Question
How to Submit Information to AI Search Engines That Accept Data Directly
LLM answers 4 min read
Only a few channels let you send information to AI search systems directly, and each one feeds a specific platform. For Google, the documented channels are Merchant Center product feeds and Google Business Profiles, which Google’s AI guidance names as ways to be visible in AI responses. For Microsoft’s Bing and Copilot, and several other engines, IndexNow lets you announce new or changed URLs immediately. Search Console’s URL Inspection and sitemaps let you ask Google to crawl. Beyond these, AI engines find content by crawling the web, and the way to “submit” to them is to let their crawlers in.
Google: product feeds and business profiles
Google’s AI optimization guide is explicit: “Using products like Merchant Center (such as Merchant Center feeds) and Google Business Profiles can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results.”
- Merchant Center feeds carry structured product data supplied by the merchant. For retailers and brands, this is the documented direct channel for product information in Google’s AI features.
- Google Business Profile carries a business’s own details and its reviews. Google’s help on local ranking says local results are based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that relevance depends on complete and detailed business information.
- Business Agent is described in the same guide as “a conversational experience on Google Search that helps customers chat with your brand,” one of the merchant experiences a business can consider.
- Emerging protocols. The guide notes that “protocols like Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) are emerging that will allow Search agents to do more.” Treat this as a direction to watch rather than an established channel.
Google: asking for a crawl
For ordinary web pages, Google’s documentation offers no submission route into its AI features. It crawls. Its documentation on recrawling describes two ways to prompt a crawl: the URL Inspection tool in Search Console for individual pages, and sitemaps for large numbers of URLs. It adds two limits worth remembering: “Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks,” and “requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all.”
Once a page is indexed and eligible to show a snippet, it can be considered for AI Overviews. Google’s AI features documentation says there is no special file or markup to add for these features.
Bing, Copilot and other engines: IndexNow
IndexNow is a shared protocol for telling search engines that a URL has been added, updated or deleted. The IndexNow FAQ lists participating endpoints including Bing, Amazon, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep, and explains that a submission to one is shared with all IndexNow-enabled engines. Google is not among the listed endpoints. The FAQ also notes that “each engine makes its own decision about whether to index” a submitted URL.
Microsoft connects IndexNow to its AI experiences directly. Its February 2026 announcement of AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools says IndexNow “helps keep information fresh across search and AI experiences by notifying participating search engines whenever content is added, updated, or removed.”
For a site that wants Copilot and Bing AI summaries to reflect current information, enabling IndexNow is a direct step that Microsoft itself recommends.
Engines without a submission channel
The crawler pages of these three companies describe how they crawl, not a way to submit content.
- OpenAI. Its crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT’s search features and recommends allowing it. Robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply.
- Anthropic. Its crawler help page describes Claude-SearchBot, which indexes content to improve search results, and notes that blocking it may reduce a site’s visibility in user search results.
- Perplexity. Its crawler documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot, and permitting its published IP ranges, for sites that want to appear in its results.
For these engines, the practical equivalent of submission is access: allow the search crawler, keep pages indexable, and keep content current. Content published on a platform’s own publishing tools is a different matter from submitting your site, and none of these companies’ crawler documents describe such tools as a way to get your own pages cited.
A submission checklist
| Platform | Direct channel | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI features | Merchant Center feeds, Business Profile | Keep product feeds and profile details complete and current |
| Google crawling | URL Inspection, sitemaps | Request indexing once for key pages; keep sitemaps updated |
| Bing and Copilot | IndexNow; Bing Webmaster Tools | Enable IndexNow; review AI Performance data |
| ChatGPT search | None documented; OAI-SearchBot access | Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt |
| Claude | None documented; Claude-SearchBot access | Allow Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User as appropriate |
| Perplexity | None documented; PerplexityBot access | Allow PerplexityBot; check firewall rules |
To check that a channel is working, look at the platform data each one offers. For indexing, the URL Inspection tool shows whether Google has indexed a page. For Copilot and Bing AI summaries, Bing Webmaster Tools reports AI citations by page. For Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Search Console’s Generative AI performance report shows which pages are being surfaced. Engines without a reporting tool can only be checked by asking them questions and seeing which pages they cite.
Set up the channels that exist first: Merchant Center and Business Profile for Google, IndexNow for Bing and the engines that share it. Then open your robots.txt to the search crawlers of the engines that matter to you. Engines without a submission channel decide what to cite from what their crawlers find, so access and freshness do the work a submission form would otherwise do.