How to rank in ChatGPT search
Help ChatGPT read your pages and find useful answers, then check where it already gets information about your market.
Steen Stones · Reviewed
Let ChatGPT read your website, give useful answers on your pages and check which sources it already cites. OpenAI chooses relevant information using several factors, so making your pages accessible is the starting point.
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| Crawler | Purpose | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | ChatGPT search results | Allow crawling and requests from OpenAI’s published searchbot addresses. |
| GPTBot | Content that may train models | A separate training choice. You can allow search and disallow this crawler. |
| ChatGPT-User | Not the search-inclusion control | Do not use this name as proof that a page is eligible for Search. |
Can ChatGPT read your website?
Ask your website team whether OAI-SearchBot, which reads pages for ChatGPT search, can reach your site. Your hosting service also needs to allow traffic from the network addresses OpenAI publishes.
You can let ChatGPT find your pages for search without agreeing to use them for model training. Allow OAI-SearchBot for search and manage GPTBot separately, because it collects material for training.
What should you improve on your pages?
Give the answer first, then explain it, as Ahrefs recommends in its ChatGPT guide. Keep the content current too, rather than just changing the date at the top.
That means replacing old statistics, updating screenshots when the interface changes and revising advice when the options change. Ahrefs recommends these improvements without promising a position in ChatGPT.
Where should you look beyond your own site?
Look at the pages ChatGPT cites for questions in your market, then read them yourself. Ahrefs recommends checking that they cover your category and discuss competitors in context, because some citations are only loosely related.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that those with more web mentions appeared more often in AI answers. The pattern does not prove that adding mentions will increase your visibility.
Ahrefs only included sites scoring above 40 on its Domain Rating measure. Their top keyword also needed at least 800 monthly searches, so the study does not represent every small company.
Will publishing more articles help?
Publishing more pages is not much of a plan on its own. Ahrefs found almost no relationship between page count and AI visibility.
In the words of our Director of Content, Ryan Law, “It's not just a content creation arms race.”
How can you check whether it is working?
Read the cited pages to check the answer, because ChatGPT citations can be wrong or out of date. Use tools such as Google Analytics to see which visits then reach your website from ChatGPT.
ChatGPT adds a source tag to its referral links, helping you identify visits in your reports.