Getting cited by ChatGPT, and what it responds to.

ChatGPT is the assistant most of your buyers actually use, which makes it the one worth understanding first. Its behavior differs enough from Perplexity and Gemini that treating all three identically leaves value on the table.

How it behaves

ChatGPT answers some questions from training and searches the web for others, and the boundary is not always predictable. Questions about current pricing, recent events, or specific local providers tend to trigger retrieval; general conceptual questions often do not.

That matters because the two paths have different implications. For retrieval-answered questions, being findable and quotable right now is what counts. For training-answered questions, you are dealing with a much slower feedback loop and broad corroboration matters more than any single page.

Crawlers and access for ChatGPT

OpenAI documents three crawlers. OAI-SearchBot finds and indexes pages for ChatGPT search results. ChatGPT-User fetches pages when a user's request calls for it. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train models. They are controlled separately in robots.txt.

For visibility, the first two matter. Make sure neither is blocked by robots.txt or by a firewall or CDN rule. Blocking GPTBot is a separate choice about training, and it does not remove you from ChatGPT search results.

What makes content quotable here

• Self-contained sections. A heading that asks a question and a paragraph that answers it completely, without requiring the reader to have read the preceding section.
• Specific claims over hedged ones. “Typically 60 to 90 days” is quotable. “It varies depending on many factors” is not.
• Plain formatting. Content buried in tabs, accordions or rendered late by JavaScript is less reliably available.
• Stated context. Who you are, where you operate, what you do — on the page, not implied by the domain.

Checking where you stand

Ask it directly, in the phrasing your buyers would use. “Who are the best [category] companies in [city]?” and “What should I look for when hiring a [category] provider?” are good starting points.

Run each several times, because responses vary. Record who gets named and which sources appear. If you are absent from all of them, the diagnostic question is not “how do I rank” but “which sources is it using, and am I on them?”

Tracking ChatGPT traffic

When ChatGPT links to a page from search results, it commonly adds a utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter, and visits also arrive with chatgpt.com as the referrer. Set up an analytics segment for both so the traffic is visible, and look at which pages receive it.

Those landing pages are strong evidence of which content ChatGPT finds useful. They are often not the pages you would guess, and they are the obvious candidates for improvement: clearer answers, updated facts and a clear next step for the visitor.

Where to go deeper

With around 900 million weekly users reported in early 2026, ChatGPT is the assistant where most buyers are. We cover platform-specific tactics in more detail on our ChatGPT SEO page, and paid placements on our ChatGPT Ads page.

Prompts to test in ChatGPT

Useful starting prompts for any business: “best [service] in [city]”, “who should I hire for [job] in [area]”, “[service] cost in [city]”, “[your company] reviews” and “[your company] vs [competitor]”. Run each several times, with search on, and note the sources panel as well as the text.

The branded prompts often reveal the most urgent problems: outdated services, wrong locations or old pricing that ChatGPT repeats to people who are already considering you.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my business?

Be identifiable, quotable and corroborated. Consistent business information so it can resolve who you are, self-contained content that answers questions completely, and presence on the third-party sources it draws from when it searches. There is no direct submission route.

Does ChatGPT use my website directly?

Sometimes, when a question triggers retrieval. Other answers come from training data, where broad corroboration across many sources matters more than any single page of yours.

How often should I check ChatGPT visibility?

Fortnightly is enough for most businesses, using the same prompts phrased identically each time, and asking each prompt several times because responses vary between sessions.

Does blocking GPTBot remove me from ChatGPT?

No. GPTBot is for training. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, which are controlled separately.

How can I see traffic from ChatGPT?

Look for chatgpt.com as a referrer and for utm_source=chatgpt.com on landing page URLs in your analytics.