AI Search

How it differs from a results page

A results page ranks documents and leaves the reading to the person. AI search does the reading. Google’s documentation on AI features in Search describes AI Overviews and AI Mode running several related searches across subtopics for one question, then composing a response with links to the pages it drew on, and says that Google shows a wider set of links this way than a single results page would. The output is one text, so the number of businesses that fit in it is small, and a business is either in the text or absent from the person’s view of the question.

Getting into the index behind it

Each product has its own indexer. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot indexes for ChatGPT search and that a site which disallows it is left out of ChatGPT search answers; GPTBot, the training crawler, is controlled separately. Perplexity’s crawler documentation names PerplexityBot as the indexer for its results. For Google, the same Googlebot index serves both Search and its AI features, and Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in them beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, with the same nosnippet and max-snippet controls applying. Indexing is not guaranteed in any of the three.

This is where the free check earns its place. Of 9,483 small-business sites audited in September 2026, 7.2% served a bot-protection challenge to a crawler that identified itself, which removes a site from every one of these indexes without anyone having chosen to. The figure is this site’s own, from what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.