How to get cited by ChatGPT

Most advice on getting cited by ChatGPT makes it sound like a new discipline with its own tricks. I don’t think it is. Ahrefs looked at 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts and found that 88% of the pages ChatGPT cited came from its general search results. Plenty of answers cite nothing at all, though, and those come from the model’s training, which I cover further down.

So the job is SEO. OpenAI has to be able to crawl your page, the page has to show up in the results ChatGPT reads, and it has to answer the question better than the other pages it’s up against. What changes is the questions. ChatGPT writes its own searches, and they’re longer and more specific than what most people type into Google.

You can see where ChatGPT looks by asking it how to get cited by ChatGPT. It cites OpenAI’s help pages, OpenAI’s developer docs, Google’s documentation and Bing. When there’s a primary source, it goes straight to it, so that’s where I’ll start too.

Let OpenAI’s search bot crawl your site

If OAI-SearchBot is blocked, ChatGPT search can’t cite you. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites “opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”

OpenAI runs three bots, and they do different jobs:

That means you can block training and still get cited. This robots.txt allows search and blocks training:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Robots.txt changes take about a day to reach ChatGPT search, according to OpenAI. Your robots.txt can allow the bot while a firewall or CDN rule still blocks it, so make sure your host lets in OpenAI’s published IP ranges as well.

A crawl shows what your robots.txt allows for each AI bot, with search bots and training bots listed separately:

Get your pages into Bing

ChatGPT search turns a question into searches and sends them to search providers. OpenAI’s ChatGPT search help page links Microsoft’s and Shopify’s privacy policies for those providers, and until August 2026 it named Bing and Shopify outright. OpenAI doesn’t say how much of an answer comes from Bing, so treat Bing as one way in.

It’s also the easiest win here, and the one most sites skip. Plenty of people set up Google Search Console and never open Bing Webmaster Tools.

1. Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools and import your sites from Google Search Console. This takes a few minutes.
2. Submit your sitemap.
3. Turn on IndexNow if your CMS or host supports it, so Bing hears about new and updated pages as soon as you publish.
4. After a week, open Bing’s Search Performance report and look for the pages you care about. A page with no Bing impressions may not be indexed there.

Once you connect Bing, seo report puts Bing’s clicks, impressions, queries and pages next to Google’s, so you can spot a page that ranks in one engine and is missing from the other. It works in both directions. Some sites get most of their search traffic from Bing and hardly show up in Google, and if ChatGPT’s search draws on Bing, those pages already have a way into its answers. If that’s your site, give Bing the same attention you’d give Google.

Find the questions ChatGPT searches for

ChatGPT doesn’t search for exactly what the person typed. It writes its own queries. OpenAI’s help page gives an example: a researcher asks “what’s the latest on the development of drugs that target CCR8 for cancer?”, and ChatGPT searches for “CCR8 immunotherapy drug development 2025”, then follows up with narrower searches such as “CHS-114 conference 2025”.

Those searches name things and often include a year. Your page needs to rank for searches like that, which usually means long, specific queries rather than head terms.

You can’t see ChatGPT’s queries, but your own Search Console data has the same kind of query. People type long, conversational questions into Google as well, and Google’s AI Mode runs its own follow-up searches. Search Console’s query filter accepts regular expressions (pick Query, then Custom (regex)), and these three filters pull those queries out.

Queries that start with a question word:

^(who|what|where|when|why|how|is|are|can|does|do|should)\b

Queries of 8 words or more (change the 7 to 9 for 10 words or more):

^(\S+\s+){7,}\S+$

Queries with a pronoun in place of something named earlier, such as “how much is it per month”:

\b(it|they|them|this|these|those)\b

People rarely start a fresh search with “it”, so many of these are follow-ups from a conversation in Google’s AI Mode. To drop branded queries, add a second filter set to Doesn’t match regex with your brand’s spellings.

Sort the results by impressions. A query with lots of impressions and few clicks is a question your page almost answers. Give the best of them their own heading on the page that already ranks, and answer the question in the first sentence under it.

seo report does this without any filters. Its AI queries section finds conversational questions, replies such as “yes” and follow-ups such as “what about…”, groups the different wordings of one question, and shows which page Google showed for each. The other opportunity sections label each query as a question, a comparison or an AI-style search, so you can see which of them to answer first.

Write titles and URLs that match those questions

ChatGPT decides which results to open from the title, the URL and a short snippet, before it reads the page. In the same Ahrefs study, cited pages had titles noticeably closer to ChatGPT’s searches than the pages it skipped, and results with readable URL slugs were cited more often than results without them. Those are correlations, so a new title won’t guarantee a citation. Clear titles and URLs also help in Google, though, so you lose nothing by making the change.

1. Put the question the page answers in the title, in the words people use. “How to export Search Console data to BigQuery” works better than “BigQuery integration”.
2. Name the things you’re writing about. “Notion vs Asana for small teams” matches more of ChatGPT’s searches than “Which tool is right for you?”.
3. Use a slug made of words, such as /blog/search-console-bigquery-export, rather than an ID.
4. Put the year in the title when the page covers something that changes each year, such as prices, rankings or rules, and update it when the year turns. ChatGPT adds years to its searches, and an out-of-date year in a title does more harm than none. Keep the year out of the URL, so the page keeps its address and links when you update it.

The title and meta description checker shows how your title and description will look in a search result before you publish.

Answer each question in the first sentence under its heading

ChatGPT quotes a sentence or a paragraph from a page. If a section opens with the answer, that’s an easy sentence to quote. If it opens with background, ChatGPT has to dig for it, and often picks another page instead.

Write each section in this order:

1. A heading that states the question or the finding.
2. A first sentence that answers it fully and names the subject instead of saying “it” or “this”.
3. Then the detail, steps and exceptions.

On a comparison page, start with “The main difference between A and B is…” and finish the sentence. For a “how much” question, put the number in the first sentence as plain HTML. A price that only loads with JavaScript, or only appears in an image, may never be read.

You don’t need to cut pages into tiny chunks for this. Google’s guide to generative AI features says “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.” Ordinary paragraphs under clear headings are fine.

Keep the pages that rank up to date

ChatGPT leans towards recent pages more than Google does. Ahrefs’ study of 17 million citations found the pages ChatGPT cited were on average more than a year newer than the pages ranking in Google for the same questions.

Being new doesn’t win on its own, though. Plenty of the pages ChatGPT cites are years old. A new page that answers the question better gets cited, and a new page that answers it worse gets read and dropped.

1. Replace numbers and examples that have gone stale, and add anything that’s changed since you wrote the page.
2. Only change the visible “updated” date and dateModified when the page has changed enough that you’d tell a reader to read it again. Bumping the date for a typo fix is the kind of fake freshness Google’s helpful content guidance warns about.
3. Keep your sitemap’s lastmod accurate for the same reason. If a search engine decides it’s unreliable, it may stop trusting it.
4. Ping IndexNow when you publish the update so Bing picks it up.

Get onto the lists ChatGPT already cites

For “best X” questions, ChatGPT cites “best” lists more than any other kind of page. When Ahrefs looked at buying questions about software, agencies and products, “best X” blog lists made up almost half the pages ChatGPT cited.

I saw the same thing when I asked ChatGPT for the best tool to check Google Search Console data with an AI agent. It cited tool vendors’ own sites, and seoskill.dev wasn’t one of them.

This is ordinary off-site SEO. Brands have been getting recommended in Google by appearing on the lists that rank for years, and the same work gets them recommended in ChatGPT.

1. Ask ChatGPT the buying questions your customers ask, such as “best invoicing software for freelancers”, and note every page it cites.
2. Check which of those pages mention you, with a search such as "yourbrand" -site:yourbrand.com.
3. For each list you’re missing from, contact the publisher and give them a reason to add you: a feature their readers have asked about, a fair price comparison, or a customer who’s in their audience.
4. Publish your own comparison pages as well. When ChatGPT cited a software company’s own site in that study, a “best” list on the company’s blog came up about a third of the time. That works today, and I don’t know for how long. There’s a credible way to do it, where you test each option, say who it suits and rank a competitor first when it’s better, and a spammy way, where you come first on every list. I’d only do the first, for the reasons in AEO vs SEO.
5. Ask happy customers to leave reviews on the review sites people in your category use. Lists and answers lean on those reviews as outside proof.

Reddit matters less than you might expect. ChatGPT reads a lot of it, but in Ahrefs’ study it cited pages from its Reddit feed less than 2% of the time. Answer questions on Reddit because it helps people, and expect any citation to go to the page someone links to in the thread.

How to measure citations and visits from ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s answers change every time you ask, so there’s no position to track. A SparkToro and Gumshoe study found less than a 1 in 100 chance of getting the same list of brands twice. Track how often you’re cited across a set of questions instead, and ask them again each month.

1. Keep a list of 10 to 20 questions your customers ask, and ask ChatGPT search each one at the same point each month.
2. Note whether each answer cites your site, mentions your brand without a link, or does neither, and which page it cites.
3. Track visits in Google Analytics by adding a filter on session source matching chatgpt\.com|openai to an exploration. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of its links, but apps that don’t pass a referrer show up as Direct, so the real number is higher than what you see.
4. Compare the pages that get cited with the pages you changed.

With SEO Skill, an agent can ask your questions in ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews and tell you whether each answer cites or mentions you, through your own DataForSEO key for less than a cent a question:

If you don’t give it questions, it uses your site’s own conversational queries from Search Console. There’s a worked example on the AI visibility checker page. seo report shows visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot, and which pages they land on.

What won’t get you cited by ChatGPT

An llms.txt file. OpenAI’s crawler and search help pages don’t mention llms.txt, and Google’s guide says Google Search ignores it. It can help an agent read your docs, but ChatGPT search doesn’t use it to choose sources.

Schema added for AI. Ahrefs followed pages that added structured data against pages that didn’t, and adding schema didn’t increase citations on any platform. Keep schema for Google’s rich results.

A page for every possible question. ChatGPT searches for lots of versions of the same question, and writing a thin page for each one is what Google’s guide calls scaled content abuse. Cover the versions as sections on the page that already ranks.

Why some questions get no citation at all

ChatGPT doesn’t search for every question. When I asked it a handful of questions about AEO and SEO, it answered most of them without any sources, including “AEO vs SEO: what’s different?”. It answered from what the model already knew.

Definitions, well-known facts and a lot of brand recommendations are answered that way. The route into those answers is the model’s training data: being named next to your topic on the pages other sites quote, and making it obvious who you are. That’s the brand mention and entity work in AEO vs SEO. It pays off slowly, as each new model is trained, so start it early.

For quicker results, work on questions that need current or specific information: prices, comparisons, “best X for Y”, and anything with a year in it. ChatGPT searches for those, so everything above applies.

Where to start

Getting cited by ChatGPT is good AEO, and good AEO is mostly good SEO aimed at longer, more specific questions. Let OAI-SearchBot in, get indexed in Bing, rank for the specific searches ChatGPT runs, answer each one in the first sentence, keep the page current, and get onto the lists that already rank.

Start with the crawler and Bing. They take about an hour, and most of the rest depends on them.

The ChatGPT examples here come from SEO Skill’s AI answers check, with each question asked once, so a second run could cite different pages. The Ahrefs figures are correlations from Ahrefs’ own samples and don’t prove that any single change causes a citation. This post doesn’t cover ChatGPT’s shopping results or product feeds, which work differently.