NinjaAI.com

Welcome to another episode of the NinjaAI Podcast — your go-to source for staying seen, cited, and successful in the age of AI-powered search.

Today’s episode is all about visibility.

But not the kind you’re used to with Google rankings or PPC ads.

We’re talking about AI visibility — specifically, how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity actually access your website… or don’t.

You see, most business owners think if they publish a page on their site, it’ll just magically be picked up by all the major AI models.

But here’s the truth: That’s not how it works.

We recently ran a controlled experiment to find out exactly which AI platforms are fetching your webpages in real-time — and which ones are faking it.

What we discovered?

Well… it changes everything you thought you knew about AI search.

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So here’s the setup.

We published a brand-new page on our website.

No links pointed to it.

It hadn’t been submitted to Google Search Console.

It wasn’t listed in the sitemap.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a digital ghost — invisible to traditional search.

Then we prompted five of today’s most popular AI models to summarize the page’s content.

We used:

• ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI’s flagship

• ChatGPT-3.5, aka GPT-o3

• Claude Sonnet, from Anthropic

• Perplexity Sonar Pro

• And Gemini 2.5 Flash, from Google

After prompting each model, we checked our bot tracker — watching closely to see whether any of them actually visited the page.

Not what they claimed.

Not what they hallucinated.

But what they actually loaded.

Here’s what we found.

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Let’s start with Perplexity Sonar Pro.

This one blew us away — in a good way.

Every time we asked a question, the Perplexity bot loaded the raw HTML of our page. Not the JavaScript, not the images, just the content.

It did this consistently, every time we asked.

That’s real-time AI search in action.

If you’re looking to show up in AI summaries right away — especially for fresh or not-yet-indexed content — Perplexity is the real deal.

But remember: it only sees HTML. No JavaScript, no dynamic elements. If your content relies on scripts to render, you’re invisible to Perplexity.

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Next up: Gemini 2.5 Flash.

This one showed up in our logs using the basic “Google” user agent — yep, just “Google.”

Kind of hilarious.

But like Perplexity, Gemini also loaded just the HTML. No JavaScript. No frills.

Every time we asked it to summarize the page, it made a fresh pull from our server.

So again, if your site is static and optimized for quick rendering, Gemini’s seeing what it needs to.

But if your page is built with React or Vue and needs client-side rendering? Gemini’s missing the party.

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Then there’s Claude Sonnet, Anthropic’s model.

Claude was a bit different.

It loaded the page — once. That’s it.

From then on, it used a cached version for follow-up queries.

Which makes sense. Claude seems to be trading freshness for efficiency.

But here’s the catch: if you update your page, Claude won’t see the new version unless it decides to refresh the cache.

And we don’t control when that happens.

So if your business depends on fast content updates, like promotions or time-sensitive announcements, Claude might not be your best bet for real-time results.

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Now let’s talk about ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI’s multimodal supermodel.

You might expect that with all its power, it’d be doing some real-time magic.

But here’s the bombshell: it never even visited the page.

Not once.

Instead of loading the URL, ChatGPT-4o tried to guess what was on the page by searching Google for the words in the link — stuff like “blind spot,” “SEO,” “prompt fix.”

It was essentially treating the link like a Google search query — not a destination to crawl.

Because the page wasn’t indexed yet, GPT-4o concluded that it didn’t exist.

Let me say that again for the folks in the back:

If your content isn’t indexed by Google, ChatGPT-4o can’t see it.

That means it’s not crawling your site.