that states the question or its topic in plain words.
  • Use a URL slug in natural language. In the same Ahrefs data, results with natural-language slugs were cited 89.78% of the time, against 81.11% without.

The SeenLens scan checks the first paragraph, the title, the description, headings and page length. It cannot judge whether your answer is correct or better than another site's answer.

5. Do other sites mention your brand?

This condition is the slowest to change. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands (published 2025-12-12) found that branded web mentions correlate with AI visibility. The Spearman correlation was 0.664 for ChatGPT, 0.709 for AI Mode and 0.656 for AI Overviews. Backlinks showed a very weak link. The study picked brands with a Domain Rating above 40, and Ahrefs says correlation is not causation. A new site cannot read this as a promise.

To check the condition, search your brand name in quotes and see which independent sites mention you. Then ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini what your brand is. Write down the answers with the date. AI answers change between runs, so repeat the test before you draw a conclusion.

Can ChatGPT see my website right now?

Paste your page URL into ChatGPT and ask for a summary. If ChatGPT summarizes the real text, one fetch worked. That visit comes from ChatGPT-User. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, because a user starts the request. So this test can pass while OAI-SearchBot is blocked. Run the crawler checker for OAI-SearchBot as well. Read OpenAI crawlers explained.

How do I run the free SeenLens scan?

The scan above fetches one page and runs 43 checks. They cover AI crawler access, content structure, structured data, agent readiness and technical delivery. You get a score from 0 to 100, five dimension scores and the top three issues. No account is needed.

The score measures readiness. It does not measure whether any AI assistant mentions your brand. See how the checks work and a sample report. The AI Visibility Report lists every issue with cause, fix and evidence.

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FAQ

How do I make my website visible to AI?

Allow the AI search crawlers, get the page indexed, put the text in the raw HTML, answer a clear question near the top of the page, and earn mentions on other sites. The sections above explain each step.

How do I get my website on ChatGPT?

Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and your firewall, and publish pages that answer questions people ask. OpenAI's bots page describes no submission form. Nothing guarantees a mention.

Why doesn't ChatGPT show my website?

Common causes are a blocked OAI-SearchBot, a page that is not in a search index, text that needs JavaScript, or a page that does not answer the question. Work through the five checks in order.

Is my site indexed by Perplexity?

Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as the crawler that surfaces sites in its search. Allow it in robots.txt and your firewall, then look for its user agent in your server log.

Does a high SeenLens score mean AI assistants will mention me?

No. The score shows how ready the page is for AI crawlers. It does not query any AI assistant and it does not count mentions.

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