Which assistants should you ask?
The ones your customers use. Start with ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, and add any other assistant you hear a customer mention. Each of those three names the crawler behind its search answers. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search (OpenAI). Anthropic says Claude-SearchBot improves Claude's search results and Claude-User may fetch a page when someone asks Claude a question (Anthropic). Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its results (Perplexity). With Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, that makes five places to start.
Google's two run on ordinary search. Google says a page needs no special optimization to appear in them; it has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet (Google Search Central). AI Overviews also show only when Google judges them additive to the classic results, so they often do not show at all (Google Search Central).
What questions should you put to them?
The ones a customer would type, in the customer's words, and the same ones every time. Write the list once and keep it. Six is enough to start.
- The service and the town: who does what you do near where you are.
- The emergency version, if your trade has one: who can come today.
- Your own name, plainly: what is this business, and is it any good.
- A fact about you: your hours, your address, whether you take a certain kind of job.
- A comparison your customers make: you against the two names they see beside yours.
- A question you answer on your site, to see whether the answer comes from your page.
What should you write down?
Three things per answer: whether you were named, what was said about you, and which pages the answer cited if it showed any. A spreadsheet with a row per question and a column per assistant is enough. Date every round.
Then sort what you found into two piles. Being left out is one problem, and the first thing to rule out is whether the assistant could read your site at all. Being described wrongly is the other. The answer may repeat a page somewhere that is out of date: an old address on a directory, a closed location still on your own site, a service you dropped. Or it may be an AI hallucination, a false statement with no page behind it. Correct every out-of-date page on your own site, ask the directories that list you to correct theirs, then check again next round.
Is your site open to the crawlers behind those answers?
Check before you conclude anything. A line in robots.txt that blocks OAI-SearchBot keeps a site out of ChatGPT search answers, and that setting is separate from GPTBot, which collects pages that may be used for training, so you can allow one and refuse the other (OpenAI). Anthropic says disabling Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User may reduce a site's visibility in Claude's search results, while ClaudeBot, its training crawler, is a separate choice (Anthropic). Perplexity-User may fetch a page when a user asks, and generally ignores robots.txt (Perplexity).
AI search crawlers can be blocked by a plugin or a template line nobody chose. The free scan reads your robots.txt and reports a search crawler blocked from your homepage as a finding, and a training crawler blocked the same way as a note, since that one is your call (how that check works). If the file asks crawlers like ours to stay out, the scan stops there and says so. A block set by your host or CDN is not in that file, so ask whoever runs your hosting about that one.
For Google, the usual SEO basics still apply to its AI features: crawling allowed in robots.txt, content reachable through internal links, the important words in text, structured data that matches what the page shows, and an up-to-date Google Business Profile (Google Search Central). Google still decides whether an overview shows. One setting is yours, though: a site set to Exclude in Search Console's Search generative AI control does not appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode (Google Search Console Help).
Is there a number you can track?
From Google, yes, in Search Console. Visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Performance report under the Web search type, together with visits from ordinary results (Google Search Central), so that total moves with both. Search Console also has a Generative AI performance report, open to every site since August 31, 2026. It counts how often links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, date and device (Google Search Console Help). Write down that count and the visits total each month.
None of ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity shows you the words its answers used about you, so your own record of answers is the measure of what they say. That is why it has to use the same questions each round.
How often should you check?
Monthly. One round tells you little, because an answer can change between two askings on the same afternoon. Six rounds with the same questions show a direction: named more often, named less, or the same wrong fact still appearing after you fixed its source.
If you would rather not run the rounds yourself, the AI Search add-on is for the Local plan: AI-answer sampling, entity and schema work, and citation seeding. The sampling is the same list-of-questions method, recorded so you can see the change.
A monthly check, counted
Here is the time one round takes for an owner with a short list of questions. The numbers are made up for the example: round guesses to replace with your own.
- Questions on your list
- 6
- Places you ask (three assistants, two Google features)
- 5
- Answers to read and record
- 6 questions at 5 places each: 30
- Time per answer, including the note
- 3 minutes
- Reading and recording
- 30 answers at 3 minutes each: 90 minutes
- One look at Search Console, both reports
- 8 minutes
- Total
- 98 minutes a month
An hour and thirty-eight minutes a month, or about two and a half working days a year. Most of it is reading, so keep the list short.
Add an assistant and the round grows by 6 answers, or 18 minutes. Add a question and it grows by 5 answers, or 15 minutes. The Search Console look stays the same.
Round numbers for the arithmetic, not a benchmark and not a forecast. Put in your own.
Questions
Can I tell ChatGPT to correct a wrong fact about my business?
Not directly. ChatGPT search reads pages through OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI). Correct the fact on your own site, ask the directories that list you to correct theirs, and check again next month. A fact with no page behind it may not change.
If no assistant names me, is my site broken?
Not necessarily. Check robots.txt first for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User and PerplexityBot, and ask your host whether it blocks them. A site that opts out of OAI-SearchBot, for one, is not shown in ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI). Then check that Google has the page indexed and eligible for a snippet (Google Search Central), and that Settings > Search generative AI in Search Console is not set to Exclude (Google Search Console Help). If all of that is fine, nothing you checked is keeping you out. The companies that run the assistants decide what their answers say, and the monthly record shows whether that changes.
Should I ask while signed in to my own account?
Only if you have never used that account to talk about the business. Otherwise use one account kept for these checks, or a session that does not draw on past chats, so nothing you told an assistant earlier can shape what it says. Then keep the account, the wording and the day of the month the same every round, so that when an answer changes, you know your way of asking did not.