When a buyer asks ChatGPT which company to hire or which product to buy, it searches the web and builds a shortlist from what it can find and trust. We open your site to OpenAI's search crawler and rewrite your pages around the questions buyers actually type. Then we work on the outside sites ChatGPT tends to cite, because what they say about you counts for more than what you say about yourself.
Most of it is ordinary SEO, aimed at one engine. But ChatGPT has its own crawlers with their own rules, and it finds pages through third-party search providers such as Bing rather than an index of its own (for shopping questions it also reads product data most stores never look at). Get those details wrong and good content stays invisible to it.
OAI-SearchBot. Block it in robots.txt and your pages drop out of ChatGPT's search answers, apart from plain links to your site
GPTBot, a separate setting. Blocking it opts you out of model training and does not remove you from search
ChatGPT-User fetches a page when someone asks about it; OpenAI says robots.txt may not apply, and it plays no part in search inclusion
Third-party search providers such as Bing, plus content from OpenAI's publishing partners
About 24 hours to reach ChatGPT search, per OpenAI
Chosen by relevance to the user's intent; OpenAI says they are not ads and not influenced by its partnerships
Memory and custom instructions can change which products a user is shown
Sources: OpenAI's crawler documentation, the OpenAI help-centre articles "Searching the web with ChatGPT" and "Shopping with ChatGPT Search", and OpenAI's ChatGPT search launch post.
OpenAI publishes only part of this. Still, what it does say shows where most brands fall out of the running, and it is usually long before ChatGPT writes a word of the answer.
ChatGPT searches the web on its own when a question looks like it needs current information. Buying questions ("best", "vs", "which agency") nearly always qualify.
Searches based on the prompt go to providers such as Bing. A page Bing has not indexed, or ranks nowhere, is much harder for ChatGPT to find.
Pages blocked to OAI-SearchBot are left out. So, in practice, are pages whose main text only appears after scripts run, or that bury the answer under a long intro.
The answer carries inline citations and a Sources list. Brands named across several of those sources tend to make the shortlist; a brand named once, on its own site, often does not.
Shopping questions get a product carousel instead of a list of links. OpenAI says the products are picked for relevance and are not ads. When a shopper opens a product, ChatGPT lists the merchants selling it and ranks them on a short list of factors you can work on.
Out-of-stock items and stale feeds lose ground. Your stock data needs to update as often as your site does.
It gets more weight when the shopper names a budget. The price shown first usually comes from the first merchant listed, which may not be the cheapest.
ChatGPT may summarise reviews and ratings from around the web. OpenAI notes it does not verify them, so the reviews people leave elsewhere count.
Brands selling their own products have an edge here, which makes your own store worth fixing before your marketplace listings.
Checkout happens on your own site. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT in September 2025, then stepped back from it in March 2026, as Digital Silk reported. Merchant ranking factors are from OpenAI's "Shopping with ChatGPT Search" help article.
Since 2026 you can also pay for a labelled slot under ChatGPT's answer. The two do different jobs, and neither buys the other: OpenAI keeps ads separate from the answer itself. We run both, so the plan can start from whichever one your prompts need.
| ChatGPT SEO | ChatGPT ads | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you appear | Inside the answer, as a mention, citation or product | In a labelled sponsored slot under the answer |
| Who can see it | Every ChatGPT user, on every plan | Adult Free and Go users in markets where ads are live |
| How you pay | A campaign fee; nothing per click | Your ad budget to OpenAI, plus management |
| How fast it moves | Crawl fixes in days, mentions over months | Live as soon as tracking and approval are done |
| When you stop paying | The pages and mentions stay | The ads stop |
| Best for | Questions where buyers want a recommendation | Testing demand quickly, or prompts you cannot win organically yet |
Ahrefs counted 66 citations of Blockchain App Factory across seven AI platforms in August 2026. ChatGPT accounts for three of them, our lowest along with Copilot. We are using the same playbook on our own site, and we would rather show you that number than hide it.
Your report tracks a fixed prompt list, so month-to-month changes mean something. For each prompt you see whether ChatGPT named you, whether it linked to you, which competitors it named instead, and which sources it cited. Visits from ChatGPT show up in GA4 as their own referral source.
See our wider AI SEO service →Three months minimum. The technical fixes land in the first few weeks, while mentions on outside sites take longer to build up, and anything still flat by week four gets swapped for something that will move.
The prompt list is agreed and run for the first time. We fix crawler access, check Bing indexing and record who ChatGPT names today.
Positioning sentence agreed, core pages rewritten as answers, schema matched to the text and, for stores, product data cleaned up.
Outreach to the lists and publications ChatGPT cites for your prompts, plus new comparison and FAQ pages where nothing good exists.
The prompt list is re-run against the baseline. Prompts that moved get defended; new ones, markets or engines get added.
ChatGPT SEO uses the same plans as our AI SEO service, with the work focused on ChatGPT, so there is one price list whichever page you came from. Every plan starts with a free audit and runs for at least three months.
| Audit | Starter | Growth | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audit and access | ||||
| Buyer prompts tested in ChatGPT | 50+ | 50+ | 100+ | Scoped |
| OAI-SearchBot, robots.txt and firewall check | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Sitemap and Bing Webmaster Tools set up | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Rendering fixes so text loads without scripts | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pages and content | ||||
| Positioning sentence agreed and published | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Core pages rewritten as answers | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Schema matched to page text | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| New comparison, FAQ and guide pages | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Product feed and data clean-up for stores | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Outside mentions | ||||
| Cited-source list for every tracked prompt | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Outreach to lists, reviews and directories | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| PR through 140+ media partners | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Other AI engines added to the work | – | – | – | ✓ |
| Reporting | ||||
| Prompt tracking | – | Monthly | Monthly | Agreed in scope |
| ChatGPT referral channel in GA4 | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Share of voice against named competitors | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
| Strategy calls | – | Monthly | Bi-weekly | Agreed in scope |
Start by letting OAI-SearchBot crawl your site and making sure Bing has indexed it, since ChatGPT finds pages through search providers such as Bing. Then put a clear answer at the top of each main page and get mentioned on the comparison lists, reviews and publications ChatGPT already cites for your topic. Track a fixed set of prompts monthly to see what moves.
For questions that need current information, it runs web searches through third-party providers such as Bing, reads the pages it can access and cites the ones it uses. OpenAI does not publish a ranking formula. In practice, a crawlable page that answers the question in its first lines gets cited more often, especially when other sites back up what it says.
No. GPTBot only controls whether your content may be used to train OpenAI's models. Search inclusion is controlled by OAI-SearchBot, a separate setting. You can block training and still appear in ChatGPT search, but blocking OAI-SearchBot keeps your pages out of search answers.
Crawl changes reach ChatGPT search in about a day, according to OpenAI. Rewritten pages are picked up as they get recrawled, which usually takes weeks. Outside mentions are slowest. That is why every plan runs at least three months, with a check at week four.
No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. ChatGPT's answers shift with the wording of a prompt and with each user's memory, and OpenAI does not sell placement in them. What we can show you is a fixed prompt list re-tested every month, with the mentions, links and competitors recorded each time.
Our ChatGPT SEO campaigns start from $7,500 on Starter, and most clients choose Growth from $15,000. Both run for at least three months, and the audit beforehand is free. These are the same prices as our wider AI SEO service, with the work focused on ChatGPT.
It builds on it, since a crawlable page with a clear answer helps in Google and ChatGPT alike. The ChatGPT- specific parts are OpenAI's own crawler settings, Bing indexing, prompt tracking instead of keyword rankings, and getting onto the particular sources ChatGPT cites for your buyers' questions.
Shopify stores are included through Shopify Catalog. Other merchants can apply to OpenAI for direct product feed access. Either way, keep prices and stock current, since ChatGPT ranks merchants on availability, price and quality, and favours the maker or main seller of a product.
Visits from ChatGPT links show up as referrals from chatgpt.com, and many arrive tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. We set up a separate channel for AI referrals in GA4 so ChatGPT visits and leads are reported on their own, not mixed into general referral traffic.
Not directly. OpenAI says product results in ChatGPT are not ads and are not influenced by its partnerships, and sponsored placements sit apart from the answer. Ads can still be useful while your organic visibility builds, for prompts you cannot win yet.
Tell us what you sell and who you compete with. We will run your buyers' prompts through ChatGPT, record who it names and cites, check that OpenAI's crawler can reach your site, and send back a ranked list of fixes.