The assistants

Five assistants. One piece of work.

Each of these finds businesses differently — different crawlers, different indexes, different controls. What almost nobody says out loud is that the work to be visible in all of them is the same work. The differences matter for what you can control, not for what you should do.

Updated 09 August 20265 min read

AssistantCrawlerGrounded inThe one lever

ChatGPT OAI-SearchBot Its own index Allow the search crawler, not just the training one Microsoft Copilot Bingbot Bing Bing Webmaster Tools — free, and almost nobody signs up Gemini & AI Overviews Googlebot Google Google Business Profile, if you are local Perplexity PerplexityBot Its own index Use it to see which sources beat you, and why Claude ClaudeBot Web search Documentation quality, and MCP if you have live data

Why we do not sell a page per platform

Most of this category sells platform-specific optimisation. We think that is mostly marketing. Every assistant above is looking for the same things: content that exists in the HTML, an identity it can verify, facts stated plainly, and permission to read you. Fix that once and you are legible to all five.

Where the platforms genuinely differ is in what you control. Bing Webmaster Tools is a real lever for Copilot and nothing else. Google Business Profile is a real lever for Gemini and nothing else. Those are worth knowing, and they are what these five pages are for.

Run the free check to see where you stand on the work that serves all of them, or read the rubric first.