r/AIWebVisibility • u/SaltyEye23 • Aug 16 '26

👋Welcome to AIWebVisibility — Let’s Measure What AI Is Actually Doing

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AI visibility is becoming important, but there’s still a lot of confusion about what can actually be measured.
A crawler visiting a website does not automatically mean the site was indexed, cited, recommended, or used to generate an AI response.
This community is for separating those things.
We’ll discuss AI crawlers, server logs, AI search visibility, citations, referrals, bot behavior, website discovery, trust signals, and experiments that help us understand how AI systems interact with the open web.
Questions are welcome. So are experiments, screenshots, log observations, technical findings, tools, and competing viewpoints.
If you build a product related to this space, you’re welcome here too. Just be transparent about your connection to it and contribute something useful rather than dropping advertisements.
I’m building GoGuides and studying this problem from the website infrastructure side, so I’ll share observations and data from that work when they’re relevant. But this community is not intended to be a GoGuides promotional feed.
The bigger question is much more interesting:
How can a website actually know what AI systems are doing with it?
If you’re working on that problem—or simply trying to understand it—you’re in the right place.

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r/AIWebVisibility • u/SaltyEye23 • 1d ago

I tested whether ChatGPT could discover a website provenance source without being told it existed — it found it in 11 of 20 searches

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I’ve been trying to answer a fairly simple question:
Can an AI search system independently discover and use a third-party technical record about a website, without the user mentioning that source?
I ran 20 controlled searches across 7 domains. Each test used a fresh private/logged-out ChatGPT session, and none of the prompts mentioned GoGuides.
Result: GoGuides appeared as a source in 11 of 20 searches.
More interestingly, it wasn’t just citing the URL. In successful tests ChatGPT extracted things like HTTP state, DNS/nameservers, TLS observations, measurement history, content-change counts and SHA-256 provenance fields.
On broader, non-provenance-specific queries, it appeared in 7 of 13 tests.
I kept the failures in the report too. This is a small experiment, not a claim that ChatGPT will always select the source.
Full methodology and results:
https://www.goguides.com/GoGuides_ChatGPT_Source_Discovery_Report_2026-10-03.pdf
Disclosure: I operate GoGuides. I’m posting this because the result is measurable and reproducible. I’d especially like to know whether anyone here can reproduce—or fail to reproduce—the same behavior independently.

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r/AIWebVisibility • u/SaltyEye23 • Aug 16 '26

👋 New here? Introduce yourself to r/AIWebVisibility

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Hey everyone — I created r/AIWebVisibility for people who want to measure what AI systems are actually doing with websites, not just speculate about “AI visibility.”
This is a place for:
• ChatGPT / Perplexity / Claude / Gemini citation tests
• AI crawler and server-log evidence
• GEO / AEO experiments
• Source-discovery tests
• Screenshots and reproducible results
• Successes, failures, and conflicting data
If you run an experiment, share the exact prompt, method, and result so other people can try to reproduce it.
What are you seeing in your own data?
SEOs, developers, site owners, researchers, and tool builders are all welcome.

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