Step 1Let OpenAI's search crawler in
OpenAI uses three bots, and only one of them decides whether you can appear in ChatGPT search: OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's own words: “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI).
- OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search. Block it and you're out.
- GPTBot collects pages to train OpenAI's models. Blocking it does not take you out of search.
- ChatGPT-User opens a page when someone in ChatGPT asks it to. It doesn't decide what shows up in search.
To let the search crawler in while keeping your pages out of training, your robots.txt can say:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /A change takes about 24 hours to reach ChatGPT search (OpenAI). Your robots.txt is not the only gate, though. Security settings at your host or at Cloudflare can turn bots away before they ever read it, so check those too if you use them.
Put your text in the page itself, not only in scripts that run in the browser. In a 2024 study of AI crawler traffic, none of the major AI crawlers ran JavaScript (Vercel). OpenAI's bots may have changed since, but text in the HTML is always read.
Not sure what your robots.txt says? The free checker reads it the way OpenAI's bots do.
Check my siteStep 2Show up in the searches ChatGPT runs
ChatGPT search sends rewritten versions of the question to outside search providers (OpenAI). OpenAI hasn't published the full list, but its VP of Engineering said “Bing is an important one” (Search Engine Journal). In Ahrefs' study of 1.4 million prompts, 88% of the pages ChatGPT cited came from those search results (Ahrefs).
Don't judge it by Google alone. In the NUS study, Google's results held fewer than 10% of the exact pages ChatGPT cited (NUS). Ranking well on Google helps, but it doesn't mean you're in the results ChatGPT reads. So look after Bing as carefully as Google.
- Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap, just as you would in Google Search Console.
- Turn on IndexNow, so Bing hears about new and changed pages right away. Many website builders and SEO plugins have it built in.
- Keep doing the usual SEO work: fast pages, clear headings, one topic per page, links between related pages.
Step 3Title each page as the question
The clearest pattern in the data is how closely a page's title matches the question. In Ahrefs' study, the titles of cited pages were clearly closer to the question than the titles of pages ChatGPT read and passed over (a similarity score of 0.60 against 0.48). Pages with a readable address, like /how-to-fix-a-leaking-roof, were cited 90% of the time, against 81% for addresses without words (Ahrefs).
ChatGPT doesn't search for the whole question. It splits it into smaller searches, such as “roofer Leeds emergency” and “leaking roof repair cost”. A page titled for one of those smaller searches can be found even when it doesn't match the whole question.
- List the questions customers ask you before they buy. Your sales emails and phone calls are full of them.
- Give each question its own page, with the question (or something close to it) as the title and in the address.
- Cover the follow-up questions too: price, timing, how to choose, how you compare with other ways of doing it.
Step 4Answer in the first lines
ChatGPT reads many pages for every answer, and keeps the passages that answer the question. Give it one: two or three sentences at the top that answer the title, with the details underneath. Use real numbers, names and places: “a repair costs £150 to £450”, with your own prices, is easier to quote than “prices vary”.
Honest note: no study we know of tests the answer's position on its own. We recommend it because it suits how ChatGPT picks passages, and because it's what readers want too.
Step 5Get named on other sites
When ChatGPT recommends a business, it leans on what other sites say about it as well as what the business says about itself. The NUS researchers found that which websites ChatGPT cites stays much steadier from one run to the next than the exact pages, which change a lot (NUS). So being named on many sites counts for more than any single page.
- Get listed in the directories and review sites for your trade and your town, with the same name and description everywhere.
- Ask to be included in “best of” and comparison articles about what you sell.
- Say what you do in one plain sentence, and use it everywhere: your site, your profiles, your listings.
Reddit is a special case: ChatGPT reads it often but rarely links to it. In Ahrefs' data, Reddit made up about two thirds of the pages ChatGPT read and passed over, and it cited fewer than 2 in 100 of the Reddit pages it read (Ahrefs). Join in where you can genuinely help, but don't count on Reddit links.
Step 6Keep facts current, not dates
Newer isn't automatically better. The search pages ChatGPT cited in Ahrefs' study were a median of about 500 days old (Ahrefs), and in the NUS study, how recent a page was “barely registered” (NUS).
So don't change the date on a page you haven't changed. Do update prices, opening hours, product details and anything else that goes out of date, because a wrong fact is worse than an old one.
Step 7Measure it the right way
Ask ChatGPT one question once and you learn little: its answers change from run to run. In the NUS study, about 40% of the pages ChatGPT looked at turned up in only one run (NUS).
- Write down 10 to 20 questions your customers ask. Ask each one several times, in new chats, and every few weeks.
- Count how often your business is named, not whether one particular page was linked.
- In your analytics, look for visits from
chatgpt.com. ChatGPT addsutm_source=chatgpt.comto the links in its answers (OpenAI).
Three things that don't work
Publishing lots of pages
No study we know of shows that more pages earn more citations, and the NUS researchers say they didn't test it (NUS). What the data does reward is a title that matches the question, so one clear page per question beats ten thin ones.
Faking freshness
A new date on an unchanged page doesn't help. Cited pages are often well over a year old.
Blocking GPTBot to “protect” your site
That's fine for training, but check you haven't blocked OAI-SearchBot along with it. One rule for all bots, or for every AI bot, blocks both.
Questions people ask
Is ranking in ChatGPT different from SEO?
Less than people think. When ChatGPT searches the web, most of the pages it names came from ordinary search results, so the basics of SEO still decide whether you are in the running. What changes is the last step: ChatGPT names a few pages in one answer instead of showing ten links, so the page that answers the exact question most clearly wins.
Can I pay to be named in ChatGPT's answers?
No. OpenAI says it ranks search results on several factors and that nobody is guaranteed a place. The work in this guide is the way in.
How fast do changes show up?
A change to robots.txt takes about 24 hours to reach ChatGPT search, OpenAI says. Everything else follows your search rankings, which move over weeks and months, not days.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
OpenAI's crawler documentation only talks about robots.txt, not llms.txt. A short llms.txt does no harm, but don't expect it to get you named. Getting crawled, ranking in search and answering the question clearly matter far more.
Does blocking GPTBot hide me from ChatGPT?
No. GPTBot collects pages for training OpenAI's models. OAI-SearchBot is the one that decides whether you can appear in ChatGPT search. You can block the first and allow the second.
Rather have someone do this for you?
FoundWell does most of this for your site, month after month: it fixes your pages, writes the articles that answer your customers' questions, and keeps checking how often ChatGPT names you. A person on our team reviews every article before it goes live.
Sources
- OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
- OpenAI: Publishers and developers FAQ
- OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT search
- Search Engine Journal: OpenAI Reddit AMA on ChatGPT search
- Ahrefs: Why ChatGPT cites one page over another (1.4M prompts)
- NUS: How ChatGPT picks what it cites (about 4,200 runs, 2026)
- Vercel and MERJ: The rise of the AI crawler
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- IndexNow
Checked against these sources on November 9, 2026. Studies of ChatGPT measure a moving target, so we recheck them and update this guide when the numbers change.