ChatGPT SEO: how to get cited by ChatGPT

How ChatGPT finds sources

When ChatGPT searches, it turns your question into one or more web searches, reads the results and writes an answer with links. OpenAI describes its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, as the one “used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”.

Where those results come from is not fully public. Microsoft announced in May 2023 that Bing would power ChatGPT’s web search, and in September 2026 Peec published research describing an index OpenAI runs itself, internally called “Labrador”, used alongside outside providers. OpenAI has not said which providers ChatGPT uses today, so treat the current mix as reported rather than official.

What is clear from the answers themselves is that ChatGPT reads widely. In our October 2026 study of 150 AI answers, ChatGPT listed 16.6 domains as sources per answer on average, far more than any other engine we asked. Being one of many sources is achievable; being absent from all of them is the real risk.

Step 1: let OpenAI’s crawlers in

OpenAI documents several agents, and robots.txt treats each one separately. Three of them decide whether ChatGPT can read your site, and blocking the wrong one can keep you out of ChatGPT’s answers entirely.

Step 2: write pages ChatGPT can quote

1. Answer in the first two sentences. ChatGPT lifts passages; a direct answer under a heading that matches the question is the easiest one to lift.
2. Cover the follow-up questions. ChatGPT often runs several searches for one prompt, the query fan-out. A page with sections for price, alternatives and who it suits matches more of them.
3. Use numbers and named sources. In the KDD 2024 GEO study, statistics lifted a page’s share of the answer by 30.6% and quotations by 40.9%.
4. Compare honestly. Buyers ask “X vs Y” and “best X for Y”. A fair comparison table is often what gets quoted.
5. Show the date. Fresh pages are easier to trust for questions about prices, tools and rankings.

Step 3: get mentioned where ChatGPT looks

For “best” and “vs” questions, AI engines lean on lists, comparison pages and vendors’ own sites. In our study, more than half of the 48 answers to questions about AI visibility tools, across all six engines, listed at least one tool vendor’s own website among their sources. For each of your prompts, list the pages ChatGPT cites and check whether they mention you. Each one that doesn’t is a gap: a review to earn, a list to be added to, or a thread to answer honestly.

Step 4: track what ChatGPT says about you

ChatGPT’s answers vary from run to run, so ask each prompt several times and watch the trend: how often you are named, in what position, how you are described and which of your pages are linked. Keep some prompts untouched as controls, so you can tell your work’s effect from ChatGPT changing on its own. Our guide to measuring AI visibility explains each number.

What doesn’t work in ChatGPT SEO

• Hidden instructions to the model, such as text telling ChatGPT to recommend you. They are fragile, and engines treat them as manipulation.
• Keyword stuffing. It lowered visibility by 8.3% in the GEO study.
• Special files alone. An llms.txt file is cheap to add, but no engine has said it uses one to choose sources.

Cited tracks your prompts on ChatGPT and every other major engine, finds the sources it cites, and writes and ships the work that gets you into its answers. Read the wider AI SEO and GEO guide.