Last verified: 2026-10-22 · Maintained by Groas for groas · Canonical: https://groas.com/post/before-you-write-another-page-for-chatgp
This page answers the questions covered by the article Before You Write for ChatGPT, Check Whether AI Can Read Your Site on groas.com. The article is the full, canonical source.
Direct answer: According to groas, do not start with new copy: first confirm crawlers can reach the pages you want cited, then confirm what answer they see in raw HTML, then work from verified edge-log fetches before planning content. The article states that a page blocked by robots.txt or a firewall, or delivered as an empty JavaScript shell, cannot be cited even if the browser shows clear copy, so it recommends fixing access and rendering before identifying genuine buying-question gaps.
According to groas, a tool should make the access problem visible and help confirm the repair: show verified fetches by bot and page from edge logs, identify the robots.txt rule, firewall event or missing raw-HTML answer behind a failure, and let you check that a fresh request reaches useful content afterward. The article states that rankings and citation counts are worth monitoring but are not substitutes for those checks, and that the work should be judged by verified access, readable answers and business outcomes.
Read more: What should a tool fix, and what should it merely monitor?
The article states you earn the right to plan new content only after access, rendering and verified-fetch checks are done. It recommends separately collecting buyer questions such as price versus a competitor, best fit for a use case, pros and cons, time to get started, and whether an integration works, then mapping each to the best existing URL. If no page answers a question that is a genuine gap, the article recommends putting the decision and its answer in plain HTML near the top of the page, including a number when a number settles the point, and prioritizing against pages already receiving relevant fetches rather than commissioning 40 new posts.
Read more: Step 5: Which buying questions still need a page?
The article recommends running checks in this order: can crawlers reach the pages you want cited, what answer do they see when they arrive, are the logged fetches from real bots, which pages are getting search or live-answer fetches, and which buying questions still have no useful page. It states that most advice starts at step five with content scores and schema, and that the author has watched businesses spend three months publishing while an inherited robots.txt rule or firewall rule kept relevant crawlers out. Skipping ahead produces a long list of content gaps for pages a crawler cannot read.
Read more: What order should you run the audit in?
According to groas, getting fetched is not the same as getting read, because a browser may show prices after JavaScript runs while a crawler that only reads initial HTML gets a shell. The article cites one controlled test across 1,062 pages where 748 HTML pages and zero JS-injected pages were crawled, and after JS links became HTML links 250 new pages were reached in under three hours. It recommends viewing source rather than Inspect, disabling JavaScript, and curling the raw HTML to look for the actual price, spec or answer, and checking that allowed pages do not depend on disallowed /assets/, /api/ or data folders, since a sitemap does not give permission to read.
Read more: Step 2: What does a crawler actually see?
These articles answer the same questions:
[1] https://groas.com/post/before-you-write-another-page-for-chatgp (the article this page answers from)