Which AI Search Engines Can You Actually Submit Your Website To?

Only two kinds of submission reach today's AI answer engines: a sitemap in Google Search Console and an IndexNow ping for Bing and its partners. Perplexity, Apple and OpenAI have no submission form at all, so their crawlers find your pages on their own schedule.

I checked this before pushing appwt.com to the engines on October 3, 2026. Every claim below comes from each vendor's own documentation, and a second review of that research corrected 13 of 45 claims before I relied on any of it.

The short answer, engine by engine

Google: submit the sitemap, skip the ping

Google's AI features answer from the same Search index as its regular results, so the sitemap you submit in Search Console is the channel that counts. The Search Console API offers the same submit call for anyone who automates it.

Two shortcuts no longer help. Google retired its sitemap ping endpoint, and the old ping address answers 404 when I call it. The Indexing API still exists, but Google limits it to job posting and broadcast event pages, so it does not apply to ordinary business pages.

Bing: one IndexNow ping reaches the most engines

IndexNow is Bing's recommended way to announce new or changed pages, and one ping is shared across every participating engine. The protocol's own list names Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver, Yep and Amazon.

The same list also names the Internet Archive, but that endpoint did not resolve when it was checked. Copilot answers from the Bing index, and DuckDuckGo says its results come largely from Bing, so both sit downstream of the same ping.

ChatGPT: no form, two indirect routes

OpenAI offers no way to submit a URL to ChatGPT search. Its publisher FAQ says any public website can appear, as long as the site does not block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler OpenAI uses for search.

ChatGPT also draws on outside search providers, and OpenAI's help page names Microsoft Bing among them. An IndexNow ping therefore helps indirectly, but Bing is one provider rather than the only one, so treat that route as partial.

Claude: Brave Search is the closest lever

Anthropic lists Brave Search as the subprocessor behind Claude's web search. Brave offers a Submit URL form that asks it to re-fetch a page, one address at a time.

No document says a Brave re-fetch changes what Claude answers, so I treat it as a sensible step with an unverified effect. Claude-SearchBot, Anthropic's own search crawler, is the other path, and robots.txt should allow it.

Perplexity and Apple: pull only

Perplexity has no webmaster console and no URL submission. Its documentation asks site owners to allow PerplexityBot and its published IP ranges, then the crawler does the rest. The Publishers and Comet Plus programs pay publishers; neither one is a way to push pages.

Apple works the same way for Siri, Spotlight and Safari answers. Applebot crawls on its own schedule, and Apple Business Connect only manages how a business appears in Maps.

The plan I follow for appwt.com

1. Keep every AI crawler allowed in robots.txt, so Google, Bing, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Apple can all fetch the pages.
2. List every sitemap in robots.txt and submit the sitemap index in Google Search Console.
3. Send one IndexNow ping with the pages that changed, which covers Bing, Copilot and the other IndexNow engines.
4. Ask Brave to re-fetch only the handful of pages that matter most.
5. Post a link on X when a page deserves Grok's attention.

None of these steps guarantees a citation. A 200 or 202 answer from a submission means the engine received it, not that it indexed or quoted the page.

For a measured look at what two of these engines actually say, read the ten questions I asked ChatGPT and Perplexity about my own business.

Sources

• Google Search Console API: sitemaps.submit
• Google Search Central: Build and submit a sitemap
• Google Search Central blog: the sitemaps ping endpoint is going away
• Google Indexing API: how to use it
• Bing: Get started with IndexNow
• IndexNow: participating search engines
• OpenAI: Publishers and developers FAQ
• OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• OpenAI: Searching the web with ChatGPT
• Anthropic: subprocessors
• Anthropic: how Anthropic crawls the web
• Brave Search: help and Submit URL
• Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers
• DuckDuckGo: where our results come from
• Apple: About Applebot
• Apple Business
• xAI: X search tool

Want a second pair of eyes on this for your own site? Contact AppWT or schedule a call.