Guide
How to check whether your business shows up in AI search: ChatGPT, Google and Copilot
Short answer: Write down the questions your customers really ask, put each one to Google, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity on more than one day, and log whether your business is named or your pages are linked. Then check the two free reports that count it (Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools) and make sure your robots.txt isn't blocking the AI search crawlers.
People ask me "am I showing up in ChatGPT?" more often now, and it's a fair question. The honest answer is that there's no single dashboard for it. What you can do is a check that takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and tells you where you stand. This is the check I run on our own site, and I'll say up front what it can't tell you.
What does "showing up in AI search" actually mean?
It can mean three different things, and it helps to log them separately: your business is named in the written answer, one of your pages is linked as a source, or neither. A link is the one you can measure most easily, because a click can be counted. A name in the text is still worth knowing about, but nobody can count it for you.
For Google, the picture is simpler than most articles make it. Google's page on AI features and your website (opened 30 September 2026) says AI Overviews and AI Mode show links to help people find information, and that there are "no additional requirements to appear" in them, nor "other special optimizations necessary". To be a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. That's the whole entry ticket.
Step 1: Is the page even in Google's index?
If Google hasn't indexed a page, it can't be linked from an AI answer. Check this first, because it's the most common reason a new site is missing. I've written the steps in how to check if Google has indexed your website.
Step 2: Ask the questions yourself, and keep a log
Start with five to eight questions, worded the way a customer would say them, not the way you'd describe your service. For our own site those are things like how a Singapore property agent can follow up Facebook leads, or how a clinic can follow up treatment enquiries. Then put each one to:
- Google Search, to see whether an AI Overview appears and which links it shows
- Bing and Microsoft Copilot
- ChatGPT with search switched on
- Perplexity
Do it on different days, and more than once. I treat one answer as one draw, not a result, so I never report a single run as "we are cited" or "we are not". Log every run in a simple table:
| Date | Question | Engine | AI answer shown? | Sources linked | Your business named or linked? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Date of the run | The exact wording you typed | Google, Bing, ChatGPT or Perplexity | Yes or no | The domains, in the order shown | Named, linked, both or neither |
What I found when I did this on 28 September 2026: in Bing, the two industry questions above did show an AI answer, and it linked several dated articles and vendor blog posts. G-SYNQ was not among them. That was a single run in Bing only, so it says where to look, not how often we're cited. I could not test Google's AI Overviews that day, and I hadn't tested ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Step 3: Use the two free reports
Two of the engines give site owners some data, and both are free.
Google Search Console. Google says clicks from AI features are counted inside the overall Search Console performance report, under the Web search type. They aren't broken out separately, so you can't filter for "AI Overview clicks". What you can see is which queries and pages get impressions and clicks at all.
Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft added an AI Performance report in public preview in February 2026, and its announcement (opened 30 September 2026) says it shows total citations, average cited pages, the "grounding queries" the AI used to retrieve content, and page-level activity, across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. It also says what the report does not show: where in an answer your page appeared, how important the page is, or any ranking. And the grounding queries are a sample of the activity, not all of it.
You need to verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools first. If you already have Search Console set up, Bing lets you import your sites from it, and imported sites are verified automatically.
Step 4: Check the AI crawlers aren't blocked
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If it blocks the crawlers that power an AI search tool, that tool can't show you. Here is what each company says its crawlers do, from their own documentation, both opened 30 September 2026.
| Crawler | What the company says it is for | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI) | Surfacing websites in ChatGPT's search features | Sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" |
| GPTBot (OpenAI) | Making its AI models more useful and safe, so it is about training | Separate from search appearance |
| ChatGPT-User (OpenAI) | Certain user actions in ChatGPT, when a person asks for a page | OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, as these are user-initiated |
| PerplexityBot | Surfacing and linking websites in Perplexity search results; Perplexity says it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models | You may not appear in Perplexity's results |
| Perplexity-User | Fetching a page when a person asks Perplexity a question | Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt |
The sources are OpenAI's crawler documentation and Perplexity's bots guide. Both say a robots.txt change can take up to about 24 hours to take effect. Our own robots.txt, checked on 30 September 2026, allows all crawlers and lists the sitemap, so nothing there is blocked.
What you don't need to do
Google says you don't need "new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. So an llms.txt file isn't a requirement for Google. If a vendor tells you it's essential, ask them to show you where Google says so.
What I'd do with the results
| What the log shows | Likely cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Your page isn't indexed | Google hasn't crawled it, or something blocks it | Fix that first, using the indexing check |
| Indexed, but never linked in any answer | Other pages answer the exact question more directly | Read the pages that are linked, then write a dated page that answers the question in the first two sentences |
| Your business is never named, even when pages are linked | Few places outside your site describe you consistently | Keep the business name and description identical on your site and on the directory and social profiles you control |
| Robots.txt blocks an AI crawler | An old rule or a plugin default | Remove the rule, then check again after a day |
In my Bing runs on 28 September, two of the five pages linked for the property agent question showed 2026 in some form: one blog post was dated August 2026 and another had 2026 in its web address. That's a small sample and I'm not drawing a rule from it, but it's why I put a visible "updated" date on every guide, including this one.
What nobody can promise
No one can guarantee that an AI tool will name or link your business. I don't offer that, and I'd be wary of anyone who does. What I do promise on SEO work is the checking and the reporting, which is what the SEO page says. If you're a business in Singapore, this check matters most for the questions on my GoHighLevel page for Singapore businesses. And if you'd like to know how long any of this takes to show up, I've written that up in how long SEO takes.