If you’ve ever wondered whether your business is showing up on ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other answer engines, welcome to the future of search! It took us months of SEO work before we even realized we were ranking on answer engines. It took two people back-to-back telling us they found us at the top of ChatGPT before this question sparked:
How do you even check if you’re ranking?
We dug deeper and uncovered clear signs that your website is being read, crawled, and recommended by AI answer engines and not just traditional search results.
Before we go any further, here’s the difference between the two:
- SEO focuses on search rankings.
- AEO focuses on answer engine rankings.
For businesses of all sizes, you’ll need both. And AEO is where things are heading, fast. So monitor where your company ranks on answer engines with the following:
1. Try the Simple Test First: Ask ChatGPT Directly
Start with some prompts to see if you appear:
- “Find me the best [your service] in [your city].”
- “What businesses offer [your industry service] near me?”
If you show up, awesome! You can stop reading if you’d like 🙂
If not, take note of the businesses that do appear. Look at:
- Their backlinks
- Their reviews
- Their site content and authority
- The platforms they’re listed on (Clutch, Yelp, G2, etc.)
For us, answer engines heavily leaned on review platforms like Clutch to determine top results. We needed to be present there and pretty much everywhere else on the internet.
As a sanity check, you should ask:
“Summarize [your website URL].”
If the summary contains the right keywords, tone, and services, then you’re partially there. You know you just need to boost other ranking signals, such as backlinks and reviews. If it doesn’t, your positioning may not be clear to crawlers (or customers), and you’ve got a lot of work to do. A good marketing agency can help you address both.
2. Check Your CDN Logs to See Whether AI Crawlers are Even Visiting
If you want to win at AEO, use a CDN like Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront. They not only speed up your site but also give visibility into what’s crawling it.
If you’re using Cloudflare, track down the following in the analytics:
| Crawler Name | Why It Matters |
| ChatGPT-user | Indicates your content is being used in answer prompts. |
| OAI-SearchBot | Used to discover and index website content. |
| GPTBot | Core bot for training + reference retrieval. |
| Googlebot + BingBot | Traditional SEO signals still matter. |
If you see all of these bots hitting your site, you’re on the map! If you’re not seeing them, you have your answer, and again, you have work to do.
For more details around the ChatGPT-specific crawlers, you can review OpenAI’s official crawler definitions here.
3. Make Sure Your CDN is Configured Correctly
This matters more than people think. Most CDNs block unknown bots by default. The problem is that AI crawlers are blocked in the process unless you adjust the settings.
Therefore, you should:
- Allow legitimate AI bots (OAI, GPTBot, Claude, Perplexity).
- Block malicious traffic without impacting legit traffic.
- Avoid default security rules that throttle crawling on your website.
Traffic management isn’t optional anymore. You need to filter intelligently.
Unsure if your CDN is configured correctly? Contact us today for your free CDN audit.
4. Ask Your Customers Directly
The most reliable source is still the human one.
After every sales call or lead inquiry, follow up with:
- How did you find us?
- Did you use ChatGPT, Perplexity, or something else?
- What prompt(s) did you use?
- Were we the first suggestion?
- Did you ask follow-up prompts?
Even a single response to any of the above questions gives clarity into how you’re appearing. And unlike SEO, where we have data, AEO is a black box.
But your customers? They see the front-end result and can shine some much-needed light. In fact, we found this to be the most effective for reverse-engineering ChatGPT and similar engines.
The Bottom Line
AEO is just marketing evolving. You now have to reach them through answer engines.
If you want your business to rank on ChatGPT:
- Test prompts directly
- Check AI crawler activity
- Configure your CDN properly
- Listen to real customers
Search is shifting from links and pages to answers and relevance. So, if you want to stay visible, connect with our expert team today for your free AEO consultation.
