ChatGPT SEO: what carries over from Google, and what does not

What ChatGPT SEO means

ChatGPT SEO means getting your pages found, read and cited when ChatGPT searches the web to answer a question. It is the same goal as Google SEO, reached through a different reader.

ChatGPT can answer in two ways. It can answer from what its model learned in training, which is a snapshot of the past. Or it can search the web, read a handful of pages, and write an answer with links to them. OpenAI’s help page on web search says ChatGPT “may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information”. Only the second way gives you something to work on this month, so this guide is about that one.

There are two separate wins inside ChatGPT SEO. One is being cited, which means a link to your page appears beside the answer. The other is being named, which means the answer recommends your brand in its text. They often come together, but not always. A page can be cited for a fact while a rival is the one recommended.

How ChatGPT search finds the pages it cites

ChatGPT search rewrites the question into search queries, sends them to search providers, and reads what comes back. That is OpenAI’s own description, from its help page on searching the web with ChatGPT.

1. A person asks a question, and ChatGPT decides whether to search. It can also be told to search.
2. ChatGPT rewrites the question into one or more shorter search queries. OpenAI’s example turns a long question about cancer drugs into “CCR8 immunotherapy drug development 2025”.
3. It sends those queries to search providers. The help page links to Microsoft’s privacy statement among the providers whose terms apply.
4. It may send more specific follow-up queries after reading the first results.
5. It reads pages its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, is allowed to read.
6. It writes an answer and attaches citations. OpenAI says it “ranks search results using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information” and that “placement is not guaranteed”.

Step three is the reason Google SEO habits still matter. If ChatGPT finds pages through a search provider, a page that ranks nowhere in that provider’s results has a harder road. A study by Seer Interactive took about 100 questions that made ChatGPT search, pulled more than 500 citations, and found 87% of them in Bing’s top 20 organic results for the same query. Only 56% matched Google’s results. The authors say the sample was small and that ChatGPT likely shortens long questions before searching, so treat it as a strong hint, not a rule.

What carries over from Google SEO

Most of the basics carry over: a crawlable page, a clear answer near the top, and a page that ranks in ordinary search. What changes is the crawler you have to let in and the way you find out whether it worked.

Backlinks, page speed and structured data are missing from that table on purpose. OpenAI says nothing public about any of them as a factor for ChatGPT search. They may still help indirectly, because they help a page rank with the search providers ChatGPT uses. Anyone who tells you their exact weight inside ChatGPT is guessing.

What does not carry over

The ranking report does not carry over. There is no position one in ChatGPT, no list of ten results to check, and no console from OpenAI that shows how often you appeared.

• The answer changes. The same question asked twice can get different sources, because the model writes a new answer each time and may run different queries.
• The question is longer. People ask ChatGPT full sentences with context, such as their team size or budget, and ChatGPT turns that into its own queries. You cannot see those queries.
• A mention can come without a click. If ChatGPT names your brand in its text and links someone else’s page, your analytics will show nothing.
• Training is a separate door. What the model learned in training comes from crawls you may have allowed or blocked long ago, through a different crawler.
• Citations can be wrong. OpenAI’s own help page warns that “search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect”.

The last point is backed by outside testing. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism gave eight AI search tools excerpts from news articles and asked them to name the source, in 1,600 queries in all. ChatGPT search identified 134 articles wrongly and signalled doubt only 15 times in its 200 responses. That was a test of news attribution in early 2025, not of product questions, but it is a fair warning: check the link ChatGPT gives before you celebrate or panic.

The crawler settings that decide whether you can appear

OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that decides whether your pages can show in ChatGPT search. Block it and OpenAI says your site “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”.

The two main crawlers are independent. You can block GPTBot to stay out of training and still allow OAI-SearchBot to stay in search. Many sites block both by accident, through a rule written for every crawler or a setting a security service turned on. Our page on how ChatGPT is asked and read covers the same crawlers from the assistant’s side. OpenAI’s help page adds one more check: your host or content delivery network must allow traffic from OpenAI’s published search bot IP addresses, not just the robots.txt line.

There is one surprise in OpenAI’s publisher FAQ. If you block OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT may still show your page’s link and title when it learns the address from a search provider or from other pages. To stop that you need a noindex tag, and OpenAI notes its crawler has to be allowed on the page to read the tag.

What the research says about getting cited

The best public evidence says pages that quote sources and give numbers get used more, and pages stuffed with keywords get used less. It comes from one research paper, and it was not tested on ChatGPT search itself.

The paper is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi with two independent researchers. It was first posted as a preprint in November 2023 and accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. The authors rewrote web pages in nine ways and measured how much of each page an AI answer used. They report that adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a page’s visibility by up to 40% in their test engine. Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick, did not perform well. In the paper’s smaller test on Perplexity it did 10% worse than the unchanged page on the main measure.

Read it as direction, not a promise. The same advice is also simply good writing. A page that answers the question in its first lines, names its sources and gives real numbers is easier for a person to trust, too.

There is no setting that ranks you in ChatGPT. You can only make sure it is allowed to read you, and give it the clearest page on the question.

A ChatGPT SEO checklist

Start with access, then the page, then measurement. Each step below rests on one of the sources above.

1. Open your robots.txt and confirm that OAI-SearchBot is allowed. Decide about GPTBot separately.
2. Ask your host or content delivery network whether it blocks AI crawlers, and allow OpenAI’s published search bot IP addresses if it does.
3. Check that your key pages rank in Bing as well as Google for the questions you care about. Bing Webmaster Tools is free.
4. Write down the questions your buyers ask, in full sentences, and decide which page answers each one.
5. Put the answer in the first two sentences of that page. Then give the detail, with numbers and named sources.
6. Remove keyword padding. The GEO research found it performed poorly.
7. Add a filter for utm_source=chatgpt.com in your analytics, so ChatGPT referrals show up as their own line.
8. Ask ChatGPT your questions yourself, save the answers, and ask again a week later before you believe any change.

How to measure ChatGPT SEO without fooling yourself

Measure it by asking the same buyer questions on a schedule and keeping every answer. A single answer is a sample of one, and the next asking can differ.

By hand, that means a spreadsheet with one row per question, the date, whether you were named, who was named instead, and which links were cited. Keep questions that already contain your brand name in a separate column. They will name you almost every time, and blending them in makes your numbers look better than they are. Our method page sets out the rules we use for counting.

Agentcites does this as a service. It asks up to 50 buyer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and DeepSeek every week, keeps each answer word for word, and records which pages each answer linked. It also runs a robots.txt check for five AI crawlers, including OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot. It asks through each assistant’s API, so an answer can differ from the one a signed-in person sees in the app. The pricing page has the one plan, at $149 a month per website.