Can I submit my website to ChatGPT or Perplexity?

You can't submit a website to ChatGPT or Perplexity. Neither company documents a form, a sitemap upload or a URL inspection tool for its AI search.

What both document instead is crawler access. OpenAI says ChatGPT search surfaces sites through OAI-SearchBot, and that sites opted out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." Perplexity says PerplexityBot crawls for its search index and is not used to train foundation models.

So the job is not to submit. The job is to remove anything that stops these crawlers from fetching your pages. That work is in your control. Whether an engine then picks your page for a given question is not.

OpenAI's help article on ChatGPT search gives the condition in one sentence: allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl the site and confirm that the host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses. The word that matters is "and". Our walkthrough of OpenAI's help article covers the rest of it.

That gives you two gates:

1. robots.txt. Rules are per bot. A minimal allow looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /

2. Network reachability. A firewall, bot manager or CDN can return a 403 or a challenge page to a crawler that robots.txt allows. Nothing in robots.txt reveals this.

OpenAI's bots page also says "Each setting is independent of the others." GPTBot governs training. OAI-SearchBot governs search. You can block training and stay in AI search by disallowing GPTBot while allowing OAI-SearchBot. ChatGPT-User, which fetches pages when a user asks, is a third agent, and OpenAI says robots.txt rules "may not apply" to it.

Perplexity documents two agents. PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity search. Perplexity-User fetches pages on a user's behalf and, in Perplexity's words, "generally ignores robots.txt rules." So the lever for Perplexity's index is the same as for ChatGPT: allow PerplexityBot and make sure your network lets it in.

Bing is the one engine here with a real submission path. Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow let you tell Bing about pages, and Bing's index backs Microsoft Copilot. Keep the scope honest:

• IndexNow's registry lists seven consuming endpoints (Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep, Internet Archive, Amazonbot). Google is not one of them.
• The IndexNow documentation never mentions AI, and a 200 response confirms only that the ping was received.
• OpenAI says ChatGPT search "sometimes" partners with other search providers. That link has never been quantified. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, sites that ranked in Bing got effectively zero ChatGPT citations even while ChatGPT's crawlers visited.

Treat Bing submission as Bing hygiene, not a route into ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Most failures happen after robots.txt says yes. If you allow AI bots but never show up in ChatGPT, check these:

• Firewall or CDN blocks. Bot protection can mistakenly turn crawlers away. From 2026-09-15, Cloudflare blocks Training and Agent crawlers by default on ad-displaying pages for new domains and existing free-tier customers, while Search stays allowed. Check your zone settings rather than assuming.
• IPv6-only hosting. OpenAI's published IP files list IPv4 ranges only. See whether ChatGPT's crawlers can reach an IPv6-only site.
• JavaScript-only content. Vercel found that ChatGPT and Claude crawlers fetch JavaScript files but don't execute them. A price or product name that appears only after hydration may be invisible to them.
• Accidental suppression. noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet:0 and data-nosnippet keep content out of Google and Bing AI answers. Templates often carry these by mistake.
• A blanket AI block. Blocking every AI user agent to stop training also removes ChatGPT search eligibility.

Run these checks in order. Each one removes a block; none of them promises a citation.

1. Read your robots.txt per agent. Confirm OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are allowed, separately from GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
2. Request a page as each crawler and record the status code. Our playbook on testing whether your firewall lets AI crawlers in walks through it, and the AI Crawler Checker shows which crawlers your firewall turns away.
3. View your key pages with JavaScript off. Move prices, definitions and product names into the server-rendered HTML.
4. Search your templates for snippet and index directives you didn't intend.
5. Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools if you want Copilot coverage.

Once access is clean, the free checker on this site shows whether ChatGPT names you for up to three buyer questions, as a snapshot.

Does allowing GPTBot help my site appear in ChatGPT search? No. OpenAI describes GPTBot as a training crawler and claims no search benefit for it. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says the settings are independent. You can disallow GPTBot to opt out of training and still allow OAI-SearchBot to stay eligible for ChatGPT search answers.

If I block OAI-SearchBot, will ChatGPT ignore my site completely? Not completely. OpenAI says opted-out sites will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers but can still appear as navigational links. ChatGPT-User, which fetches pages when a user asks, follows different rules. Our page on whether [ChatGPT can still link to a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot](/questions/block-oai-searchbot-navigational-links) covers the detail.

Will submitting my sitemap to Bing get me into ChatGPT? Nothing documents that. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes uses other search providers, but no one has measured how much Bing presence affects ChatGPT. In Otterly's 2026 test, sites indexed and ranking in Bing received effectively zero ChatGPT citations. Bing submission is worth doing for Bing and Copilot on its own terms.

How long after allowing the crawlers will I show up? No engine publishes a timeline, and allowing a crawler buys eligibility only. Each engine decides per question whether to search the web at all, then which pages to retrieve and cite. Fix access, then measure each engine separately over time rather than expecting a fixed date.

Can I verify that OAI-SearchBot is really visiting my site? Yes, through your server or CDN logs. Filter requests by the OAI-SearchBot user agent, then confirm the source IP sits in the ranges OpenAI publishes in its searchbot.json file. Look at the status codes too: a stream of 403 responses means your firewall is turning the crawler away.