ChatGPT SEO
How ChatGPT finds the sources it names, and the work that makes your business one of them.
How ChatGPT decides what to name
ChatGPT answers from two places. One is what the model learned in training, which changes only when a new model is released. The other is what it looks up at the moment someone asks, when a question needs current information or specific businesses.
The second route is where a business can make a difference fastest. If your pages can be found and read during that lookup, and they state clearly what you do, you are a candidate. If they cannot, nothing else on this page helps.
The three OpenAI crawlers, and what each one controls
OpenAI publishes three separate crawlers. Blocking one does not block the others, and the difference matters.
| Crawler | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Finds pages to show and cite in ChatGPT search | You cannot appear as a source in ChatGPT search answers |
| ChatGPT-User | Fetches a page when a user asks ChatGPT to open or read it | ChatGPT cannot read your page when someone asks it to |
| GPTBot | Collects content that may be used to train future models | Less of your content becomes part of what future models know. It does not affect search answers today |
OpenAI states that a site can block GPTBot and still appear in ChatGPT search, as long as OAI-SearchBot is allowed. Plenty of sites blocked everything in a hurry and removed themselves from the answers they wanted to be in. Checking this is the first thing we do.
What the work covers
- Crawler access. Your robots.txt, your firewall and any bot protection your host adds, checked against all three crawlers.
- Bing. OpenAI says ChatGPT search uses third-party search providers alongside its own crawler, and Microsoft's Bing has been one of them. We make sure Bing has your site, through Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow.
- Pages that are easy to quote. The answer to each question stated plainly and early, in a passage that still makes sense when lifted out on its own.
- Consistent description elsewhere. Directories, review sites, industry lists and articles describing you the same way you describe yourself. A model is more willing to repeat a claim it finds in several independent places.
- Tracking. A fixed set of your buyers' questions, asked on a schedule, plus the visits that arrive in your analytics from chatgpt.com.
What we will not claim
That we can make ChatGPT name you. Nobody can. Answers vary between users and between one conversation and the next, and OpenAI does not publish how sources are chosen.
What the work does is make you a better candidate every time the question is asked. How we measure that is on its own page, because it deserves more than a sentence.
Want to know if ChatGPT names you?
We will ask the questions your buyers ask and show you who comes up, and what it would take to be among them.