Guide · AI search

Showing up in AI answers:
what is actually documented.

Plenty of people now sell "AI visibility" to local businesses. Before you pay for any of it, read what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft themselves publish about how sites get into their AI answers. It is shorter than the sales pitch, it costs nothing, and most of it is technical housekeeping you can check in an afternoon.

Published 2026-09-21 · Formory Group

The short answer.

None of the three publishes an application form, a paid placement, or a special file you need for their AI answers. Google says there are no additional requirements for AI Overviews beyond normal search eligibility. OpenAI says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search if its crawler is not blocked, and that placement is not guaranteed. Microsoft says Copilot relies on the same crawling and indexing as Bing search.

So the job is: be properly indexed in Google and Bing, do not block the crawlers that feed these answers, and keep your business listings accurate. How to write pages that get quoted is a separate question, covered in our guide on how local businesses get cited by AI search. This one is about the plumbing.

What Google says about AI Overviews.

Google's page on AI features and your website, last updated December 2025, is blunt. To be eligible, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. There are no additional requirements and no special optimizations. You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or new markup.

It then lists the ordinary practices that still matter: crawling allowed in robots.txt and by your CDN or hosting, internal links so pages can be found, a good page experience, important content available as text, supporting images and video, structured data that matches the visible text, and up-to-date Business Profile information.

That last point is the one local businesses skip. If your hours, phone number or services on Google differ from your website, you are giving Google two versions of the facts. Our Business Profile setup guide covers getting that right.

Controls work the same way as in normal search: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what is shown. Google-Extended is a separate control for AI training and grounding in some of Google's other systems, not for Search.

What OpenAI says about ChatGPT.

OpenAI's crawler documentation names three user agents. OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features. GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train its models. ChatGPT-User visits pages when a user's request triggers it.

The settings are independent. You can allow OAI-SearchBot and block GPTBot if you want to appear in search answers but not in training data. If you block OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI says your site will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. Changes to robots.txt take about 24 hours to take effect.

OpenAI's help page on ChatGPT search adds two things. To be eligible, allow OAI-SearchBot and make sure your host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI's published IP addresses. And ChatGPT uses an approximate location from the user's IP address, and may share that general location with third-party search providers and with providers of local information such as nearby business listings. When it lists the search providers' privacy policies, Microsoft's is among them.

For a local business that means your ChatGPT visibility depends partly on your own site and partly on listings you do not control directly, which is one more reason to keep every listing accurate.

What Microsoft says about Bing and Copilot.

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines now cover Copilot directly. They say Bing and Copilot rely on the same core crawling, indexing and ranking, and recommend IndexNow, XML sitemaps and crawlable internal links for discovery.

Two directives matter here. According to the guidelines, NOARCHIVE prevents content from being used in Copilot responses, and NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet. If a template or plugin added either to your pages, you have opted out without meaning to.

Bing Webmaster Tools also has an AI Performance report, in public preview since February 2026, showing how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and unlike Google's Search Console, it reports AI citations separately.

An afternoon's checklist.

Read your robots.txt. Open yoursite.ca/robots.txt and look for Disallow lines naming Googlebot, Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot. Block GPTBot if you like; leave the others alone if you want to appear.

Check your host and CDN. Google names hosting and CDN blocking in its checklist, and OpenAI asks you to allow its IP ranges. Some hosting and security services offer settings that block AI crawlers. Ask your web person which ones are switched on and whether search crawlers are exempt.

Look for NOARCHIVE and NOCACHE in your page source if you care about Copilot.

Register with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap to both.

Put the facts in text. Services, service areas, hours and prices written on the page, not only inside images or PDFs.

Match your listings. Business name, phone, hours and services the same on your site and your Business Profile. For a quick outside read on your site's basics, try our free website check.

How to tell if it is working.

Google does not report AI Overviews separately. According to its documentation, traffic from AI features is included in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, together with everything else.

OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends, so you can see those visits in Google Analytics or similar. Bing's AI Performance report covers Copilot citations.

Beyond that, the honest method is manual: ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, in your town, and see who gets named. Nobody can guarantee you a spot, and anyone who promises one is describing something none of these companies document.

Sources.

Before you ask.

Do I need an llms.txt file to appear in Google's AI Overviews?

No. Google says you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

If I block GPTBot, will I disappear from ChatGPT?

Not from search answers. OpenAI treats GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (search) separately. Blocking OAI-SearchBot is what removes you from ChatGPT search answers.

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT or Google's AI?

Neither OpenAI's nor Google's documentation describes a paid placement in these answers. OpenAI says placement in ChatGPT search is not guaranteed.

How do I see traffic from ChatGPT?

OpenAI says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so those visits show up by source in your analytics.

Your turn

Same check,
run on your site.

The check behind this page is the one we ran on every business above. Put your own address in and it will load your site on a phone screen, look at the certificate and the page age, and tell you what a visitor meets. No email, nothing stored.

Check my website free Read the full GTA report

Want the same for
your business?

Tell us what you do and where you work. We will look at what you have now and say plainly whether it is worth rebuilding — including when it is not.

Start a project See our work

Showing up in AI answers:what is actually documented.