ChatGPT and a planner's region: OpenAI's crawler rules, then your facts

What does OpenAI's crawler page settle?

OpenAI's crawler documentation describes four user agents, each with a separate job. Read them one at a time, because a rule in robots.txt names a token, and RFC 9309 is explicit that a group written for one token does not apply to another. The table keeps to what OpenAI states, with what a planner's decision about each token changes beside it.

Two consequences follow for a planner. Where your file gives OAI-SearchBot or GPTBot no group of its own, the rules written for * govern it. ChatGPT-User cannot be read that way: OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to it, so nothing private on your site, such as a client planning portal or a shared budget sheet, should rely on a Disallow line. A login is what keeps those closed.

ChatGPT can also answer from what its model learned in training data, without fetching anything, and that reflects your site as it stood when the text was collected. A robots.txt line does not reach back into it, which is one way a retired package or an old business name can turn up in an answer. What you can change is the page itself, which is what the next fetch reads.

Checking that OpenAI's crawlers reach your pages

1. Open /robots.txt and find the group that names OAI-SearchBot. With no such group, the * group governs it, and a Disallow: / under * would keep it off the whole site.
2. Run the crawler access check. It reads your file the way each of nineteen AI tokens would and reports which are allowed. For ChatGPT-User, the result is what your file asks of it, which OpenAI says may not apply.
3. Fetch your regions page the way the AI crawler would and look inside the result: curl -sL -A "OAI-SearchBot" -o regions.html https://www.example.com/regions/, then search regions.html for the name of a region you work in. The HTTP status code alone can mislead, since some challenge pages answer 200.
4. Open your availability and portfolio pages with JavaScript turned off. A booking calendar or a gallery drawn by a script can leave a fetcher that runs no scripts with nothing to read.
5. List where your facts live. A pricing guide sent as a PDF, a client portal on your planning software's domain, a venue list kept only on a social profile: each sits outside your own HTML pages, and a page on another host is governed by that host's robots.txt, not yours.
6. After changing a rule for OAI-SearchBot, wait: OpenAI says changes take about 24 hours. Then repeat steps 1 to 3.

Each step has a counterpart in our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026). 3.2% disallowed AI crawlers in robots.txt on purpose, while 7.2% sat behind bot protection that served a challenge page instead of the site, a block nobody wrote into the file. 3.0% delivered their content only through JavaScript, and 2.1% kept their real content in a PDF. All four figures cover every trade; the audit published none for planners.

What a regional question asks your pages to state

Take a question as a couple might type it: "full planning for a september wedding in the okanagan, about 80 guests". It has four parts: a service, a region, a month and a size. For an answer built from pages that ChatGPT search fetched to connect you with all four, a page of yours has to state each one. That is reasoning, not documentation; OpenAI's page describes access and says nothing about how answers are put together.

Naming the region the way couples name it

Regions have more than one name: a valley and its county, a coast and its towns, the name locals use and the one visitors type. Put each of them on the regions page once, in a sentence that says what you do there. List the towns you work in inside the region, and say where your travel fee begins, since the edge of your area is where a couple most needs to know.

A destination planner states two places: where the business is based and where it plans. A planner based in Toronto who plans in Tuscany and a planner based in Tuscany who plans for couples from Toronto need different sentences, and both need the languages they plan in and the currency their fee is quoted in. If you work in two countries, give each destination its own page, under one business name.

Keep your Google Business Profile in line with the regions page. Google's Business Profile guidelines ask for a precise address and/or a service area, the business's real-world name with no services or places added to it, and the fewest categories that describe the core business. A planner who works from home can show a service area rather than a storefront, and the regions it lists should be the ones your site names.

Do not publish a page for every town in the hope of catching its questions. A page for a town you have never worked in states nothing true, and a batch of near-identical town pages is the kind of thing Google's spam policies call doorway abuse, whose examples include pages targeted at particular cities or regions that funnel visitors to a single page. A page per region where you have real weddings to show is a different matter.

Venues, travel and dates, written so they stay true

A venues list is only as good as what stands behind it. Name a venue only where you have planned, give the month and year of the latest wedding there, and link each name to its write-up, which the article on reviews and real weddings covers. "Preferred vendor at [venue]" belongs on your site only if the venue lists you; otherwise it is a claim a couple can check and find false.

Travel terms need numbers, or brackets until you have them: the distance or the towns included, the fee beyond them, and for destination work what travel and lodging cost the couple, how many site visits are included and how many days before the wedding you arrive. A couple needs exactly those to compare a local planner with one who travels.

Open dates go stale fastest, and a stale one misleads the couple who reads it. Put the day you last updated the line beside it, and edit it when a date is taken. If you cannot keep it current, publish the parts that hold: how far ahead you book, how many weddings you take in a weekend, and what to send when asking about a date.

When the pages are written, measure whether anything moved: the panel in AI visibility for planners puts regional questions to all four assistants every month. The overview for wedding and event planners lists the other facts a planner's site should state.