How to rank in ChatGPT: getting your business mentioned and cited.

OpenAI's publishers and developers FAQ is short and worth reading in full. Its first point is the most important: any public website can appear in ChatGPT search. For your content to be included in summaries and snippets, OpenAI says, make sure you are not blocking OAI-SearchBot.

OpenAI documents three separate agents, and they do different jobs:

Two more details from the FAQ are easy to miss. If a page is disallowed but OpenAI learns its address from a third-party search provider or from other pages, it may still show the link and title in ChatGPT Atlas; OpenAI says to use a noindex tag if you do not want that, and to let its crawler read the page so it can see the tag. And ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so referral visits show up in your analytics.

Before any content work, open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you want to appear in ChatGPT search, nothing there should disallow OAI-SearchBot for the pages you care about. A minimal rule that allows it looks like this:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

If you also want to opt out of model training, you can disallow GPTBot separately without affecting search. Robots.txt is only one gate: firewalls, bot-protection settings and hosting rules can block crawlers too, so check those if your site seems invisible. Our explainer on technical SEO covers the other access basics.

OpenAI does not publish a ranking formula, and nobody outside OpenAI can see one. So the honest list of levers is the list of things that make a business easier to find, understand and repeat.

Clear answers on your own pages

Put the answer to the question in the first paragraph, in sentences that still make sense quoted alone. In the research paper that named generative engine optimization, the rewrites that did best on the authors' benchmark added citations, quotations and statistics. That is a lab result, not a promise, but it points the same way as good writing: specific claims with sources.

The same facts everywhere

Your business name, what you sell, where you work and what it costs should say the same thing on your site, your profiles and every directory that lists you. When sources disagree, an assistant has to guess, and guesses are how businesses get described wrongly.

Reviews and mentions on sites people trust

ChatGPT search draws on the public web, so what other credible sites say about you matters. Industry roundups, reviews, partner pages, press and interviews are all places an answer can come from. Earn them rather than buy them; the value of a mention is that someone chose to give it.

Pages that stay current

Prices, services and team pages go stale quietly. Date the pages where timing matters and update them when facts change.

This is an observation method, not a ranking check. Answers can vary with the session, the account and the location, so the goal is a pattern across repeated checks, not a single screenshot.

• Write the 20 questions once and keep the wording fixed.
• Run them in ChatGPT with search on, noting whether you were signed in and where you were.
• Record four things per answer: whether you were mentioned, which of your pages were cited, which other sources appeared and whether any fact about you was wrong.
• Repeat monthly and compare with the last round before changing anything.

Our guide to tracking your brand in AI search covers how to organize the results over time.

If you would like help working through what the record shows, our AI search optimization page explains how we approach it. For the bigger picture, see our explainer on SEO vs AEO vs GEO.