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Chris Green shows how to test whether ChatGPT can see your page
Publication date: 18.09.2026
In brief
- ChatGPT and similar chatbots have no Search Console of their own, so Chris Green suggests checking pages with the chatbot itself.
- Take a distinctive 20–30 word snippet from the page and ask the bot for exact matches.
- If your URL comes back, retrieval is not your problem; if it does not, that is a reason to investigate, not proof.
Search Console tells you whether a page is in Google's index. AI assistants have no such dashboard, so site owners are left guessing whether their content even reaches the search that feeds an answer. Chris Green suggests a workaround in Search Engine Journal: ask the chatbot.
How the distinctive snippet check works
The method takes a few minutes and needs no tools.
- Pick a 20–30 word passage from the page with specific names, numbers or unusual phrasing. Generic sentences will not work.
- Ask the bot something like: search for this text and return only results containing that exact match.
- See whether your URL appears among the results.
- Repeat with other snippets: the bot may call different sources each time, so a single attempt proves nothing.
To automate it, Green built a Chrome extension called Exactly Matchy. It filters out boilerplate, picks distinctive passages with on-device AI and generates a one-click prompt for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
This is an inference from indirect evidence. A page missing from the bot's results does not prove it is unindexed, and a page showing up does not mean it is cited anywhere or drives traffic.
A list of suspects when the snippet does not turn up
This is where the method helps most, because it hands you a list of suspects. Green suggests working down a chain: can the page be discovered through the sitemap and internal links, does a WAF or robots.txt block it, does it render without running scripts, is there a noindex, and only at the end, is the content itself strong enough. In his words, without Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools or access logs you cannot answer for sure, but you get a list of potential issues.
On many sites we see, the most common culprit on that list has nothing to do with content. Plenty of shops sit behind Cloudflare or another protective layer with aggressive rules that drops unfamiliar bots, and the owner has no idea. We covered how bot filters can hit indexing in a piece on Cloudflare blocking AI bots. If the snippet does turn up but the bot never cites you, that is a different question: whether your page is a convincing enough answer. That needs its own measurement system, and one is described in our guide to measuring AI search visibility.
Why one test is not enough
The author is open about the weak spots. The result is only an inference. The bot may have called a different search source than last time. The check says only whether the page can be fetched. It promises nothing about visibility in answers, let alone visits. If the content is generic, there may be no distinctive snippet to test, and the test comes back empty by definition.
I like that it is an everyday practitioner's trick with no pretence of being a "methodology": forty seconds per page, zero budget. I do wonder whether real tools from the platforms will arrive before everyone gets used to crutches like this.
