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Vercel counted 569 million GPTBot requests and 370 million from Anthropic's crawler in one month on its network, and found that none of the major AI crawlers render JavaScript. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new domains since 1 July 2025 and set new defaults on 15 September 2026. So plenty of sites are unreadable to their fastest-growing kind of visitor, and their owners do not know it.

Ask ChatGPT the same buying question twice and you will often get two different lists of sources. NJIT researchers measured it across 11,500 real queries and found AI Overview source sets overlapping at a Jaccard score of 0.66 between two runs of the identical query, against 0.78 for the ordinary results page. A newer paper ran 50 questions across 6 engines 15 times each and found five of the six still naming brands they had never named before at run 15. So a single audit is not a measurement, it is one draw from a distribution. The repetition is the product, and you can get it with a spreadsheet for nothing.

Three AI engines answer the same buying question and cite three different kinds of source. Perplexity shows a numbered list you can read straight off the page. ChatGPT browses and names a handful inline. Google AI Overviews mostly pulls from pages already ranking underneath it. Those are three different games, and a single audit run tells you almost nothing about any of them, because the answers shuffle between runs. This is the test, the comparison, and the logging sheet that turns it into a trend.

There are three things that decide whether an AI answer names your brand, and only three. A clear entity, pages that can be quoted without editing, and mentions on the sites the engines already trust. This is what to do for each one, in the order that works when you have no team and no budget.

You'll find out, in about 30 minutes, whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews name you when your customers ask the questions that lead to a purchase. Five questions, three engines, one sheet, and a score out of 15. Then you'll know which of three levers to pull first.