AI & GEO
ChatGPT SEO
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What is ChatGPT SEO?
ChatGPT SEO refers to the strategies aimed at ensuring a brand, product, or piece of content is referenced or recommended by ChatGPT when users ask it questions related to a topic. Without web access, ChatGPT answers from training data that has a knowledge cutoff; with ChatGPT search (launched in October 2024) it retrieves live web content and cites sources.
Optimizing for ChatGPT visibility involves building a strong brand presence across authoritative, widely cited sources that are likely to appear in training data, and making content accessible to ChatGPT search. OpenAI documents separate crawlers: OAI-SearchBot for surfacing sites in ChatGPT search, and GPTBot for collecting training data, so a site can allow one and block the other in robots.txt.
Why it matters for SEO
OpenAI reports hundreds of millions of weekly ChatGPT users, many of whom use it for research, recommendations and purchasing decisions. Brands that appear in ChatGPT responses for relevant queries gain awareness and consideration at a critical decision-making moment, even without a traditional search click taking place.
Example
A meal-kit brand asks ChatGPT "best meal kits for vegetarians" and finds it is not mentioned. It checks that its robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot, which OpenAI uses for ChatGPT search results, and decides separately whether to allow GPTBot, which OpenAI uses for model training. It also works on earning mentions in the independent review and comparison articles that tend to be cited for this kind of query.
Free tools for ChatGPT SEO
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