# Can ChatGPT see your site? A five-minute test

> Do this from your own laptop, in this order. Each step tells you something different.

Asking an assistant "can you see my website?" is not a test. The answer depends on whether that session
    browsed the web or answered from memory, and both happen. What you want is evidence that a crawler can
    reach the page and get something usable back. That is measurable.

## 1. Read your own robots.txt

Open `yourdomain.com/robots.txt` in a browser. Search for the names that matter: `GPTBot`,
    `OAI-SearchBot`, `ClaudeBot`, `PerplexityBot`, `Google-Extended`.

A block looks like this — and it means the assistant never sees the page, no matter how good it is:

      - `User-agent: GPTBot` followed by `Disallow: /`

      - or a wildcard: `User-agent: *` with `Disallow: /`, which blocks every crawler including the AI ones

## 2. Fetch your homepage as the crawler

If you can run a terminal command, this is the honest test — it asks for the page the way GPTBot would:

`curl -A "GPTBot" -I https://yourdomain.com`

A `200` means you were served. A `403` or `503` means something in front of your site
    — a firewall, a bot rule, a security plugin — is turning crawlers away even though robots.txt allows them.
    That case is the one owners never find by reading files, because the file says "allowed".

## 3. Check for a map

Open `yourdomain.com/llms.txt`. If it 404s, an assistant crawl has to guess which of your pages
    matter. It will guess wrong: usually the homepage, sometimes a blog post from 2019.

## 4. Ask the question your customer would ask

Not "do you know my site". Ask what a buyer asks: _"who does [your service] in [your area]"_. Then read
    the answer for names.

Three outcomes, and each means something different:

      - **You are named** — you are readable and being used. Work on staying current.

      - **Competitors are named, you are not** — the most common result, and the fixable one. This is
      a readability problem, not a quality problem.

      - **Nobody local is named** — the category may be too thin for the model to answer. Try the
      question with the city included.

## 5. Ask the same question twice, a week apart

Answers move. One mention is a snapshot; the useful number is whether it happens again. This is also the
    reason we built the scan to store results over time instead of showing a single score.

**What this test cannot tell you:** how often you are cited across all conversations. No
      tool can see inside someone else's chat. Treat any product claiming otherwise with suspicion — including
      ours.

HTML version: https://websitespa.net/guides-chatgpt-visibility-test