Your Backlinks Are Indexed But Invisible to AI Search — I Built a Free Checker to Prove It

A developer built a free checker that tests whether backlinks are visible to AI search engines, not just indexed by Google. The tool extends an existing Google Sheets script to check for AI Overview citations and LLM recognition, highlighting a growing gap between traditional SEO indexation and AI-driven search visibility.

A few weeks back I published a Google Sheets tool to check backlink indexation with SerpApi https://dev.to/seobysubham/i-built-a-google-sheets-tool-to-check-backlink-indexation-with-serpapi-and-why-i-made-it-1h0k — a simple, manual-only script that tells you whether a backlink has actually been picked up by Google, instead of guessing. It worked well. One backlink I was tracking got indexed by Google in under 72 hours. Good news, right? Then, out of curiosity, I opened ChatGPT and asked it about the exact page that backlink pointed to. It had no idea the page existed. Not "I don't have real-time data." Not a vague guess. It simply didn't know the content was there — despite Google indexing it days earlier. That gap is the entire premise of this post: being indexed by Google and being visible to AI search are two completely different things , and almost nobody is measuring the second one. So I extended my original checker to test for both. For over a decade, indexation was the finish line. If Google crawled your page and added it to the index, you were in the game — rankings were just a matter of time and optimization from there. That assumption is breaking down. A growing share of search now happens inside AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's own AI Overviews — that don't work like the traditional index. They don't list ten blue links; they synthesize an answer from a handful of sources they trust enough to cite. A page can be perfectly indexed and still never make it into that shortlist. For anyone doing SEO or link building, that means a new failure mode nobody's watching for: a backlink that "worked" by every traditional metric, but contributes zero visibility where a growing number of searches actually happen. I wanted a way to see that gap directly, on my own sites, without relying on vibes. The original tool answered one question per backlink: is this indexed? The updated version answers three: site: query Each backlink row in the Google Sheet ends up with three simple signals instead of one, plus a combined score so I can sort and prioritize at a glance. Same stack as before: Python, the SerpApi library, and Google Sheets as the interface — no dashboard, no database, nothing to maintain. This part is unchanged from the original tool — a straightforward site: search through SerpApi to confirm the URL is indexed: python import requests def check indexation url, serpapi key : params = { "engine": "google", "q": f"site:{url}", "api key": serpapi key } response = requests.get "https://serpapi.com/search", params=params results = response.json return bool results.get "organic results" SerpApi's Google engine returns an ai overview block when one is present for a query. I check whether my domain shows up anywhere inside its sources: python def check ai overview keyword, target domain, serpapi key : params = { "engine": "google", "q": keyword, "api key": serpapi key } response = requests.get "https://serpapi.com/search", params=params results = response.json ai overview = results.get "ai overview", {} sources = ai overview.get "references", cited = any target domain in src.get "link", "" for src in sources return { "has ai overview": bool ai overview , "domain cited": cited } If there's no AI Overview at all for that keyword yet, I record that too — it's a useful signal on its own. This one is more experimental, and I want to be upfront about that. I send a small, consistent prompt to the OpenAI API asking whether the model has knowledge of the page or domain, and log the raw response for manual review rather than trying to auto-parse a yes/no: python from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI api key="YOUR OPENAI KEY" def check llm recognition url, domain : prompt = f"Are you aware of the website or page at {url} " f" domain: {domain} ? If so, briefly describe what it's about. " f"If you have no knowledge of it, say so directly." response = client.chat.completions.create model="gpt-4o-mini", messages= {"role": "user", "content": prompt} , max tokens=150 return response.choices 0 .message.content I run the same prompt structure against Perplexity's API too, since its answers are grounded in live search rather than training data alone — it tells me something different: not "does the model remember this," but "would this page surface in a real-time AI search right now." Each backlink gets logged as a row with: | Backlink URL | Indexed? | AI Overview exists? | Domain cited in Overview? | LLM recognizes page? | Notes | |---| I don't collapse this into a single fake "score out of 100" — SEO tools do that too often and it hides more than it reveals. Instead I flag any row where Indexed = Yes but both AI columns are No . Those are the interesting rows. That's the actual gap. Out of the backlinks I re-checked from my last batch: The AI Overview number was the useful one. It's the closest thing to a real-time "does AI search actually see this" signal available right now, and it's a much smaller percentage than the indexation rate. That gap is exactly what I was trying to surface. Same reasoning as the original tool, and it applies even more here: Manual-only isn't a limitation here — it's the correct way to use a signal that's still this noisy. A few things worth being upfront about, since overselling this would defeat the point of writing it: If you're building something similar, treat every AI-visibility signal as directional, not authoritative. The full script indexation + AI Overview + LLM recognition check is a single Python file plus a Google Sheet template — no server, no signup, nothing to host. If you want to run it on your own backlinks, I'm happy to share the setup in the comments or a follow-up post. If you've noticed the same indexed-but-invisible gap on your own sites, I'd genuinely like to hear what you found — drop it below. I write and build tools like this as part of my link-building work at SEO by Subham https://seobysubham.com — if you're curious about the manual, white-hat approach behind the original indexation checker too, it's all there.