How to help AI search find your website
Start with crawler access and useful pages. Learn what to check before chasing mentions in AI answers.
Seeing a competitor mentioned in an AI answer can make your own website feel invisible. Start by separating access from selection. A system needs usable sources, but making a page accessible does not mean it will be chosen for every answer. Work through the checks you can control first.
Name the search experience you care about
Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and ChatGPT search are different experiences. Keep a record of the question, the product you used and the sources shown. One response is a snapshot, not a reliable measure of your visibility across every question.
Choose questions a potential customer would really ask. A product comparison, a how-to question and a request for a business by name have different goals. Check whether your pages actually answer the questions on your list.
Check the relevant crawler’s access
OpenAI identifies OAI-SearchBot as the crawler for its search features and publishes access guidance. Review both your robots.txt rules and your hosting or CDN settings. Search crawling and model-training crawling have different purposes; check the named bot before changing a rule.
Our robots.txt checker can review a selected crawler’s rules for a URL. It does not simulate that crawler visiting through your hosting firewall, and it cannot tell you whether your page was used in an AI answer.
For Google’s AI features, check search eligibility
Google says supporting pages in AI Overviews and AI Mode need to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Its usual SEO guidance still applies; there is no separate special markup required for these features. Use Search Console to investigate the Google side of the problem.
Google’s guidance for AI features
Give the page a clear job
Choose one page and read it as someone who has never heard of your business. Can they tell what you offer, who it is for, what it does and where its limits are? Add the specific information a buyer needs. Keep product details current and make evidence easy to examine. These are useful editorial improvements even before you know whether an AI system will cite the page.
Measure visits and references separately
When ChatGPT sends a visitor to your site, use your analytics to review that referral. OpenAI’s publisher FAQ explains its referral tracking. A mention without a click and a useful visit are different outcomes, so keep both in context.
IndexLinks helps with page checks, supported search-engine notifications and connected Google status. Use those to investigate access and discovery. For a question about how often AI answers cite your business, you will also need a separate measurement process.
Use this information as a starting point, then verify the page-level evidence available to you.