Is your WordPress site in AI search? Three checks: Bing, IndexNow and OAI-SearchBot

Is your WordPress site in AI search tools at all? You can’t answer that with one test, because each tool finds pages its own way. But three of them are documented by the companies that run them, and you can check each one this afternoon.

The three are the Bing index, IndexNow and OpenAI’s search crawler. Our SEO and AI search fixes start with a free written site check.

Why check Bing if you already rank on Google?

Because Microsoft names Bing as the place Copilot looks. Its admin docs cover Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. When web search is on, they say, “Copilot generates a search query that it sends to the Bing search service asking for more information.”

The same page says Copilot “may fetch information from the Bing search service” when the web helps it give a more grounded response.

Microsoft does not say what happens to a page Bing has never indexed, so we won’t guess. It does tell you which index Copilot asks, and that index is Bing’s, not Google’s.

To look, search Bing for site:yourdomain.com, then for the exact title of a page you care about. If the page is missing, start with the Google side of the same problem, because a stray noindex tag can keep a page out of Bing as well as Google. Our post on why Google rejects an indexing request on WordPress shows the two commands that find one.

What does IndexNow do for a WordPress site?

It tells search engines a page changed, so they don’t have to wait for the next crawl. Engines that adopt the protocol “agree that submitted URLs will be automatically shared with all other participating search engines.”

On WordPress, the IndexNow Plugin on wordpress.org “was developed with love and coffee by the Bing Webmaster team.” It sends new, updated and deleted URLs in the background and hosts the key file for you. On 19 Oct 2026 it was at version 1.0.4 with more than 100,000 active installations.

Does a 200 from IndexNow mean the page is indexed?

No. The documentation says “the HTTP 200 response code only indicates that the search engine has received your URL.” The page still has to be crawled and judged like any other.

Is ChatGPT’s search crawler allowed on your site?

In OpenAI’s words, “OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.”

It also says what happens if you shut it out: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.” OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from its published IP ranges. After a robots.txt change, OpenAI says ChatGPT search can take about 24 hours to adjust.

There are two places to look. First, open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for a group that names OAI-SearchBot over a Disallow line, or a User-agent: * group with Disallow: /.

Second, check the server. A security plugin, a host firewall or a CDN bot rule can refuse a crawler that robots.txt welcomes. In our WordPress lab test of AI crawlers, one .htaccess rule gave GPTBot a 403 while a browser loaded the same page.

Finding a rule like that and clearing it is the kind of single problem our fixes cover, from $45.

What did we see when we ran the check on our own site?

On Mon 19 Oct 2026 at 4:56 AM ET we asked distrocode.com for four addresses with the OAI-SearchBot user agent string from OpenAI’s page, then with a plain one:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}' -A "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.4; +https://openai.com/searchbot" https://distrocode.com/

The home page, /seo-ai-search-fixes/, /free-site-check/ and /robots.txt all answered 200 to both. The robots.txt that Yoast serves for us is one User-agent: * group with an empty Disallow: and a sitemap line, so it turns no crawler away.

That test has a limit. Our requests came from our own machine, not OpenAI’s IP ranges, so a rule that checks the address as well as the name would not show up. For that, read your firewall or CDN logs for OAI-SearchBot requests and their status.

What can these checks not tell you?

They can’t tell you whether an AI answer will name you. Passing all three means the doors are open, and each engine decides what its answer says. Why ChatGPT doesn’t mention your business covers what nobody can promise.

What does our free site check look at?

It is a written report within 2 business days, with no call and no login. It covers phone speed, forms, checkout, visible errors and whether a page tells Google to skip it. The three checks above are yours to run today.

If one of them turns up a blocked crawler, clearing it is a fix from our list. On a WordPress or WooCommerce site that is $45 for one problem, $110 for up to three and $250 for up to five. Ask for a free site check if you want the rest of the site looked at too.

If you already know a crawler is being turned away, send us your site address and what you found.