How do you get your business cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews?
Make your pages easy to reach and worth citing: let each engine's crawler in (Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot), make sure the pages are indexed, answer one question per page in its first paragraph, and publish specific facts only your business can (your process, timeframes, your own data), under the name of someone whose credentials can be checked. Then measure a fixed list of questions and keep going.
By Jarek Piotrowski · Last updated
The three engines side by side
| Engine | Crawler to allow | What it draws on | How to check yourself |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Googlebot (Google) | Google's search index: a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet | Search the question on Google. Search Console counts AI-feature traffic inside the Performance report's "Web" search type, not separately |
| ChatGPT search | OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI). GPTBot is OpenAI's training crawler, a separate choice | Pages OAI-SearchBot can reach. Sites that opt out aren't shown in ChatGPT search answers, except as navigational links | Ask the question with search on and read the linked sources |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot (Perplexity) | Sites PerplexityBot surfaces and links in Perplexity's search results | Ask the question in Perplexity and read the sources it links |
The free AI crawler checker reads your robots.txt rules for all three crawlers, and tests whether your firewall turns away OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot (a Googlebot test from our address would mislead, so it points you to Search Console instead).
1. Let the crawlers in
ChatGPT search uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, except as navigational links. Google's AI Overviews use Googlebot and Google's index. Check that your robots.txt blocks neither. Blocking a training crawler such as GPTBot is a separate choice: which AI crawlers to block, and which to allow.
2. Let Perplexity in too
Perplexity runs its own crawler. Perplexity says PerplexityBot is "designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity", and recommends allowing it in robots.txt and, if a firewall filters bots on your site, allowing its published IP ranges as well. Changes can take up to 24 hours to reach Perplexity's systems. A second agent, Perplexity-User, visits a page when someone asks Perplexity a question; because a person asked, it generally ignores robots.txt rules.
3. Make sure the pages are indexed
A page Google has not indexed cannot appear in an AI Overview. Search Console's page indexing report and URL Inspection tool show which of your pages are in. Google's guidance is that pages must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to be used in AI features. More on Google alone: how to get your business into AI Overviews and AI Mode.
4. One question per page, answered first
Put the question in the heading the way people ask it, answer it in the first paragraph, then give the detail. A page that tries to answer ten questions answers none of them clearly.
5. Publish what only you can say
AI answers already have the general facts. What they lack is your process step by step, how long things take with you, what it costs if you publish fees, and data you collected. In our own scans, the pages that were cited were the specialist ones that carried sourced facts nobody else had published: 10 of 12 specialist questions linked in the scan of 28 Sep 2026, and none of 3 broad ones (case study). That client's question list isn't published, because it would identify the client.
The data we do publish is the Australian AI Overview Index: 40 fixed questions across five industries, 3 runs each. In the scan of 23 Oct 2026, Google showed an AI Overview in 119 of 120 runs, and an individual business's own website was among the sources in 116 of those 119. Every question and count is in the CSV (free to reuse under CC BY 4.0).
6. Name the people behind the page
Show who wrote or approved the page and why they can be trusted: their role, qualifications and a link to a public register where one exists. Mark it up with structured data that matches what the page shows.
7. Measure, then write the next page
Check the same questions every month: is your site linked, is your business named, and who is cited instead. Linked and named are different results. For one firm, ChatGPT linked its pages on 8 of 25 tracked questions on 22 Sep 2026 (0 on 10 May 2026), while naming the firm in fewer answers over the same scans (58% to 33%). How to run the check yourself.
Our own weekly tracking doesn't cover Perplexity for every site: client reports measure Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT (how I measure). For Perplexity, ask your questions by hand.
If you would rather have it done, SEO and AI-answer visibility covers these steps each month, measured in Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT. To see where you stand every week, the AI visibility dashboard (A$99 to start, then A$29/month) asks your clients' questions in ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and shows which businesses the answers name instead of you.
Jarek Piotrowski runs LayerOps from Canberra: fast, lead-ready websites, and SEO and AI-answer visibility for professional and service businesses Australia-wide.