Aensight Journal / AI visibility

How does AI visibility work?

AI visibility works in three steps. AI tools like ChatGPT read web pages with their own bots. When someone asks a question, they pull a few useful passages from what they have read. Then they write an answer and name some sources. Your page has to pass all three steps, not just rank well.

By Ayushi Agrawal, Founder, Aensight. Published October 7, 2026.

Those three steps happen in order: reading, choosing, then answering. Work on your words only pays off at the last step, so a page blocked at the first one never gets that far.

If the term itself is new to you, start here: What is AI visibility

What happens before anyone asks a question?

Your pages get read first. Most AI companies use two separate bots: one finds pages to show in answers, the other collects pages to train their models. Blocking the wrong one costs you visibility you wanted to keep.

OpenAI's search bot is OAI-SearchBot, and the company says sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." GPTBot is the training bot. Perplexity and Anthropic split theirs the same way. (OpenAI)

Google is different, and this is the trap. There is no Google AI bot to allow. Your page has to be in Google already and allowed to show a short preview, which Google calls a snippet. Google does offer a control named Google-Extended, and it is easy to assume it is the AI switch. It is not: Google says it only affects Gemini model training, not whether you appear in Google Search. (Google Search Central)

Why does the same question give different answers?

Nothing here is promised, and the search runs fresh every time. Google says so plainly: "Just because a page meets all requirements, best practices, and complies with the policies, doesn't mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content. Indexing and serving aren't guaranteed." (Google Search Central)

AI tools also widen your question. Google calls this query fan-out: it quietly runs several related searches alongside the one typed. So you compete on questions you never wrote a page for.

One check tells you nothing. Ask the same question a few times over two weeks and write down what you see.

What can you actually do about it, without a developer?

Three things, all settings you can reach yourself.

First, let the right bots in. In Yoast SEO, go to Tools, then File Editor, and check robots.txt does not block search bots. If that menu is missing, your host has file editing switched off. Other SEO plugins have the same editor. Check your security plugin too, since some block unfamiliar bots by default. (Yoast)

Second, make sure the page can show up. Go to Settings, then Reading, and check that "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is not ticked. Then clear any "noindex" setting on pages you want found. (WordPress)

Third, answer the question in the first paragraph. AI tools quote passages, not whole pages. Put the plain answer at the top, under a clear heading, in words that stand on their own.

We applied eleven fixes like these to our own site and wrote down what each AI tool said before and after: Does fixing technical SEO actually change what AI says about you

What is the short version?

Let the search bots in, check the page can appear, and put the answer at the top. Doing it by hand, page by page, is where owners stop. Aensight finds what is missing on your site and applies the fixes for you, four of them free and twelve on the Starter plan at EUR 19 a month, with one-click undo on every fix. That is our own description of the product, not an independently audited claim.

If you would rather not check all of this by hand, run the free audit and it will list what is missing on your own site: Audit my site