Let me clear up a mix-up first. When you search for "ChatGPT SEO," half of the articles that come up explain how to use ChatGPT while doing SEO: having it write blog posts, generating keyword lists. This article is about the opposite. It explains what it takes for your name to come up in the answer when a customer asks ChatGPT "which one should I buy on this budget?" or "who should I go to?"
Because the topic is new, there's a lot of guesswork out there. As far as I can, I'll rely on what OpenAI's own help pages say, and where they don't say something, I'll tell you so plainly.
The broader name for this work is GEO. I covered the umbrella effort, which also includes Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, in the what is GEO guide. Here we're looking only at ChatGPT, because the way it finds sources is its own, and some of the settings apply to it alone.
ChatGPT either answers from what it learned during training or searches the web on the spot and reads the pages it finds. The second part is the one you can influence.
According to OpenAI's web search help page, ChatGPT can start a search on its own for questions that need up-to-date information. When it searches, it doesn't send the user's question as is; it rewrites it into one or more targeted queries and passes those queries to its search partners. For those search partners, the same page points to Microsoft's and Shopify's privacy policies. Then it reads the pages it found, writes the answer and shows the sources as links.
The practical takeaway from this flow: if your page gets dropped at the second or third step, there's no way you'll appear at the fourth. So the first half of ChatGPT SEO is about being findable. That's why the first weeks of a ChatGPT SEO project usually go into a technical audit, not writing.
Then there's the query rewriting. The user asks a long, conversational question; ChatGPT turns it into a short search query. So your page has to be found for that short search and, once read, also contain the answer to the long question. In my view, this is the least-discussed side of ChatGPT SEO.
Most of the time ChatGPT doesn't recommend you because its crawler can't get into your site. If it can, the problem is usually how the content is written, and sometimes a lack of outside sources that confirm you.
Here are a few options often recommended for teams this size:
The first reason is the sneakiest, because site owners usually have no idea. Bot protection from your hosting company or CDN can quietly stop crawlers it doesn't recognize. A line once added to robots.txt to "block AI bots" does the same thing. The site opens perfectly normally for people and is closed to ChatGPT.
The second reason is how the content is written. If the most important information on a product page sits inside a tab, in a PDF or on top of an image, the model either never sees it or can't use it. The third is outside confirmation. As long as you're the only one calling yourself "the best solution," on your own site, ChatGPT has nowhere to verify it.
To show up in ChatGPT, you first need to make sure its crawler can get into your site, then make your pages quotable, and then measure the results with the same questions. The order matters, because writing content while the door is closed is wasted effort.
The order of ChatGPT SEO
Ask the questions in ChatGPT
Write down 15-25 questions your customers would actually ask and ask them in ChatGPT with search on. Record who gets mentioned and which pages are cited as sources.
Open the door to OAI-SearchBot
Check that OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked in your robots.txt file and that your hosting or CDN isn't stopping the IP addresses OpenAI publishes.
Set up the Bing side
Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and confirm your important pages are indexed.
Write quotable pages
Put two or three sentences at the top of every important page that answer the question directly. What determines the price and who it isn't a fit for should also be on the page as plain text.
Get mentioned elsewhere
From your step 1 records, pull out the sites ChatGPT often cites in your industry. Build content and relationships to get featured there.
Ask the same questions again
Repeat the question set and track visits from ChatGPT separately in GA4.
You might ask why step 3 is there, since in Turkey practically everyone uses Google. OpenAI's help page lists Microsoft as one of its search partners, and Microsoft's search engine is Bing. A page that isn't properly indexed in Bing has a low chance of being found this way. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and setup takes less than an hour. Honestly, I see no reason to skip insurance this cheap.
Step 6 has an easy shortcut too. According to OpenAI's FAQ for publishers, ChatGPT automatically adds the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter to links from its search results to your site. Once you set a filter for that source in GA4, you'll see how many people came from ChatGPT and what they did.
If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, you need to allow OAI-SearchBot; blocking GPTBot doesn't change that. These two get mixed up often, and because of that mix-up some sites unintentionally remove themselves from ChatGPT search.
| Bot | What it's for | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Finding and showing sites in ChatGPT search | You won't be shown in ChatGPT's search answers |
| GPTBot | Collecting content that may be used to train models | You're left out of training but keep appearing in search |
| ChatGPT-User | Visiting a page at a user's request | OpenAI writes that robots.txt rules may not apply to this bot |
The information in the table comes from OpenAI's crawlers page. The same page also says a change to robots.txt can take about 24 hours to be reflected in its systems.
ChatGPT has no fixed ranking like Google does, so "top position" is the wrong goal to set. OpenAI also writes on its web search page that it ranks results based on many factors and that placement is not guaranteed.
You can ask the same question today and tomorrow and get different answers. If the user has memory turned on, OpenAI writes that ChatGPT can also draw on saved memories when rewriting the search query; so when two people ask the same question, the same query may not go out. That's why I'm skeptical of anyone sharing a screenshot that says "we're #1 in ChatGPT."
What you can measure is frequency: in a set of twenty questions, how many mention you, and how that number changes month to month. I have one more caveat here: this method isn't flawless either, because the question you ask won't be exactly the same as the one a real user asks. Still, it's the most honest measure we have.
Whether your site is open to ChatGPT is largely determined by your robots.txt file and your hosting settings, and you can check both without technical knowledge. To see your robots.txt file, just type yourdomain.com/robots.txt into your browser.
ChatGPT access and content check
0/8Check off the items; you'll see whether your problem is access or content.
Don't underestimate the second item. For example, on July 1, 2026, Cloudflare announced new settings that separate AI traffic into search, agent and training; search bots stay allowed by default, but things may look different on a site that once turned on the old "block AI bots" option. Checking that setting in your dashboard once may do you more good than the rest of this article.
If your customers mostly use ChatGPT and you want to move fast on a single tool, go with ChatGPT SEO; if you're targeting several AI tools together, GEO; if you need to be visible this month, ads.
"ChatGPT for SEO"
ChatGPT SEO
If you want to start on your own, the checklist and steps above are a solid start. If your catalog is large, your industry is heavy on comparisons or your technical setup is complex, a ChatGPT SEO service ties all of this into one plan. If Gemini and Google's AI Overviews matter to you too, it makes more sense to handle the umbrella work with a GEO agency.
The organic side takes time to deliver. In the meantime, if you want to appear below the answer as sponsored, advertising on ChatGPT is a separate option. Keep in mind that ads don't change what the answer says; OpenAI states this clearly on its ads help page.
Access fixes are done within a few weeks; according to OpenAI, a robots.txt change is reflected in about a day. Seeing the effect of content and outside sources takes longer, and it's not possible to give a firm date. Making the first meaningful comparison at the end of the second month is reasonable.
LLM SEO is the general name for work done for all assistants built on large language models. ChatGPT SEO is the version focused on ChatGPT. If you're targeting several tools together, it's usually called GEO.
ChatGPT adds the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter to links from its search results. Just look for that value in the source/medium report in GA4.
Not on its own. llms.txt isn't mentioned in the guidelines OpenAI publishes for search; what they describe is OAI-SearchBot access. The file does no harm, but your priority should be access and content.
No. According to OpenAI's ads help page, ads run on separate systems and don't affect the answer. The ad appears below the answer with a sponsored label; being mentioned inside the answer is separate work.
Last updated: September 27, 2026. OpenAI's help pages are updated often; I checked the information here on that date.
September 21, 2026: Documents unsealed in the NYT lawsuit show Microsoft measured, with its own data, that Bing Chat cut publisher clicks by 83-93% compared with classic Bing.
When ChatGPT doesn't mention your brand, it rarely comes down to a single cause. We walk through six possible reasons in order, starting with the free checks you can do in a few hours.
Since GPT-6, ChatGPT links no longer carry the UTM tag or the referrer; as of October 15, 2026, ChatGPT visits are shifting to Direct in analytics.
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