Does ChatGPT see my website?

Three checks, from the quickest to the most certain. The first two take about a minute by hand, and the checker on this site runs them for you.

1. Is the crawler allowed in?

ChatGPT search reads the web with a crawler called OAI-SearchBot, and fetches single pages on demand as ChatGPT-User. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it the way that crawler would. Find the group that names OAI-SearchBot. If none does, the User-agent: * group applies. If the group you land on says Disallow: /, ChatGPT search cannot index you.

Blocking GPTBot is a separate matter. GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler, and blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search as long as OAI-SearchBot is still allowed. In my September census of the top 5,000 sites, 258 block both, and nearly all of them only meant to block training. If you are one of them, the fix is a few lines, and the guide on showing up in ChatGPT has them.

2. Is there anything to read?

Load the page and view its source: Ctrl+U in most browsers, or curl from a terminal. Look for the actual sentences of the page. If the source is mostly script tags around an empty div, the words are added in the browser, and a crawler that does not run JavaScript sees nothing. OpenAI has not said its crawlers run JavaScript, so assume they do not.

This is more common than people expect. In the census, 16% of 607 top-site homepages sent under 250 characters of text without JavaScript.

3. Ask ChatGPT, then check the logs

With web search on, ask a question your page answers and look at the sources it lists. Then ask it directly what is on your domain. If it searches and describes your real pages, it can see you. If it says it cannot access the site, or describes something years out of date, go back to the first check.

Keep in mind that ChatGPT will not cite you every time even when it can. It picks from many pages. What this check tells you is whether you are eligible. Winning the citation is a separate question.

Your server logs settle it. Look for the user agent strings OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User. A site that neither has ever visited is not in ChatGPT's search index.

If the answer is no

Check your site now. It reads your robots.txt for the AI search crawlers and tests whether your homepage sends readable text.