Chris Green shows how to test whether ChatGPT can see your page

Search Console tells you whether a page is in Google's index. For AI assistants there is no such panel.

Site owners are left guessing whether their material reaches the search layer an answer rests on at all. Chris Green at Search Engine Journal proposed a workaround: ask the chatbot itself.

How the distinctive-snippet check works

The method takes a few minutes and needs no tools at all.

1. Take a 20–30 word passage from the page with specific names, numbers or unusual phrasing. Generic sentences will not do.
2. Write to the bot along these lines: search for this text and return only results with an exact match.
3. See whether your URL is among the results.
4. Repeat with other passages: the bot may reach for different sources each time, so one attempt proves nothing.

To automate it, Green built a Chrome extension called Exactly Matchy. It strips boilerplate, uses on-device AI to pick distinctive passages, and produces a ready prompt for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in one click.

The list of suspects when the passage is not found

This is where the method is most useful, because it gives you a list of suspects.

Green suggests working down the chain: whether the page can be found through the sitemap and internal links, whether a WAF or robots.txt is blocking it, whether it renders without executing scripts, whether there is a noindex, and only at the end whether the content itself is strong enough.

Without Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools or server logs you cannot answer for certain, he says, but you will have the list of candidate problems.

For Ukrainian sites the most common cause on that list sits outside the content. Many shops sit behind Cloudflare or another protective layer with aggressive rules that cuts off unfamiliar bots, and the owner has no idea.

We wrote about how anti-bot filters affect indexing in our piece on blocking AI bots in Cloudflare.

If the passage is found but the bot still does not cite you, that is a different question: whether your page is considered a convincing enough answer. That needs a measurement system of its own, an example of which is described in our guide to measuring AI search visibility.

Why one test cannot be trusted

The author does not hide the weak spots. The result is only an inference: the bot may have reached for a different search source than last time.

The check tells you whether the page can be retrieved. It promises nothing about visibility in answers, let alone visits.

If the content is generic, there will be no distinctive passage at all, and the test comes out empty by definition.

I'd keep the check to hand anyway. Not for a report, but to rule out the worst case in forty seconds: that nobody can retrieve the page at all.

What I like is that it is an ordinary practitioner's trick with no pretence of being a "methodology": forty seconds per page, zero budget. I am curious whether the platforms will ship real tools before everyone gets used to crutches like this one.

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