ChatGPT visibility: what the engine sees of your site is not what you think you are showing
ChatGPT visibility is how often the engine cites your site in its answers. It does not hand back a list of links: it writes, then names two to five sources. OpenAI crawlers do not execute JavaScript, and extractors discard part of what is left. Fast Growth Advisors measures that gap page by page, with a dated reading and the link to reproduce it. Across three vendor sites run through the three extractors, less than a third of the text survives in the worst case.
How do you get cited by ChatGPT?
By making your message readable without JavaScript, and then making it extractable. Those are two different things, and the second one is almost always forgotten.
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User do not execute JavaScript. That is measured, not assumed. Everything rendered after page load disappears: client logo carousels, third-party review widgets, toggle pricing tables, animated figures, case studies in modals. The engine can then say what the company does, but not what sets it apart, and it cites the competitor who put its proof in plain HTML.
Counter-intuitive but verified: text hidden by CSS remains readable. Without JavaScript there is no CSS applied. What a site hides is therefore extractable, including leftovers from an old redesign.
Do ChatGPT and Google work the same way?
Merging them corrupts any measurement, and that is exactly what tools returning a single score do.
| Question | OpenAI crawlers | Googlebot |
|---|---|---|
| Do they execute JavaScript? | No | Yes |
| When do they read the page? | At answer time | At crawl, then at index |
| Share of 404s encountered | 34.8 % | 8.2 % |
One OpenAI crawler request in three lands on a page that no longer exists, against one in twelve for Googlebot. That is a consequence nobody draws. The redirect plan, usually treated as a technical chore, becomes a visibility matter: a dead URL is a lost source.
Counting those visits properly means verifying crawler identity, because the declared agent can be forged. Across 1,129 requests claiming to be an AI assistant, our measurements identify 876 as impersonations. White paper, counting bots →
What does ChatGPT search for when you talk to it?
What your customer types is not what the engine searches for. The model rewrites before searching, and each one rewrites differently.
| Step | Exact text |
|---|---|
| What the user writes | Quels outils ou agences comparer pour suivre la visibilité d’une marque sur ChatGPT, Gemini et Perplexity ? |
| What ChatGPT searches for | monitor brand mentions on ChatGPT tools |
| What Claude searches for | outils suivi visibilité marque ChatGPT Gemini Perplexity |
Neither ChatGPT nor Claude searches for the sentence the user typed. And on this subject, ChatGPT translates it on the way.
Which language does ChatGPT search in for you?
“ChatGPT searches in English” is wrong in general. Across thirty prompts and fifteen sectors, it issued 40 French queries against 34 English ones. It searches in French more often than not.
IT is the exception: 100 % of the queries ChatGPT issues there are in English.
| Sector | Queries issued in English |
|---|---|
| IT | 100 % |
| Cooking | 91 % |
| Automotive | 83 % |
| Banking | 50 % |
| Health | 33 % |
| Insurance | 17 % |
| Law | 14 % |
| Real estate | 10 % |
So it is not the engine that decides the language, it is the subject. On nationally regulated subjects, law, real estate, insurance, health, it stays in French. It switches where the authoritative sources are in English, and B2B software is one of those.
Claude and Gemini do not switch: 34 French queries against 3 English for one, 35 against 0 for the other.
A second-language version is therefore not a translation, it is a source in its own right. Why translation is never enough →
The keywords that matter are not your customers’. They are the ones the engine writes on their behalf. Nobody looks at them, because nobody collects them. They are readable in each engine’s answer, and therefore measurable.
Seven times out of ten, ChatGPT answers without searching
Before choosing sources, an engine decides whether to look for any. That is the first sort, and the most decisive. When it does not search, nothing you publish can enter its answer. Only the model’s memory speaks, and that memory dates from its training.
| Engine | Searches | Prompts |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 100 % | 20 of 20 |
| Claude | 85 % | 17 of 20 |
| Gemini | 35 % | 7 of 20 |
| ChatGPT | 30 % | 6 of 20 |
ChatGPT searched on six prompts out of twenty. It is the engine where your content is least likely to be read, and Perplexity the one where it is most likely. Working on ChatGPT visibility without knowing this means optimising for three answers in ten.
Twenty prompts across four engines, two domains. An order of magnitude, not a definitive ranking.
The reading, so you do not have to take our word for it. Query audit commercial startup B2B, French market, French language, six readings on 1 and 2 September 2026. Google cites https://fast-growth.fr/en/messaging-audit/, the English version of our page, on three of them, and the French version on a fourth. Run the search again →
The cause is not Google translating the query. The engine cites the page it has ranked: on this French query, it is our English page that surfaces at rank six. On audit messaging site web B2B, where our French page ranks first, it cites that one six times out of six and never the English one.
A page better built in the other language can therefore capture a query it was never aimed at. That is an opportunity as much as a warning about the page that should have surfaced.
What is left of your page after extraction?
An engine does not read your page, it reads what an extractor pulls out of it. A full diagnostic has three layers: can the engine reach the page, is the text in the bytes it returns, and does the extractor keep it. The third is the one nobody looks at, and often the one that costs.
Our measurements cover three B2B software vendor sites, two in HR software and one in workforce scheduling. Each page was fetched with the GPTBot user agent, exactly what the OpenAI crawler receives, then run through the three reference extractors: trafilatura, jusText and Resiliparse.
| Page | Text in served HTML | trafilatura | jusText | Resiliparse |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HR software vendor A | 25,387 characters | 59 % | 26 % | 95 % |
| HR software vendor B | 13,425 characters | 23 % | 18 % | 40 % |
| Scheduling software vendor | 12,832 characters | 49 % | 35 % | 91 % |
| This page | 9,671 characters | 92 % | 88 % | 89 % |
On HR software vendor B, trafilatura keeps only 23 % of the served text, and jusText 18 %. Four fifths of what the page says never reaches the engine. The page still weighs 713 kilobytes. Plenty of code, little text, and most of that text discarded by the extractor.
The second lesson lies elsewhere: the three extractors disagree with each other. On the same page one keeps 23 %, another 40 %. Content can therefore reach one engine and vanish from another, with nothing changing on your side.
We devoted a whole white paper to what survives extraction and what disappears, with a demonstration page and the full output of the three extractors. White paper, the recoverable message →
What this measurement says, and what it does not. It covers extraction, not rendering: the bytes measured are the ones the crawler receives, without JavaScript. Whatever a browser shows on top, thanks to JavaScript, adds to this loss instead of replacing it. And three pages are not a statistic: this is a demonstration of the mechanism, reproducible on your own site in ten minutes.
How do you measure your ChatGPT visibility?
By putting your category questions to it, archiving the answers, and keeping the link that lets you run the search again. Without those three, a visibility report cannot be verified.
One reading is not enough. We replayed the same question eleven times in a row: on the French market the sources changed from one call to the next, with a median overlap of 62 %. There is a stable core and a rotating fringe. Appearing once is not holding a position.
| Cited domain | Present in | Status |
|---|---|---|
| apogea.fr | 11 / 11 | core |
| quel-sirh.fr | 11 / 11 | core |
| culture-rh.com | 11 / 11 | core |
| combohr.com | 9 / 11 | fringe |
| ringover.fr | 7 / 11 | fringe |
| youtube.com | 6 / 11 | fringe |
| bakertilly.fr | 4 / 11 | fringe |
| agendrix.com | 4 / 11 | fringe |
| factorial.fr | 1 / 11 | fringe |
| skello.io | 1 / 11 | fringe |
Three domains out of ten hold a position. Two appeared once. A tool that measures a single time cannot tell them apart, and will report a citation that does not hold. Run the search again →
This reading covers Google AI Overviews, where we have a measuring instrument. We have not measured ChatGPT stability in the same way, and we do not assume it is identical.
Three states, never merged. The engine cites you, it answers without citing you, or it does not answer that question. The third is not invisibility: it is an absence of measurement. A tool that merges the last two reports a problem nothing established.
The Google AI Overviews barometer, method and editions →
Make your expertise citable by ChatGPT and Claude →
Your site is not invisible to AI, it is unreadable →
FAQ
How do you get cited by ChatGPT?
By making your message readable without JavaScript, and then making it extractable. OpenAI crawlers, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, do not execute JavaScript: that is a measurement, not an opinion. Anything your site renders after page load, logo carousels, third-party review widgets, animated figures, does not exist for them. What remains is the text your server sends.
Are ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews the same thing?
No, and merging them corrupts any measurement. Googlebot executes JavaScript, OpenAI crawlers do not. Google cites pages it has already ranked, ChatGPT queries the web at answer time. A tool that returns one score for both is adding up two different mechanisms.
How do I know whether ChatGPT cites me?
By putting your category questions to it, archiving the answers, and keeping the link that lets you run the search again. One reading is not enough: answers vary from one call to the next. We keep three states apart and never merge them: the engine cites you, it answers without citing you, or it does not answer that question at all.
What does ChatGPT answer in your category?
The free diagnostic puts five questions from your category to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Answers archived, verification link included, causes read on both the message and the pages.