ChatGPT SEO
What OpenAI documents, and what everyone else is guessing.

"ChatGPT SEO" means one of two things: using ChatGPT to do SEO work, or getting ChatGPT to cite and recommend your company. This note is about the second one, and the short answer is that OpenAI documents only three things you control: whether your site is public, whether its search crawler can reach it, and whether the page is indexable. Everything past that is educated inference, including most of what you will read on this topic.

Two jobs under one phrase

When we pulled the Google results for "chatgpt seo" on 14 October 2026, Google's own AI Overview opened by splitting the query in exactly this way, and the organic results were a mix of both: Reddit threads and YouTube videos about using ChatGPT for keyword clustering, next to agency and tool-vendor pages about being cited by it.

If you want the first job, you do not need us. If you want the second, read on.

What OpenAI actually documents

OpenAI's publisher FAQ is the closest thing to an official answer. Three points matter:

1. Any public website can appear in ChatGPT search. There is no application and no paid placement.
2. Its search crawler is called OAI-SearchBot. If you want your content surfaced and cited, do not block it in robots.txt.
3. A page can still show up as a link and title if OpenAI learns the URL from other sources, even when its crawler is disallowed. The documented way to stay out is a noindex tag.

Check these first. A surprising number of company sites block every unfamiliar bot by default, usually through a firewall or CDN rule nobody remembers adding.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

Also worth knowing: not every ChatGPT answer searches the web. When it answers from its training alone, there is no citation to win.

What it does not document

OpenAI does not publish a ranking formula for why one site is cited over another. Whatever sits between "reachable" and "cited" is observation and best guess.

That includes the advice we give ourselves. Answering the question in the first two sentences, one focused page per question, facts a machine can quote, and being described consistently on other sites are all consistent with how retrieval systems work. None of it is a documented lever, and we do not treat it as one.

What the models said today

We asked the same question in ChatGPT and in Perplexity on 14 October 2026, with web search on: "How do I get my company recommended by ChatGPT? What actually influences whether ChatGPT cites a website?" (API access through DataForSEO, GPT-5.4 and Perplexity Sonar Pro.)

• ChatGPT answered almost entirely from OpenAI's own help pages. It listed crawlability, indexability and query relevance, and then said plainly that OpenAI does not publish a full ranking algorithm, so anything further is inference.
• Perplexity answered with a longer list: relevance, independent corroboration, extractable facts, technical access, consistent entity information, evidence, reputation. It cited ten sources, and all ten were agency blogs, studies from SEO vendors or similar commercial pages, not OpenAI.

Read those together. The model closest to the source was the more cautious one. The confident, detailed checklist came from a model summarising people who sell this service, which includes us. Treat any list of "ChatGPT ranking factors" accordingly, this one too.

What we would do, in order

1. Confirm OAI-SearchBot is not blocked, and that no page you want cited carries noindex.
2. Make sure the pages that answer buyer questions are in the HTML, not behind a script or a form.
3. Write the answer first, then the explanation. This is the format an assistant can lift cleanly.
4. Check that your company is described the same way on your own site and on the third-party profiles buyers use.
5. Pick a fixed set of real buyer prompts and re-run them monthly, recording who is named. That is the only measurement that tells you whether anything worked.

We cover the wider picture in GEO, AEO, AI SEO: what the terms mean, and the work itself on the answer engine optimization page.

The part that costs us

Nobody can promise you a citation. Answers vary by prompt, by location and by day, and a page that is cited this week can vanish next week with nothing changed on your side. Step 5 exists because of that.

The demand is also modest and not obviously growing. Google Ads data via DataForSEO puts "chatgpt seo" at roughly 390 US searches a month with keyword difficulty 22, and the monthly series ran at about 260 in July and August 2026, down from 880 in September 2025. If a provider's pitch leans on this phrase as proof of a large market, ask them for the numbers.