How to rank in ChatGPT: a practical guide to ChatGPT SEO

Ranking in ChatGPT means being one of the sources it cites, or one of the businesses it names, when it searches the web to answer a question. There’s no position one in the old sense. There’s the answer, and whoever it credits.

This guide is for business owners and marketers in the US, the UK and Australia who’ve typed their own category into ChatGPT and not seen their name. We’ll stick to what OpenAI has actually published, plus what we see doing this work.

How ChatGPT search picks its sources

ChatGPT searches the web when a question needs current information, or when the user asks it to. It rewrites the question into one or more search queries, gathers results, then writes an answer with citations.

OpenAI’s help article on ChatGPT search sets out the mechanics. It says ChatGPT “typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries” and sends them to search providers. It ranks results “using multiple factors intended to help users find relevant, reliable information”, and adds that “placement is not guaranteed”. It also uses your general location, based on IP address, for local questions.

That’s all OpenAI says about ranking. No list of factors, no weighting. Anyone who claims to know ChatGPT’s exact algorithm is guessing.

Two practical points follow from the mechanics. Your page has to be findable by the queries ChatGPT writes, which are often longer and more specific than what a person types. And the page has to contain a clear answer that’s easy to lift, because the model is writing a summary, not listing links.

Does ChatGPT search use Bing?

Partly, as far as the public record goes. OpenAI doesn’t publish a simple “we use Bing” statement, so be careful with anyone who says it does, full stop.

Here’s what it does say. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT search in October 2024, its announcement said it uses “third-party search providers, as well as content provided directly by our partners”. The help article says ChatGPT “sometimes partners with other search providers” and lists the Microsoft privacy statement among the partner policies that apply. OpenAI also runs its own search crawler, OAI-SearchBot.

So the sensible reading is that Microsoft’s index is one input, alongside OpenAI’s own crawling. The practical upshot doesn’t change: be indexed well in Bing and crawlable by OpenAI. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and check for crawl errors. It takes an afternoon, and plenty of sites have never done it because they only look at Google.

Step one: make sure OpenAI can crawl you

This is the only hard requirement OpenAI publishes. Its crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, though they can still appear as navigational links.

OpenAI runs three user agents, and people mix them up constantly:

So you can block training and still allow search. A robots.txt that does both looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

OpenAI says robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to apply.

Robots.txt isn’t the only gate. OpenAI’s help centre says to confirm that your host or CDN “allows traffic from OpenAI’s published searchbot IP addresses”. Firewalls and bot-protection tools often block unknown crawlers. Cloudflare, for example, announced in July 2025 that new domains would be asked upfront whether to allow AI crawlers. If someone clicked “deny” during setup, your robots.txt can look perfect and you’ll still be invisible.

In our experience, this is the most common reason a decent site is missing from ChatGPT. It’s also the cheapest to fix.

Step two: write pages ChatGPT can quote

Once you’re crawlable, the question is whether your page is the best thing to cite. Pages that get quoted tend to answer the question in the first two or three sentences of a section, in plain words, with specifics.

Some habits that help:

• Open each section with the answer, then explain. A model lifting one paragraph should get a complete thought.
• Use real specifics: prices, locations served, turnaround times, named standards. Vague copy gives the model nothing to cite.
• Cover the follow-up questions a buyer asks next. ChatGPT often splits a question into several searches.
• Put key facts in text, not only in images or PDFs.

The research backs the direction, if not the exact numbers. The 2023 GEO paper from Aggarwal and colleagues found that adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised a page’s visibility in AI answers, while keyword stuffing did worse than doing nothing. Their tests used their own test engine and Perplexity, not ChatGPT, so treat it as a guide, not a formula. We explain the wider picture in GEO vs SEO.

Step three: be consistent and be mentioned

ChatGPT recommends businesses it can describe with confidence. That confidence comes from your own site and from what everyone else says about you.

Keep your name, services, locations and contact details identical across your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, LinkedIn and industry directories. Conflicting details make a business harder to recommend.

Then work on third-party mentions. Reviews, local press, “best of” lists, trade associations and forum threads all shape how AI tools describe a category. This is slow, human work: doing things worth writing about and asking the right people to write about them. Our piece on Reddit and AI search covers one channel that shows up in AI answers a lot.

A worked example: a roofing company in Denver

Say a roofing contractor in Denver asks ChatGPT, “Who are the best roof repair companies in Denver?” Four competitors come up. They don’t.

Here’s the order we’d check things in. First, robots.txt and the Cloudflare bot settings, to confirm OAI-SearchBot gets through. Second, Bing Webmaster Tools, to confirm the key pages are indexed. Third, the services page: does it say “roof repair in Denver” in plain words, with the areas covered and how quickly they respond? Fourth, reviews and listings: are the business name and phone number the same everywhere, and do the local roundups mention them?

Any one of those can be the blocker. Usually it’s two or three together.

How to test your ChatGPT visibility

Test with a fixed list of questions, run the same way each month. One-off checks are noise, because answers vary between runs.

Write 10 to 20 prompts your buyers would genuinely ask. Mix broad ones (“best accountant for small businesses in Leeds”) with specific ones (“accountant who handles Making Tax Digital for landlords”). Run them in a fresh chat with search on. Log who’s named, who’s cited and which pages are linked.

Then check your analytics. OpenAI’s publisher FAQ says ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to referral links, so you can filter those visits in GA4.

If you’d rather not run it yourself, our free AI visibility check runs 10 fixed questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and shows who gets named instead of you.

What not to do

Some ChatGPT SEO advice is harmless noise. Some can hurt you.

Don’t block OAI-SearchBot by accident while trying to block training. Check the user agent names carefully.

Don’t pay anyone who guarantees a ChatGPT ranking. OpenAI says placement isn’t guaranteed, so nobody outside OpenAI can promise it.

Don’t fake reviews or mentions. In the US, the FTC’s final rule on fake reviews bans AI-generated fake reviews and buying reviews tied to sentiment. The UK and Australia have their own consumer law on this too.

Don’t stuff keywords or spin out hundreds of thin AI-written pages. The research found stuffing doesn’t help, and thin pages give a model nothing worth quoting.

Our view: the businesses that do well in ChatGPT are usually the ones that were already easy to recommend. Clear site, consistent details, real reviews, people talking about them. The technical fixes make you eligible. Reputation makes you the answer.

Quick answers

What’s the one thing to check today?
Whether OAI-SearchBot can reach your site through both robots.txt and your firewall or CDN.

Should I hire someone for ChatGPT SEO?
If you’ve fixed access and still aren’t named, yes, because the remaining work is content and reputation over months. Our GEO service covers it, alongside SEO.

Will ranking in Google help me in ChatGPT?
Often, because good pages tend to be good sources everywhere. But it isn’t automatic, since ChatGPT uses different indexes.

For clients outside Singapore, see how we work with international businesses, or get in touch to talk through your results. If your site struggles on Google too, start with why your website isn’t ranking.