You do not need a platform subscription to find out whether AI tools can see your business. You need about ninety minutes and a willingness to write down what you find.
This is the audit we run for clients, in the order we run it. Every technical step in Part 1 comes from Google's or OpenAI's own published documentation rather than from someone's theory about how these systems work, and I've linked each so you can verify it yourself.
Work through it in order. Part 1 is the part most businesses fail, and it's the part that makes everything else pointless if it's broken.
This sounds basic. It is where roughly half the problems live.
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. Read what's there.
OpenAI runs several distinct agents, and they do different jobs. OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and OpenAI states that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. OpenAI explicitly recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt. Separately, GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's models, and disallowing it signals your content shouldn't be used for training. ChatGPT-User visits pages when a user's question prompts it, and because those actions are user-initiated, robots.txt rules may not apply (OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers).
That distinction matters enormously and almost nobody gets it right.
OAI-SearchBot allowed? If you've disallowed it, you have opted out of appearing in ChatGPT's search answers. This is the single most common self-inflicted AI visibility wound we find.GPTBot? Blocking it is a legitimate choice about training data. Just make sure it's a choice, and know it's a different question from search visibility.User-agent: * / Disallow: / left over from a staging site. It happens more than you'd think.A note worth internalizing: blocking GPTBot to protect your content from training while leaving OAI-SearchBot allowed is a coherent position. Blocking OAI-SearchBot and then paying someone to improve your ChatGPT visibility is not.
This one is subtle and genuinely costly.
Google states that to be eligible to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed, be eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and meet the Search technical requirements. Google also confirms there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI features (Google Search Central, AI features and your website).
Read that middle condition again. If a page can't show a snippet, it can't appear in an AI Overview.
The directives that limit what Google shows are nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, and noindex (Google).
nosnippet. Some SEO plugins and privacy-oriented themes add it by default.max-snippet value. A very low character limit quietly reduces your eligibility.data-nosnippet attributes wrapped around your most useful content. We have seen this applied to entire FAQ sections.noindex. Use Search Console's URL Inspection tool.Google's stated best practices for AI features include making sure important content is available in textual form, ensuring crawling is allowed in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure, and making content findable through internal links (Google).
Google is direct here: structured data is not required for eligibility in AI Overviews or AI Mode. What Google does list as a fundamental is making sure structured data matches the visible text on the page (Google).
LocalBusiness or Organization schema if you don't have it. It helps machines understand you as an entity even though it isn't an eligibility requirement.FAQPage schema to genuine FAQ content.Anyone telling you schema markup is the secret to AI visibility is overselling it. Google says otherwise in writing.
This is the part people skip, and it's the most informative ninety minutes you'll spend. You're going to ask the machines directly and write down what they say.
Write ten prompts a real prospective client might use. Not brand searches. Discovery questions. For example:
Prompts 8 through 10 test whether the models know you at all. The first seven test whether you get recommended when nobody has named you.
Add Gemini and Copilot if you have time. ChatGPT is the highest-value single check: it drove 87.4% of AI referral traffic in Conductor's analysis of 13,770 domains (Conductor 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks).
For every prompt and surface, record four things:
That last column is the most valuable output of the whole audit. The businesses named instead of you are your actual competitive set in AI search, and they are often not the competitors you assumed.
Being absent from prompts 1 through 7 is normal for a small or newer site. Being wrong on prompts 8 through 10 is urgent, because incorrect information about your business is worse than no information.
Do this in a logged-out or temporary session so your own history doesn't skew the results.
AI systems assemble a picture of your business from many sources. Contradictions weaken it.
This work is unglamorous and it is the foundation of entity clarity. There's no clever substitute.
AI systems quote content that directly answers a question. Most service-business content circles the question instead.
Query phrasing is the tell. Pew found AI summaries appeared for 8% of one-or-two-word searches but 53% of searches of 10 or more words, and 60% of searches beginning with who, what, when or why (Pew Research Center, 900 US adults, 68,879 searches).
Two pieces of encouraging math for smaller sites. Over 68% of terms that trigger AI Overviews get 100 or fewer monthly searches, and almost 80% sit in the 0–40% difficulty band (Semrush). And when ChatGPT Search cites webpages, the cited pages rank in traditional organic positions 21+ almost 90% of the time, with 50% of links in ChatGPT-4o responses pointing to business or service websites (Semrush).
You do not need to outrank a national publisher. You need to be the most specific answer to a narrow question.
Models learn that you exist partly from other sites. A site nobody references is hard to recommend.
Now decide what you'll track, and set expectations properly.
Two reality checks to keep you sane.
First, the volume is currently modest. Conductor found AI referral traffic accounted for 1.08% of all website traffic across 13,770 domains in 10 industries, growing roughly 1% month over month (Conductor). AI Overviews appeared in 25.11% of about 21.9 million Google searches analyzed, so the interception of ordinary search is the bigger story than the referral traffic.
Second, results are unstable by nature. Ahrefs' tracker shows a 70% chance of an AI Overview changing between observations, average content persistence of about 2.15 days, and 45.5% of cited sources being entirely new between looks (Ahrefs). If a vendor guarantees you a fixed position in an AI answer, they are describing something that does not exist.
In this order, genuinely.
nosnippet, get indexed. This is often a single afternoon and it gates everything else.Notice that steps 1 through 3 are maintenance, not marketing. Most of what people call AI visibility work is just doing the basics properly and then writing clearly.
How do I check if my website is visible to AI?
Start with yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm you aren't blocking OAI-SearchBot, then check your pages for nosnippet or noindex and confirm they're indexed in Search Console. Then ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode ten real client questions and record whether you appear.
Is there a free AI visibility checker?
Paid tools exist, but the manual audit above costs nothing and tells you more, because you see the actual answers and which competitors get named instead of you. Start manual, then buy a tool only if you need to track many prompts over time.
Does blocking GPTBot hurt my ChatGPT visibility?
Not directly. GPTBot relates to training data, while OAI-SearchBot governs whether you appear in ChatGPT's search answers. You can block GPTBot and still be visible in ChatGPT search, provided OAI-SearchBot is allowed.
Do I need schema markup to appear in AI Overviews?
No. Google states structured data is not required for eligibility. It still helps machines understand your business, and Google does ask that your structured data match your visible text.
How often should I audit AI visibility?
Run the full audit quarterly and the Part 2 prompt battery monthly. Given how volatile AI answers are, a single reading tells you very little and a trend line tells you a lot.
Why does my competitor show up in ChatGPT and I don't?
Usually one of three things: they're crawlable and you aren't, they publish specific answers to real questions and you publish general marketing copy, or they're mentioned across more third-party sites. The audit above tells you which.
Most AI visibility problems are not mysterious. They're a blocked crawler, a nosnippet tag someone added years ago, inconsistent business information, and content that never answers a question directly.
Fix those and you've done most of what can be done. The rest is patience, because this layer is genuinely volatile and genuinely small today, even as it grows and increasingly shapes how people decide.
If you want the practical companion to this audit, we wrote a walkthrough of getting your business to show up on ChatGPT specifically. And if you're still sorting out what the acronyms mean, our take on GEO versus AEO versus SEO is the shorter read.
If you'd rather have someone run this audit properly and hand you a prioritized list, that's what we do. We'll tell you honestly which parts you've already got covered, and if Part 1 is your whole problem we'll say so rather than sell you a bigger engagement than you need.
Book a 30-minute intro call and we'll run the first few steps together on the call.
