The “site:” search operator in Google/Bing has been the mainstay of SEOs wanting to check if a page is in a search index if they didn’t have access to Google Search Console or similar. So simple, so effective.
Likewise, if you wanted to check to see if page content is indexed (or duplicated in the index), taking a large enough snippet of meaningful text from the page and searching it in quote marks, that also fulfills a similar function.
See if this page has been indexed and whether it has been syndicated here.
If you have access to GSC/Bing Webmaster Tools, you have better tools to help understand indexing and why content is/isn’t included. But in the AI-search age, the lack of these tools feels all too obvious!
BUT we can do something similar – read on!
Prompting for a snippet of text is more than good enough for this. Something like:
Search for “paste your snippet here” and return any results which contain that exact text only.
So, as an example (ChatGPT signed out):
The exact response can differ, but this is pretty indicative.
Two questions from here:
- Is this useful/what can we do with this information?
- Can we make this workflow any easier?
Is This Information Useful?
Yes! In the above example, it proved unambiguously that ChatGPT with search tooling can return that URL.
With this we can infer:
- Whichever search source it used contained that content.
- That content was correctly attributed to that URL.
- Therefore, from a technical point of view, that page is “search” friendly.
If your page wasn’t returned by this, you immediately have some elements to troubleshoot:
- Is that page discoverable? Is it accessible by crawling the site or within a sitemap.xml? I’ve seen “AI content” being generated and intentionally orphaned, which isn’t great for discovery!
- Is that page fetchable, i.e., not being blocked by bot security (WAF or similar), or robots.txt?
- Is that page crawlable? At least the page text, at least can it be rendered/extracted?
- Is the page indexable? Does it have noindex directives or canonical tags pointing elsewhere?
- Is the page content worthwhile enough to be indexed? Harder to be sure of, use your judgement initially.
- Or at least, is the passage you searched significant enough to only return your page? It may be super-generic and just not be strong enough to “rank” in the search results the ChatBot is using.
Another point is that your page may not have been discovered yet, or it may have been discovered and not yet indexed. Sometimes it takes time. So you need to be patient.
Test this four to five times if the results are less clear than my example. ChatGPT (for example) does call from different sources, and it is possible that the source called from is only one of those available. If you want to be really sure, change the snippet as well.
Without GSC/BWT or access logs, you can’t answer those questions for sure, but you have a list of potential issues to work through. This “workaround” is not a straight-out replacement, and AI Chatbot responses are not “truth” – so you need to interpret the output.
The easy-to-do tasks here are to use a “normal” tech SEO approach to solving discovery, retrieval, crawling & indexing issues.
Or, you have a page whose content cannot be distinct enough to be returned this way – this is a possibility, but I’d assume that page won’t be highly valuable from a search point of view if this is the case.
How Can We Make This Easier To Do As Part Of A Workflow?
There is nothing stopping you from copy-pasting a snippet into any chatbot and asking it to return the exact match only. But it’s a little clunky. So here’s a vibe-extension (Exactly Matchy) to speed up the process.
Here’s how it works:
- Exactly Matchy reads the rendered page you’re currently viewing and extracts visible headings, paragraphs, and list content, while filtering out obvious boilerplate such as navigation, cookie banners, footers, and menus.
- It then finds distinctive 20-30 word passages that are more likely to uniquely identify that page, favoring things like specific names, numbers, claims, and uncommon wording rather than generic marketing copy.
- Chrome’s on-device LLM is used only to rank/select the best candidate passages, not to rewrite them.
- The LLM is deliberately on-device, so the page text does not need to be sent to a third-party API; there are no API keys or usage costs, and the extension remains a fairly lightweight local tool. If Chrome AI is unavailable, it falls back to a simpler method to score the page content.
- Each selected passage becomes an exact-match retrieval prompt, with one-click links into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
- The first snippet should be the best, but sometimes you may need to test multiple times and use multiple snippets (see my point about different search sources above).
The only way to access this is by forking the repo, downloading it yourself in Chrome (putting extensions into dev mode). If there are enough people who find this useful, I’ll get this added to the Chrome Extension library.
- Fork the repo or download it to your computer.
- Open chrome://extensions and enable “developer mode.”
- Click on “load unpacked” and point to the folder and select it.
- Enable the extension in the toolbar (pin it to make it easier to access).
Add extensions like this at your own risk; I’m not saying this to put you off, but it’s the internet equivalent of taking candy from a stranger. Review the code, make sure you’re happy before diving head-first.
Any thoughts/feedback welcome!
My Page Is Returned This Way, But It Isn’t ‘Ranking’ In AI Or Driving Traffic
This is a totally different/distinct point – and one I haven’t set out to solve here. This guide is more about ensuring the first hurdle (retrieval) isn’t catching you out.
If your content can be retrieved – but isn’t – then you really need to understand the authority you have in this area and how useful your content actually is relative to the competition.
More Resources:
This post was originally published on Chris Green Search Marketing (SEO/AEO).
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
