ChatGPT SEO: how ChatGPT finds websites, and how to get your business into its answers

Ask ChatGPT for a plumber who works weekends or the best thrift stores in town, and it will often search the web and answer with links to the pages it used. OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week (October 2026, the company's own figure), so being one of those links is now part of being found.

"ChatGPT SEO" is the work of getting there. There is no submission form and OpenAI publishes no list of ranking factors, but it does say what makes a page eligible, and the rest follows from how ChatGPT search finds pages. In our check of 348 small-business websites, most of the problems that keep a site out of AI answers were basic and could be fixed in an afternoon. The full study.

How ChatGPT finds websites

OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs (OpenAI's crawler documentation):

Crawler	What it does	Does robots.txt control it?
OAI-SearchBot	Finds pages to show in ChatGPT search	Yes. Block it and you are left out of ChatGPT's search answers
ChatGPT-User	Visits a page while answering a person's request, and for custom GPT actions	OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, because a person asked
GPTBot	Collects pages that may be used to train OpenAI's models	Yes, and separately from search

ChatGPT search also works with outside search providers. OpenAI's help page on searching the web with ChatGPT says it sometimes rewrites a question into search queries and sends them to other providers, and points to Microsoft's privacy statement; its documentation for business workspaces names Bing. OpenAI does not say how much each source contributes, which is one reason nobody can honestly promise you a place in ChatGPT's answers. Where ChatGPT gets its information.

Put together, a page has three hurdles to clear: OAI-SearchBot or Bing must be able to fetch it, the HTML they fetch must contain the answer, and the page must look like a relevant, reliable source. OpenAI says it ranks results on several factors with exactly that aim, and that placement is not guaranteed.

1. Let OAI-SearchBot in

OpenAI's eligibility rule is short: allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, and make sure your host or CDN accepts requests from OpenAI's published IP addresses. Most sites never mention OAI-SearchBot and are fine, because it falls under the general User-agent: * group. The trouble starts with copied "block AI" lists and security settings.

In our check, 4 sites disallowed OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and 7 disallowed ChatGPT-User. More stopped them at the firewall: of the 315 sites that let a browser in, 15 turned away a request from OAI-SearchBot and 14 one from ChatGPT-User. Our checker sends each crawler's published user-agent name from our own server, so a firewall that verifies crawlers by IP address will turn our test away even when the real crawler gets in. Read a block as "your firewall reacts to this name", then confirm in your firewall's event log.

If you want ChatGPT search but not model training, this robots.txt does both, because the two settings are independent:

# Opt out of training OpenAI's models
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

# Everyone else, OAI-SearchBot included, is welcome
User-agent: *
Allow: /

OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about a day to reach its search. More robots.txt templates.

2. Be in Bing

Because ChatGPT search can draw on outside providers, and OpenAI names Bing, a site Bing has not indexed is giving up one way in. 6 sites in our check blocked Bingbot in robots.txt, and 18 turned away a request named Bingbot. Open Bing Webmaster Tools, add your site (it can import and verify sites from Google Search Console in a few clicks), submit your sitemap, and check your homepage with its URL Inspection tool. Bing SEO, step by step.

3. Put the answer in the HTML

When Vercel and MERJ measured AI crawler traffic in December 2024, none of the major AI crawlers they tested, OpenAI's included, ran JavaScript (their study). They read the HTML your server sends. If your text is added later by scripts, as it is on many site builders and React apps, a crawler may find an almost empty page.

In our check, 49 homepages (16%) were nearly blank without JavaScript, and 41% had fewer than 300 words in their HTML. The test takes a minute: open your page, choose View Page Source, and search for a sentence you can see on screen. If it is not in the source, an AI crawler probably cannot read it either. The fixes, cheapest first.

4. Write down what customers ask about

ChatGPT can only recommend a business for what it can read. For a local business that means, in plain text on the site: what you do, where you are and which areas you serve, prices or price ranges, opening hours, and how to get in touch. 66% of the homepages we checked had no email address in their HTML at all, and a page that only says "contact us for a quote" gives an assistant nothing to repeat.

• Give each service its own page, with a heading that names the service and the place: "Water heater repair in Round Rock", not "Services".
• Answer the questions customers ask on the phone, in the words they use.
• Keep your name, address, phone number and hours identical on your site, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and every directory you appear in.
• Add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data. Half the homepages we checked had none. How to add it.

5. Give it reasons to trust you

OpenAI does not publish its ranking factors, so be wary of anyone who claims to know them. What we can say is that ChatGPT search draws on the open web, and a business that other sites mention, review and link to gives it more to go on than one that exists only on its own homepage. Reviews on the platforms your customers use, listings in respected local and trade directories, and local press coverage all help people find you anyway. Treat any effect on ChatGPT as a bonus, not a promise.

What does not work

• Submitting your site. There is no form. The one exception is shopping: merchants can apply to share product data.
• Allowing GPTBot to "get into ChatGPT". GPTBot is for training. Search is OAI-SearchBot's job, and the settings are separate.
• An llms.txt file. OpenAI has not said ChatGPT reads other sites' llms.txt files. In our check, sites with one had serious problems at exactly the same rate (24.4%) as sites without. What llms.txt does and does not do.
• Paying for a place in the answer. ChatGPT now shows ads to users on its Free and Go plans, below the answer. OpenAI says ads do not influence the answers themselves (Ads in ChatGPT).

How to tell whether it is working

• Referral visits. In Google Analytics, open Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition, and look for chatgpt.com as a session source.
• Ask it. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, with search on, the questions your customers ask, and note whether you are mentioned or linked. Answers change from one run to the next, so ask each question more than once. How to track it properly, for free.

Questions

How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?

Make sure OAI-SearchBot and Bingbot can fetch your pages, that the pages state what you do, where and for how much in plain HTML, and that the same facts appear in your listings elsewhere. Then be the business people would recommend anyway. No one can guarantee a mention.

Is ChatGPT SEO different from Google SEO?

The foundations are the same: pages that can be crawled and indexed, with clear and specific content. The differences are a separate crawler to allow, Bing mattering more than you might expect, and AI crawlers that, in the most recent public measurement, did not run JavaScript.

How long does it take?

OpenAI says robots.txt changes reach its search in about a day. Being crawled, indexed by Bing and then cited takes longer, and there is no way to request it.

Day 2 of 20. See what OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and the other AI crawlers get from your site with the free AI visibility checker.