To rank on ChatGPT, your pages must be reachable by its web search (OAI-SearchBot not blocked, site well indexed on Bing as well as Google) and there must be a page, yours or someone else's, that answers the exact question the user asks. In our test of 6 Italian buyer questions on 27 October 2026, ChatGPT used 40 domains as sources: 19 were the websites of the companies it named, 15 were comparison articles or rankings.
Put simply: ChatGPT has no ranking to climb. It has sources to read.
And which sources it reads depends on the kind of question.
When companies ask us "why doesn't ChatGPT mention us?", the cause is usually one of three things:
- the site blocks AI bots in robots.txt or at the firewall, often without anyone deciding to;
- there is a generic "services" page, but no page that answers the question buyers actually ask;
- the industry comparisons are written by competitors, and the company is not in them.
When we asked ChatGPT whether Sunscape is a reliable company, the answer rested on 9 links, 3 of them pages on Sunscape's own site. The rest were company registries, trade press, LinkedIn and Google Maps (the full test is in our piece on how AI describes your brand).
It works the other way too. On 19 and 21 October 2026 two enquiries reached us through the visilay.com contact form from the address /contact/?utm_source=chatgpt.com: ChatGPT had linked straight to our contact page.
So a good website is enough?
No. In the answer about business management software for SMEs, none of the 7 products named had a page of its own among the sources: ChatGPT learnt about all of them from articles written by others. In this guide:
- how ChatGPT picks its sources, with what OpenAI says and what it doesn't;
- our test on 6 Italian questions, with a table of the 40 sources;
- how to check whether ChatGPT cites your site;
- the 6 moves the data supports, and the ones that don't help.
How ChatGPT decides what to show (and why there is no position one)
ChatGPT answers in two ways: from what it learnt in training, or by searching the web and citing the pages it finds. The second is the one a business can work on, and OpenAI says search starts on its own "when your question would benefit from current information", on every plan including the free one.
Three facts, all from primary sources:
- The bot that reads you is OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". GPTBot is different: it is used for model training.
- You can't pay or apply to be included. The publishers FAQ says "any public website can appear in ChatGPT search", with no form and no paid lane.
- Search also runs through other engines. OpenAI says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers" and names Microsoft. A Seer Interactive study (February 2025, 500+ citations from about 100 questions) found that 87% of ChatGPT's citations were in Bing's top 20 results, against 56% for Google.
What about your "ranking" on ChatGPT?
It doesn't hold up. SparkToro had 600 volunteers run 12 prompts, for 2,961 answers across ChatGPT, Claude and Google: the chance of getting the same list of brands twice is less than 1 in 100 (January 2026). Talking about "first place on ChatGPT" makes little sense. What counts is how often you appear across many answers, which we measured in our piece on how accurate AI visibility data is.
Our test on 6 Italian questions (40 sources, and who wrote them)
On 27 October 2026 we asked ChatGPT, with web search on and location set to Italy, six questions an Italian buyer might ask: three about choosing a product, two about finding a supplier, one about our own sector. Text and sources were collected through the DataForSEO API. As "sources" we count the links ChatGPT tags with utm_source=chatgpt.com, the pages it took information from; plain "official website" links are left out.
| Question to ChatGPT (asked in Italian) | Companies or products named | Domains used as sources | Of which, sites of named companies | Of which, comparisons and rankings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best management software for an Italian SME | 7 | 6 | 0 | 5 |
| Who to call for a commercial solar installation in Lombardy | 5 | 5 | 4 | 0 |
| Italian manufacturers of packaging machinery | 15 | 9 | 6 | 0 |
| Which CRM for an Italian B2B company | 5 | 6 | 3 | 3 |
| Best couriers for e-commerce shipping in Italy | 10 | 9 | 2 | 7 |
| How to monitor brand visibility on ChatGPT | 3 | 5 | 4 | 0 |
| Total | 45 | 40 | 19 (48%) | 15 (38%) |
The finding is in the difference between the rows.
When the question is "who does this?", ChatGPT reads suppliers' websites: in the solar and packaging questions, 10 of 14 domains were sites of the companies named. The pages cited had titles like "Impianto Fotovoltaico per Aziende in Lombardia" (commercial solar in Lombardy) or "About us": they said plainly what the company does and where.
When the question is "which is best?", ChatGPT reads comparisons: across software, CRM and couriers, 15 of 21 domains were comparison articles or rankings. At least 5 of them were written by companies selling software in the same market (Synalla, Geaz, Poleepo, Spedity and Sendcloud).
Two more details:
- 21 of 22 dated sources were published or updated in 2026; one, on migliorcrm.it, was two days old.
- On the question about our own sector none of the 5 sources was Italian: all were English-language documentation from US and European tools. No Italian site was cited, Visilay included.
Six answers are not a statistical sample, and answers change on every run. But the pattern matches what Ahrefs reports from Glen Allsopp's research: for one type of commercial query, nearly half of ChatGPT's citations come from "best of" articles. Which domains recur sector by sector is covered in our piece on the sources ChatGPT and AI Overviews cite.
Does ChatGPT cite my site? How to check (three ways)
To know whether ChatGPT cites your site you need to look at two different things: the answers, where your name and links appear, and the visits, which arrive with the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter that OpenAI adds automatically to outbound links.
- Google Analytics 4. Filter sessions with source chatgpt.com and look at landing pages: those are the pages ChatGPT links to. How to set up the report, and what it misses, is in our guide to ChatGPT traffic in Google Analytics.
- Your contact forms. If the form records the referring URL, as ours does, the parameter stays attached to the enquiry. That is how we spotted the two October enquiries.
- Your buyers' questions. Write 20 to 30 questions a buyer would ask without knowing you, and rerun them every month. Which ones to pick and how many is in our guide to prompt tracking.
Keep one distinction in mind: being cited as a source and being named in the answer are not the same. In the packaging test, IMA was named first without any page of its site among the sources. The difference, with study data, is in our piece on AI citations and brand mentions.
Rerunning 30 questions a month by hand across several engines soon becomes a job in itself. That is why we built ScryRank, the monitoring tool developed by Visilay: it reruns the same prompts every month on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and records mentions, cited sources and the full text of each answer. If you would rather we did the work, including what to change, there is our AI monitoring service.
How to rank on ChatGPT: 6 moves the test supports
They are in order of priority: the first two are technical and take a morning, the rest need content.
1. Let OAI-SearchBot in
Open robots.txt and check that OAI-SearchBot is not blocked, there or in your firewall or CDN. OpenAI says it takes about 24 hours after a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust. You can block GPTBot if you don't want your content used for training without touching search: the two settings are independent. Which bots actually visit a business website is in our log analysis of AI crawlers.
2. Get properly indexed on Bing
If 87% of citations in the Seer study sat in Bing's top 20, a page Bing doesn't know starts at a disadvantage. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap and check that key pages are indexed. How to do it, and what IndexNow really does, is in our guide to Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow.
3. Write one page for each commercial question
All four solar installers cited had a page dedicated to commercial solar, with the region in the copy. Not a "services" page with ten items: one page, one question.
It is the same principle we use on Google. Of the nine keywords that bring the most qualified enquiries to Macropix, none contains the company's name: the biggest is "ledwall", 4,400 searches a month in Italy (the case is in our piece on manufacturing SEO). Someone asking ChatGPT for a supplier does the same: they describe the problem, they don't type your name.
Put the answer in the opening lines. Ahrefs reports Kevin Indig's analysis of 1.2 million citations: 44.2% come from the first 30% of the text. ChatGPT also splits long questions into several searches, as we explain in our piece on query fan-out, so every sub-question needs a paragraph that answers it. The academic paper that gave GEO its name (Aggarwal and colleagues, 2023) measured visibility gains of up to 40% in generative engine answers by working on page content alone.
4. Get into the comparisons ChatGPT reads
If you sell something buyers choose between alternatives, your own site is not enough: in the three "which is best" questions, sites of the companies named were 0 of 6 sources for management software and 2 of 9 for couriers.
Search Google and Bing for the rankings in your sector, see who writes them and whether you are in them. Then take two routes: get included with verifiable facts (prices, cases, specs) and publish an honest comparison of your own that says who wrote it. Synalla, Geaz and Spedity did, and ended up among the sources.
What if the comparisons only list your competitors?
Then ChatGPT will recommend them, and the reason is usually visible in the sources behind the answers. How to diagnose it is in our piece on why ChatGPT recommends your competitors.
Of 21 sources, 15 were comparisons written by others.
When a buyer asks ChatGPT "which is best", the answer is shaped by the rankings in your sector, often written by your competitors. We find which pages ChatGPT reads for your buyers' questions, show you where you are missing and build the pages you need to be there.
Book a strategy call5. Publish your prices, at least as ranges
In the CRM answer, the only vendor pages used as sources were the pricing pages of HubSpot, Microsoft and Salesforce. ChatGPT quoted exact figures, such as Dynamics 365 Sales Professional from 56.30 euros per user per month, taken from the official page. For Zoho, which was not among the direct sources, it took the price from a comparison site.
If your price isn't public, someone else will write it for you. Even a range ("projects from X to Y") gives ChatGPT a figure to cite from your own site.
6. Update your pages and show the date
In our test 21 of 22 dated sources were from 2026. The Ahrefs study of 17 million citations across 7 AI platforms points the same way: pages cited by ChatGPT are on average 458 days newer than Google's organic results. Update the pages that matter with new data, not just a new date, and keep the date visible.
What doesn't help you rank on ChatGPT (and what you can't buy)
The 2025 version of this article gave six generic tips. We have dropped some because today's data doesn't back them.
- Publishing a lot. Ahrefs found a very low correlation between the number of pages on a site and its ChatGPT visibility. Ten generic posts are worth less than one page that answers a precise question.
- llms.txt as a shortcut. It is not among the requirements OpenAI lists for search, which only mention OAI-SearchBot and robots.txt. What it does and doesn't do is in our piece on llms.txt.
- Paying to get in. OpenAI's publishers FAQ describes no paid inclusion in answers. Anyone promising it is selling something else.
The point about mentions still stands: the more credible sites talk about you, the more sources ChatGPT has to name you. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found the strongest correlations with ChatGPT visibility in brand mentions, YouTube above all (correlation above 0.7).
Is ranking on ChatGPT the same work as AI Overviews? (almost)
Mostly, yes: a page crawlers can reach, the answer up front, verifiable data, third-party sources that talk about you. But the starting point differs. AI Overviews draw on Google's index, which has its own documented rules; ChatGPT also leans on other engines, and in the Seer study its citations matched Bing far more than Google (87% against 56%). A site that is strong only on Google can still be missing from ChatGPT, which is why Bing deserves its own check. What makes a brand citable across engines is in our guide to AI visibility and our comparison of AI search engines. None of these moves guarantees a citation: they increase the chances that ChatGPT finds a page of yours to use.
If you want the opposite, using ChatGPT to do SEO, see our guide to ChatGPT and SEO. And if you want us to plan the pages and third-party sources, that is our GEO service.
Frequently asked questions
No. OpenAI's publishers FAQ says any public website can appear in ChatGPT search and describes no paid inclusion. What you need is a site OAI-SearchBot can read and a page that answers the question.
It depends on what you want to know: for visits, check sessions with source chatgpt.com in Google Analytics 4, because OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to its links; for mentions, rerun your buyers' questions every month or use a monitoring tool.
No. GPTBot is used for model training; for search, OAI-SearchBot is what counts. OpenAI says the two settings are independent, so you can block the first and leave the second open.
No. In Seer Interactive's 2025 study, ChatGPT's citations matched Bing's top 20 results 87% of the time and Google's 56%. Bing indexing and presence in your sector's comparisons also matter.
It depends: OpenAI says unblocking OAI-SearchBot takes effect in about 24 hours, but a new page must first be found and indexed, and answers change on every run. That is why you measure across many questions over time, not with a single test.
In short
OAI-SearchBot open, Bing checked.
One page for every question a buyer asks.
A place in your sector's comparisons, public prices, current dates.
Measure across many answers, never just one.
One last thing the test taught us. On the question about our own sector, ChatGPT found no Italian source and answered an Italian business with English documentation from American tools. In many markets the comparison ChatGPT would like to read hasn't been written yet: whoever publishes it first, with real data, has a good chance of becoming everyone's source.
