How to check if ChatGPT knows your website

Last updated: September 2026

Method 1: Just ask the models

Open ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity and try prompts like:

• "What do you know about yoursite.com?"
• "What are the best tools for [your category]?" — is yours named?
• "Compare yoursite.com with [competitor]."

Ask each question at least 3 times. AI answers are generated fresh every run, so a single "yes it knows me" or "never heard of it" proves nothing. What matters is the pattern: mentioned in 3 of 3 runs is real visibility; 0 of 3 is invisibility; 1 of 3 is a coin flip.

Method 2: Mind the training cutoff

If your site launched recently, the model probably never saw it in training — that is normal, not a verdict on your site. But models with live web search (ChatGPT with browsing enabled, Perplexity) can discover and cite new sites at query time. If even they cannot find you, the problem is usually crawlability or quotability, not age.

Method 3: Check the technical basics yourself

• Does yoursite.com/llms.txt exist? (A markdown summary LLMs prefer over HTML.)
• Does your robots.txt allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot — or block them?
• Do your pages carry JSON-LD structured data and clear, factual statements a model can quote?

See the llms.txt guide and the citation checklist for details.

Method 4: Run an automated audit

Manual spot-checks do not scale and they lie by small sample. An automated audit runs the technical checks systematically and scores your site. Ours is free and needs no signup: quotalis.vercel.app/free-audit.

Frequently asked questions

ChatGPT knew my site yesterday but not today. What happened?

Probably nothing. Run-to-run variance is normal — that is exactly why honest measurement repeats each prompt multiple times and reports a range instead of a single score.

Does being in Google's index guarantee ChatGPT knows my site?

No. Google's index and an LLM's training data are different systems with different cutoffs. And for live-search answers, what matters is whether AI crawlers can fetch and quote your pages — a separate check from Google indexing.

Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?

That is a business decision, but know the trade-off: blocking GPTBot/ClaudeBot/PerplexityBot protects content from training use at the cost of becoming invisible inside AI answers. Many sites allow answer-time crawling while opting out of training where the distinction exists.