“Are we showing up in ChatGPT?” How to answer the question every client now asks

It used to be "why aren't we on the first page of Google?" Now, more and more often, the question is "when I ask ChatGPT for a dentist in my area, why doesn't it mention us?"

It is a fair question. People do ask AI assistants for recommendations, and Google now shows AI-generated overviews above the ordinary results for many searches. A client who has paid for SEO for three years is right to wonder whether any of it carries over.

The problem is that most answers they will hear are either dismissive ("that's not real search") or overconfident ("we'll get you ranked in ChatGPT"). Neither is true. Here is a more honest way to answer.

What "showing up" actually means

There is no ranking in an AI answer the way there is a position in Google's organic results. There are two different things a client might mean, and it helps to separate them:

• Being cited. The answer links to the client's site as a source. Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT's search answers both show sources, and a citation is a visible, clickable reference.
• Being mentioned. The answer names the business in its text, with or without linking to it. This is closer to a recommendation, and it is what most clients mean when they say "showing up".

A business can be mentioned without being cited, when the assistant names it but links to a review site or directory instead. And it can be cited without being mentioned prominently, when its page is used as a source for a general answer.

What you can measure, and what you can't

You can check specific questions. Ask the same question a customer would ask, in the same country, and record whether the answer cites the site, whether it mentions the business, and which sources it cites instead. Repeat it for a set list of questions every month and you have something real to report.

You can also measure, for questions tracked across AI platforms, how often a domain is cited and on which platforms. That gives a broader picture than checking questions one at a time.

What you cannot do is get a complete, stable picture. Answers vary between runs, between users and between locations. There is no report that shows, for every question anyone asked, whether an AI answer cited the client. Anyone who presents a single "AI ranking" number is presenting an estimate as a measurement.

The foundations are ordinary SEO

This is the part clients find reassuring: most of what makes a site usable as a source is work you are already doing.

Google builds AI Overviews from its own index. A page Google cannot crawl or has chosen not to index is not going to be cited. So the basics from any technical audit still come first: no stray noindex on important pages, canonicals pointing where they should, no robots.txt rules blocking the content, and pages that load and render properly. If you have not run a proper audit on the site, start there. Our first-audit checklist is the order we use.

It is also worth checking the organic results for the same question. When an AI Overview appears, compare its sources with the pages ranking in the top ten. If the client's page is nowhere in the ordinary results for that question, that is usually the problem to solve first.

Check that AI search crawlers can reach the site

ChatGPT's search feature relies on its own crawler, called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's documentation says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT's search answers. It is separate from GPTBot, which OpenAI uses for collecting training data, so a site can allow one and block the other.

Two places to check:

• robots.txt. Look for rules that block OAI-SearchBot, or that block all bots with a broad rule. Some site owners copied a "block AI" snippet at some point without realising it also removed them from AI search answers.
• The firewall or CDN. Bot-protection settings on services like Cloudflare can block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them. If the client uses one, check its bot settings, not just the robots file.

Whether to allow training crawlers is a business decision for the client. Whether to allow search crawlers is a visibility decision, and most businesses that want customers will want to allow them.

Write pages that answer the question directly

AI answers are built from passages that answer the question being asked. Pages that bury the answer under a long introduction, or never state it plainly, give an assistant less to work with.

For the pages that matter:

• Answer first. If the page is about emergency dental appointments, say near the top who it is for, where you are, what it costs and how to book.
• Be specific. Prices or price ranges, service areas, opening hours, qualifications, turnaround times. Specific facts are easier to quote than general claims.
• Cover the questions around the main one. Google's "People also ask" boxes and related searches are a good free source for the follow-up questions customers have.
• Keep facts consistent. The address, hours and services on the website should match the Google Business Profile and major directories, so every source says the same thing.

None of this is new advice. It is what makes a page useful to a person, which is also what makes it useful as a source.

Get mentioned in the places AI answers cite

For many commercial questions, the sources an AI answer cites are not businesses at all. They are review sites, comparison articles, forums, local directories and news coverage. When a client is not mentioned, the most useful question is: which sources were cited instead, and is the client in them?

That turns a vague worry into a concrete to-do list. If an answer to "best physiotherapist in Leeds" cites two local directories and a newspaper round-up, the client can check they are listed in the directories with accurate details, ask happy customers for reviews on the platforms that show up, and look for genuine reasons to be included in local coverage.

When a client isn't in the answer, look at who is. The cited sources are the map.

How to report on it

Keep it simple and repeatable:

• Agree on 10 to 20 questions that real customers ask, in the client's own market and country.
• Check the same questions every month, on the same platforms.
• Record three things for each: cited or not, mentioned or not, and the sources cited instead.
• Report the trend across the set, not the result of any single question.
• Pair it with the organic ranking for the same questions, so the client sees how the two relate.

Present it as a leading indicator and a to-do list, not a scoreboard. The value for the client is knowing which sources matter in their market and whether the work is moving them into those sources.

What we built for this

AuditOpti includes two tools for this job. AI Search Optimization checks a question against Google's AI Overview and ChatGPT's web answer, and shows whether the client is cited or mentioned and which sources appear instead. AI Visibility shows how often a domain is cited across tracked AI answers, by platform. Both are on every plan, with the monthly limits on the pricing page.

Whatever you use, keep the promise small and the measurement consistent. Clients do not need certainty about AI answers. They need someone to check honestly and tell them what to do next.