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Is your site readable by ChatGPT?

You do not need special software to answer this question. You need five minutes and the view-source screen already built into your browser. Here is how to check, step by step.

What "readable" actually means

ChatGPT and most other AI assistants do not open your website the way you do. They fetch the raw file your server sends, before any JavaScript on the page has run. If your business name, your services and your location are only added to the page after JavaScript runs in a browser, an assistant's crawler never sees them. Readable simply means: are those words already in the raw file.

How to see what a crawler sees

  1. Open your website in a browser.
  2. Right-click anywhere on the page, away from an image or a link, and choose "View Page Source." On a phone, or if that option is missing, add "view-source:" to the front of your address bar and reload, for example view-source:yourbusiness.com.
  3. You now see the raw HTML: the exact file a crawler like GPTBot reads. Ignore the code. Use your browser's find tool (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) and search for a sentence you know is on your page: your business name, your phone number, or a short phrase from your homepage.
  4. If you find it in the raw source, that content is visible to an AI crawler. If you do not find it, but you can see it on the normal page, that content exists only after JavaScript runs, and a crawler like GPTBot never sees it.

What the empty-page problem looks like

When you view source on a site with this problem, you typically see a very short file: a handful of script and link tags in the head, and a body that holds little more than one or two empty-looking tags, sometimes literally a div with an id of "root" or "app." All of your actual words: your services, your address, your prices, get added to that empty tag later, by JavaScript, once a browser runs it. A crawler that does not run JavaScript sees only the empty shell. This is common with sites built on certain JavaScript frameworks and single-page-app builders, especially if nobody has taken a deliberate step to render the content on the server first.

robots.txt, in plain words

Every website can have a file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. It is a plain text file, not a program, that tells a well-behaved crawler which parts of the site it may or may not read. A line that disallows the whole site tells every crawler that reads it to stay away entirely. A line naming a specific crawler tells only that one to stay away. This file is a request, not a lock: it works because reputable crawlers choose to respect it. Check your own file by visiting yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you did not write it yourself, someone or something else did, so it is worth reading.

The crawlers, and what allowing or blocking each one means

  • GPTBot reads pages to help train and improve OpenAI's models. Blocking it keeps your content out of that process, but it does not stop ChatGPT from browsing a page live when a user asks it to.
  • OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind ChatGPT's search feature. Blocking this one specifically can keep your pages out of ChatGPT's search results.
  • ChatGPT-User fetches a specific page live, at the moment a user asks ChatGPT to look at it. Blocking it means ChatGPT cannot open your page on request.
  • ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot are Anthropic's crawlers, used respectively for general crawling and for Claude's search feature. Blocking either keeps your content out of that part of Claude's pipeline.
  • PerplexityBot crawls pages for the Perplexity answer engine. Blocking it keeps your content from being cited there.

For almost every small business, the goal is to be found, so the right setting for all of these is usually to allow them. Block one only if you have a specific reason to keep that content out of that particular tool.

What to do next

If you found your own words in the raw source, and your robots.txt allows these crawlers, your site is likely readable today. If you did not find your words, or your robots.txt blocks a crawler you want to reach you, you have found your starting point. Either fix belongs to whoever built your site: ask them, in plain words, to make sure your key content is in the raw HTML, and to check that robots.txt allows the crawlers you want to reach.