As the digital health landscape shifts and diversifies, search behaviour is no longer dominated solely by Google. The end of 2024 marked Google’s steepest drop in market share in nearly a decade, with AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and SearchGPT gaining significant traction.
For healthcare and pharmaceutical brands, this isn’t just a technical shift, it’s a strategic imperative. If your content isn’t being indexed and accessed by AI tools, you risk losing visibility at critical touchpoints along the patient and HCP journey.
So how can you check whether AI bots are crawling your site, and why does it matter for compliance-conscious industries like pharma and health?
Why AI-friendly websites are vital for health brands
Unlike general consumer content, healthcare websites must strike a careful balance between accessibility, accuracy, and regulatory compliance. This means that if AI tools can’t reach your website content – or if they’re indexing outdated or partial information – there could be real reputational risks and missed opportunities. From patient information pages and disease awareness campaigns to HCP portals and medical education hubs, ensuring AI visibility helps your brand stay present in zero-click searches and answer engine results. By taking steps to get your health brand noticed within AI responses, you can also gain control over how accurate and compliant your information appears in AI outputs.
How to check if AI bots are crawling your website
There are two main ways to investigate whether your health content is being accessed by AI tools like ChatGPT or SearchGPT: manual log file review, or through a dedicated log file analyser. Below, we walk through both approaches – whether you manage a medical device site, a prescription medicine brand hub, or a consumer health blog.
Method 1: Manual Log File Review
If you have access to your website’s server (typically via cPanel or a hosting dashboard), you can download server log files. These files record every user-agent (including bots) that visits your site.
To find AI activity:
- Open your log file in a text editor
- Use CTRL+F to search for user agents like ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, or OpenAI
- Note any successful (200) status codes and the pages accessed
For example, at Varn Health we’ve reviewed log files to check whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot has accessed our healthcare SEO insights. Confirming this activity not only helps validate our technical SEO efforts but ensures that our content can be indexed by emerging AI tools.
This is particularly useful for pharma sites that want to check whether regulated product information or important items like SmPC pages are being crawled.
Method 2: Use a Log File Analyser (e.g. Screaming Frog)
For teams that prefer a visual overview (especially when working with multiple sites or multilingual content), tools like Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser can streamline the process.
Once you upload your log file:
- Navigate to the ‘User Agents’ tab
- Search for known AI bots or sort the list alphabetically
- Examine the specific URLs crawled, crawl dates, and HTTP response codes
This data can highlight which areas of your health website are being indexed and which are being missed – a vital insight if you’re preparing for AI-first content planning or compliance sign-off processes that depend on traceability.
What to do next
Once you’ve confirmed that AI bots are (or aren’t) crawling your healthcare website:
- Ensure your robots.txt and meta directives allow access to relevant, approved pages – and equally, that any content you do not want to appear in SERPs is being successfully blocked
- Prioritise crawlability of high-trust content like medical glossaries, symptom checkers, and FAQs
- Review crawl frequency – is AI picking up new or updated pages quickly enough?
It’s also worth extending your checks beyond AI. Your site is likely visited by bots from Google, Bing, Yandex, and others – as well as digital intelligence tools like AhrefsBot and SemrushBot, which can indicate competitor research or backlink monitoring. For pharmaceutical and med comms agencies, this data can even support reputation monitoring or identify when health misinformation may be circulating.
The bigger picture: preparing for AI in health search
As search continues to evolve – fuelled by LLMs, zero-click answers, and voice search – the old rules of SEO are no longer enough. AI is transforming how medical information is accessed, interpreted, and shared.
By auditing your log files, you’re not just doing a technical health check. You’re future-proofing your visibility in a highly regulated, high-trust industry.
Need help?
Want to make sure your health content is visible to AI and search engines alike? We have a new AI Visibility Framework which can help you uncover your AI search visibility. Get in touch with the team at Varn Health; whether you’re running a patient support programme, launching a new product, or are simply refreshing your SEO strategy for 2025, we’re here to help.
