How ChatGPT builds an answer
- For questions about current products, prices and options, ChatGPT often searches the web and cites the pages it used.
- For general questions it may answer from training data alone, which reflects how your brand was described across the web before the model's cutoff.
- It favours sources that answer the question directly, such as comparison articles, review sites, forums and clear product pages.
- Answers are tailored to the user's location and language.
Let it read your site
OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to find pages for ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User when a user or agent asks ChatGPT to read a page. GPTBot collects training data and can be blocked separately without affecting search. Check robots.txt and your firewall with the free AI crawler checker.
How to get recommended in ChatGPT
- 1Allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User in robots.txt and your firewall.
- 2Find the buyer questions where ChatGPT names competitors and not you.
- 3Look at the sources it cites for those questions, and get present and accurate on them.
- 4Publish answer first pages with clear facts, tables and FAQs for the questions you lose.
- 5Fix wrong or outdated facts about you at their source.
- 6Track the same questions every week to see what moves.
Measure it properly
ChatGPT answers change from one run to the next, and by country, language and wording. One chat is not a trend. Track the same set of buyer questions every week, run each more than once, and look at the share of answers that name you, the position you appear in, and the sources cited. Variask does this for ChatGPT and every other major AI engine.