How to Check If ChatGPT Can See Your Site

You've probably asked yourself: "Is my site showing up in ChatGPT / Perplexity / Claude answers?" Before you can fix AI visibility, you need to know whether AI crawlers can even reach you.

1. The robots.txt check (2 minutes)

Your robots.txt controls which AI crawlers can access your site. The critical thing to look for: are the retrieval crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) accidentally blocked? These are the ones that get you cited. Blocking them removes you from AI answers.

2. The UA-level fetch check (5 minutes)

See what your server returns for each crawler's user-agent:

curl -A "OAI-SearchBot/1.0" -I https://yoursite.com
curl -A "GPTBot/1.0" -I https://yoursite.com
curl -A "PerplexityBot" -I https://yoursite.com

200 OK = this user-agent is accepted · 403/4xx = refused · 503/challenge = your CDN/WAF is interfering. Keep the limitation in mind: a user-agent test only proves how your server treats that string. It is not a verification of the real crawler, which is also judged on verified-bot identity and its published IP ranges.

3. Use a checker that tests many bots at once

Manual curls test one crawler at a time — and there are 40+ that matter, changing weekly. A tool that checks your robots.txt against the full roster in one shot shows you the complete picture instantly.

Found a problem? Fix it, then re-check

Edit robots.txt, add an explicit Allow for the retrieval crawlers you need, and re-run the check to confirm the fix took effect. That verify loop is the difference between guessing and knowing.

Run the full 40-crawler check now: AI Crawler Visibility Checker.