ChatGPT SEO: how to be found and cited in ChatGPT

OpenAI describes the process in its help page on searching the web. ChatGPT may search on its own when a question would benefit from current information, and a person can also start a search from the tools menu^[1]. When it searches, it sometimes works with other search providers: it typically rewrites the question into one or more targeted queries, sends them to those providers, and after reading the first results may send more specific queries^[1].

Two kinds of personal context shape those queries. ChatGPT may use an approximate location from the person’s IP address, and share that general location with the search providers to improve local results; and if memory is on, it may use saved memories when it rewrites a query^[1]. The answer can then carry citations, and a Sources panel lists the cited sources and other relevant links^[1].

OpenAI’s summary for site owners is short: ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors meant to help people find relevant, reliable information, and placement is not guaranteed^[1]. Nobody can promise a citation; the work is to become eligible, findable and easy to cite.

To make a site eligible, OpenAI asks that OAI-SearchBot be allowed to crawl it and that the host or content delivery network let through traffic from OpenAI’s published search crawler addresses^[1]. Sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers^[2].

Blocking GPTBot, OpenAI’s training crawler, is a separate setting and does not affect search^[2]. How to write the rules for each of OpenAI’s user agents, and how to confirm in the logs that they work, is the subject of GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and robots.txt.

One more check follows from the search providers. OpenAI does not say how much each provider contributes, but its help page points readers to the privacy statements of Microsoft and Shopify as providers that may process the queries^[1]. A page that a provider’s index cannot see is unlikely to be among the results ChatGPT reads, so keep your important pages indexable by Bing as well as by Google, and check them in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Because ChatGPT rewrites a question before it searches, the useful target is the rewritten search, not the conversation. OpenAI’s own examples show the pattern: a long research question becomes a short search that names the subject and the year, and a request for nearby restaurants becomes a search that names the city^[1]. Short, specific, current and local: those are the searches to rank for.

1. 1Take the questions your customers ask an assistant, from sales calls, support and your own prompt tracking.
2. 2For each, write the two or three short searches an assistant would run to answer it: the product and the problem, the category and the year, the service and the city.
3. 3Search each in Bing and in Google, in the market you sell in, and note where your best page ranks.
4. 4Where you do not rank, treat it as ordinary SEO work on the page that should answer the search: its relevance, its title, the links that point to it.
5. 5Where the search names a year or a place, make sure the page states it. A page about winter tyres that never says which year’s models it covers is a weak match for a search that does.

This is also why classic SEO and ChatGPT visibility move together for most sites. A page that ranks for the short searches is in the set ChatGPT reads; a page that does not is rarely cited, however well it is written.

OpenAI tells its own users that search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or wrong, and asks them to open a cited source, check that it supports the answer, look at when it was published or updated and prefer an authoritative source when accuracy matters^[1]. Write pages that pass the check a careful reader is told to make:

• Put the fact where the citation lands. A cited page that makes the reader hunt for the statement looks like a source that does not support the answer.
• Show the date the page was published and the date it was last changed, and change the second only when the content changes.
• Say who stands behind the page: the organisation, its role in the subject and how to reach it.
• Cite your own sources for figures and claims, so the page can be checked as well as quoted.
• Keep one page per question, so that the page cited is the one that answers it, and not a thin variant of it.

How to write the passage itself, with the question as the heading and the answer first, is covered in answers against ranked links and in this hub’s practical guide.

Not every answer is built from articles. For shops, local businesses and restaurants, ChatGPT draws on structured data from partners, and that data has its own way in.

OpenAI’s merchant page says that shopping in ChatGPT is live for users in the United States, that richer product data helps products surface with more accurate information, and that shoppers complete the purchase on the merchant’s own site or app^[3]. For a shop, the feed is often a faster route into product answers than any article.

Many answers cite other sites, not yours: reviews, comparisons, forums, directories. They are where most category questions are decided, and where a wrong fact about you usually comes from. Mapping those sources, and working on each by its own rules, is set out in how to improve brand visibility in AI search engines.

Three signals, read together, show whether the work is reaching ChatGPT.

1. 1Answers. Over a fixed set of customer questions asked the same way each month, the share of answers that name you and the share that cite your pages. The method is in how to measure results prompt by prompt.
2. 2Visits. Google Analytics 4 groups visits from AI assistants, ChatGPT among them, in a default channel of its own^[4]; read it by landing page to see which cited pages send people.
3. 3Fetches. ChatGPT-User is the agent that visits a page when a person’s question needs it; OpenAI says it is not used to decide whether content appears in search^[2]. Its requests in your logs show which pages are being read for answers.

Expect the answers to move before the visits do, and most mentions to send no visit at all. Ask new customers how they found you, and count “an AI assistant” as an answer.