Your firm may be invisible to ChatGPT. Here is how to check in ten minutes.
People have started asking assistants the questions they used to type into Google, including which adviser to use. Whether you appear in that answer is decided by things most firms have never checked.
Published 6 min read Sources checked 24 September 2026
Filed under Answer engine optimization, AI search visibility, SEO, Professional services marketing
The short answer
Run four checks: can a crawler fetch your pages without JavaScript, does each service have its own URL, are your key facts in text rather than images, and does any page answer a real client question in its first 60 words. Crawlability is the strongest single citation factor (ahead of every content signal) and it is the one most firm sites fail.
On this page · 8 sections
A client used to search “mortgage broker Edinburgh” and see ten links. Increasingly they ask an assistant, and get a paragraph naming two or three firms.
You do not rank in that paragraph. You are either cited or you are not, and the mechanics are different enough from classic SEO to be worth ten minutes.
Check 1: does your site work without JavaScript?
Open your service page, disable JavaScript, reload. If the page is blank, a crawler that does not execute scripts sees the same blank.
Plenty of modern adviser sites (anything built as a single-page app, or a builder relying on client-side rendering) fail here. It is the cheapest and most consequential thing on this list.
Check 2: does each service have its own URL?
If your mortgage, protection and pension pages are tabs on one page, or sections reached by a #fragment, they are one document to a machine.
An assistant answering “who does equity release in Edinburgh” is looking for a page about equity release. It cannot cite a tab.
Check 3: are your facts text, or pictures of text?
Fee structures in a PDF. Credentials in a designed image. The team’s qualifications inside a carousel. All invisible.
Everything you would want quoted needs to exist as selectable text on a page that can be fetched.
Try it yourself: select the sentence you most want a client to hear. If your cursor will not highlight it, no assistant will ever repeat it.
Check 4: do you answer the question in the first 60 words?
Assistants extract answers, not brand impressions. A page that opens with “Welcome to our practice, established in 2004” has not answered anything by word sixty.
The structural advice from the citation research is unglamorous and specific: put the answer at the top of each section, keep paragraphs to two or three sentences, use question-shaped headings, and name the source of every statistic.
| Check | How | If it fails |
|---|---|---|
| Fetchable without JS | Disable JavaScript, reload | Highest priority. Talk to whoever built it |
| One URL per service | Click each service, watch the address bar | Split the tabs into real pages |
| Facts as text | Try to select the sentence | Move it out of the image or PDF |
| Answer in 60 words | Read the first paragraph aloud | Rewrite the opening, not the whole page |
| Freshness | Find the last-updated date | Pages cited by four assistants skew ~25% fresher than organic results |
What about schema markup?
Worth doing, and second-order. FAQPage carries the most weight for question-and-answer content, then Article and Organization. But schema on a page a crawler cannot fetch is decoration on a locked door.
Do the four checks first. They are free, they take ten minutes, and most firms fail at least one.
One caveat worth stating
These factor weightings come from third-party analysis of citation patterns, not from OpenAI, Google or Perplexity disclosing how their systems choose sources. Nobody outside those companies knows for certain.
The four checks above are still worth doing, because they are also just: a website that works.
Corrected 24 September 2026. This note gave the citation-factor scores as marks out of ten; Zyppy scores twenty-three factors from 9.5 down to 2 and states no scale, so the “out of ten” was ours. Its sources also said Ahrefs compared AI citations, AI Overviews included, with Google’s top ten (the 1,064-day average leaves AI Overviews out and is set against organic results generally) and put BuzzStream’s 0.04% in the wrong one of its two datasets. The entries are on the register.
Questions people actually ask
How do I know if my website appears in ChatGPT answers?
Start with whether it can be read at all: check the page renders without JavaScript, that each service has its own URL, that key facts are selectable text rather than images or PDFs, and that the opening 60 words answer a real question. URL accessibility is the strongest single citation factor.
What matters most for being cited by AI search?
In Cyrus Shepard’s May 2026 synthesis of 54 studies, URL accessibility scored 9.5, the top score of twenty-three factors: ahead of search rank (9.4), fan-out rank (9.3), preview controls (9.2) and query-answer match (9.2). Being fetchable outranks every content signal. The scores are correlations, weighted by how repeatable and how strong the evidence is and whether official documentation supports it.
Does schema markup help with AI citations?
It helps, but it is second-order. FAQPage carries the most weight for question-and-answer content, followed by Article and Organization. Schema on a page a crawler cannot fetch achieves nothing.
Sources
- 01 Cyrus Shepard, AI Citation Ranking Factors Analysis, Zyppy Signal, 7 May 2026, factors scored from 54 experiments, patents and case studies (we count 23), weighted by repeatability, strength of evidence and official support, documentation, technical specifications or patents. The scores run from 9.5 to 2, with no scale stated beyond that: URL accessibility 9.5, search rank 9.4, fan-out rank 9.3, preview controls 9.2, query-answer match 9.2. The author: “These are not confirmed ranking factors. Correlation is not causation.” signal.zyppy.com(opens in a new tab)
Weight: third-party synthesis of 54 sources, method stated; not a platform disclosure Re-checked: every six months Last read: 24 September 2026
- 02 Ryan Law, New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed), Ahrefs, 28 July 2025 (16.975 million cited URLs across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews and organic Google). URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini averaged 1,064 days since publication, against 1,432 for the organic search results: “on average, 25.7% ‘fresher’”. The 1,064 does not include AI Overviews. ahrefs.com(opens in a new tab)
Weight: vendor dataset, very large, method stated Re-checked: every six months Last read: 24 September 2026
- 03 BuzzStream, 50 AI statistics digital PR and SEO should know, updated 30 June 2026: across a 4-million-citation dataset tracked with Xofu, blog and content pages made up 53.46% of citations. In a separate BuzzStream study of news citations, whose size the page does not give, press releases published through syndication were “0.32% of news citations and 0.04% of the entire dataset”. buzzstream.com(opens in a new tab)
Weight: vendor dataset (a digital-PR firm), large; sells the conclusion Re-checked: every six months Last read: 24 September 2026
Checked 24 September 2026. Next scheduled check 23 March 2027. Numbers that move (leaderboards, live indices) are re-checked every 30 days; annual datasets and rules in force every six months; dated research once a year. If something here has gone stale before we got to it, tell us and we will correct it and say what changed.
Cite this note
Noxia, “Your firm may be invisible to ChatGPT. Here is how to check in ten minutes”, Field notes, 8 September 2026; sources checked 24 September 2026. https://www.noxia.co.uk/field-notes/is-your-firm-invisible-to-ai-search
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