How to Get Mentioned in ChatGPT: What's Documented
Where ChatGPT finds businesses to name: its crawler, search partners, listings, product feeds. What OpenAI, Google and Bing publish, and what studies found.
By Tyler Phan7 min readLast reviewed
Part of our guide to AI search and GEO
On this page
In September, a thread on r/smallbusiness asked: "Anyone had a customer say they found you through ChatGPT instead of Google?" It drew 98 comments. A home inspector wrote that they ask clients how they found them and have "definitely had a few that said ChatGPT this year." The most upvoted reply, at 47 points when we read it, was shorter: "GPT googled you. It's all the same but hard to track." Two weeks later, a thread on r/SEO couldn't agree on which index ChatGPT uses. One reply: "I thought it always used bing?" Another: "They built their own index beside of Google/Bing." OpenAI's own help pages answer more of this than either thread did.
Where ChatGPT looks for businesses to name
| Where it looks | What OpenAI says | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Its own crawler | OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features"; sites opted out "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links" | Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and at your host or CDN |
| Partner search providers | ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers" and sends them rewritten queries, such as "top restaurants San Francisco" | Get indexed in Bing as well as Google (our reading of the Microsoft link) |
| Local listings | It may share your location "with trusted third-party providers that help provide more local information, such as nearby business listings"; restaurant times come from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp | Keep your listings complete and current |
| Product data | Product results draw on "Structured metadata from first-party and third-party providers (e.g., price, product description) and other third-party content" | Shopify stores are already in; other merchants can apply for a direct product feed |
The first row is the one fully in your control. Our post on why ChatGPT isn't citing your website walks through the robots.txt and CDN checks, and OpenAI says a robots.txt change can take "~24 hours" to register in search.
The second row is where the Reddit threads went in circles. OpenAI doesn't name an index. It says that when ChatGPT search uses partners, it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries that it sends those providers," and for how those providers handle queries it links two documents: Microsoft's privacy statement and Shopify's privacy policy. Microsoft runs Bing, so we read that as a reason to make sure Bing has indexed your pages. That's our inference, not something OpenAI states.
For local businesses, the restaurant example is the clearest: ChatGPT can show reservation times from OpenTable, Resy or Yelp, and "Availability varies by restaurant and location." For shops, OpenAI says merchants are ranked "based on factors like availability, price, quality, and whether they are the maker or primary seller of that item," and that for Shopify merchants "No additional work is required." Everyone else can apply to send OpenAI a product feed.
What Microsoft and Google publish about AI answers
Microsoft says more about AI answers than OpenAI does. In February 2026 it added an AI Performance report to Bing Webmaster Tools that shows "how often your content is cited in generative answers" across Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing "and select partner integrations." It doesn't say whether ChatGPT is one of those partners, so treat it as a Microsoft number. The same post recommends IndexNow, which notifies participating search engines "whenever content is added, updated, or removed," and Bing Places for Business, so that "key details such as address, hours, and contact information remain current and eligible for inclusion in AI-generated responses."
On writing, a post by Krishna Madhavan, a principal product manager at Microsoft Bing, says assistants like Copilot "break content down" into smaller pieces and assemble answers from them. Its advice is practical: question-and-answer pairs, lists and tables, and "Don't hide important answers in tabs or expandable menus." It ends with a caveat: "While there's no secret sauce that guarantees selection in AI answers, there are clear practices that improve eligibility."
Google's guide covers its own AI features, not ChatGPT, but it addresses the question of mentions directly. Its AI features "can show what's being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions. However, seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." The same guide says Merchant Center feeds and Business Profiles "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results."
What the studies found
Three studies come up most often. Each measures something narrower than "getting mentioned in ChatGPT."
- GEO paper, KDD 2024
- 30 to 40%
- more visibility in generated answers from adding citations, quotes or statistics
- Ahrefs, ChatGPT, June 2025
- 0.20
- correlation of a domain's web visibility with ChatGPT mentions, top 50 domains
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews, 75K brands
- 0.664
- correlation of brand web mentions with AI Overview visibility
The GEO paper, by Pranjal Aggarwal and co-authors from Princeton and other institutions, published at KDD 2024, rewrote web pages and measured how much of each generated answer drew on each source. Adding citations, quotations and statistics raised that share by 30 to 40% on its main measure, and keyword stuffing didn't help. The engine was one the authors built on GPT-3.5, plus a test on Perplexity that showed improvements of up to 37%. It wasn't ChatGPT search as it runs today, and the paper says the effect "varies across domains."
Ahrefs' Patrick Stox took the top 50 websites mentioned in each of Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity in June 2025 and compared how often each was mentioned with the search traffic of web pages that mention it. The rank correlation was 0.55 for AI Overviews, 0.35 for Perplexity and 0.20 for ChatGPT, which he calls weak. His reading: "I think ChatGPT leans heavily on partnerships for top citation sources." A separate Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that brand mentions across the web correlate with visibility in AI Overviews at 0.664, much more than backlinks at 0.218. That one is about Google, not ChatGPT, and both are correlations.
Put together, being talked about on the web goes with being named by Google's AI, and more weakly with ChatGPT. Google says seeking inauthentic mentions "isn't as helpful as it might seem."
Six things to do
Not all of these come from OpenAI, so each line says whose documentation it rests on.
- Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and make sure your host or CDN lets OpenAI's published IP ranges through (OpenAI's crawler and search help pages)
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap, and turn on IndexNow if your platform supports it (Bing's advice; the link to ChatGPT is our reading of OpenAI's Microsoft link)
- Keep your Google Business Profile and Bing Places listing complete and current (Google's and Microsoft's advice; OpenAI says it uses nearby business listings but doesn't name the providers)
- Restaurants: keep your OpenTable, Resy or Yelp pages current (OpenAI names these three)
- For products, keep price and availability accurate; on Shopify that's already shared, otherwise apply for OpenAI's product feed (OpenAI's shopping help)
- Answer your customers' questions in plain text, with lists, tables and Q&A, not inside tabs, images or PDFs (Microsoft Bing's Krishna Madhavan); earn real mentions, such as reviews and forum answers, and don't buy them (Google's guide)
Then measure what you can. Visits from chatgpt.com show up as referrals in your analytics when the browser passes the referrer. Bing's AI Performance report counts citations on Microsoft's side. For ChatGPT itself, the most checkable method we've seen is the one in our ChatGPT citations post: a fixed set of prompts rerun on a schedule, logging which URLs get cited.
What we found on our own site
We ran the first two checks on elmrank.com, which went live on October 14, 2026. Our robots.txt names GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. OAI-SearchBot isn't named, so it falls under the rule for all crawlers, which allows every page except one test page. Nothing there keeps OpenAI out.
Then we read the server's access log, from launch to 09:15 on October 17 (Vietnam time), and counted requests for our blog posts and service pages by user agent:
- OAI-SearchBot
- 0
- requests for our blog and service pages, Oct 14 to 17
- Bingbot
- 0
- same pages, same days
- Googlebot
- 78
- same pages; ClaudeBot 28, PerplexityBot 1
So OpenAI's crawler was allowed in and hadn't come yet, three days after launch, on a domain we registered on October 13. Bing hadn't either, which matters if ChatGPT search leans on Microsoft, as we read OpenAI's help page. For a site in that state, opening robots.txt wider changes nothing; getting the sitemap into Bing Webmaster Tools is the useful next step. We'll rerun the count rather than guess when OAI-SearchBot first shows up.
What we can and can't show
We don't have ChatGPT mention or citation numbers for the three content sites we run, and we won't estimate them. Every number we publish for those sites is Google Search data, on our use cases page.
Our plan covers part of the list above. The first month includes an SEO and GEO audit and a robots.txt that lets the OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity crawlers in unless you want them out. From then on, $300 a month pays for up to 30 articles written to answer questions directly, the technical fixes, hosting and a monthly report. Where they can be counted, that report includes AI referral visits and Google's AI Overviews impressions next to your Search Console clicks. Our sample report shows the Google side for one of our own sites; it has no AI numbers yet. Listings, product feeds and reviews aren't part of the plan. The AI search optimization page lists what we do and what we report.
We don't promise mentions or citations in AI answers, and our terms say so. The only result we promise is about Google clicks.
Questions
Can you pay to be mentioned in ChatGPT?
Not in the answer itself. OpenAI says its product results 'are selected independently by ChatGPT and are not ads, nor influenced by any OpenAI partnerships,' and that ads are separate from them. ChatGPT does now carry ads, which OpenAI checks with a separate crawler, OAI-AdsBot, but an ad is not a mention in the answer.
Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing to search?
OpenAI doesn't name one index. Its help page says ChatGPT search 'sometimes partners with other search providers' and sends them rewritten queries, and for how those providers handle queries it links Microsoft's privacy statement and Shopify's privacy policy. ChatGPT also has its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot.
How we know this
Written by Tyler Phan. Every source below was read on the date shown; the page was last reviewed on Oct 17, 2026.
- OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT, accessed Oct 16, 2026
- OpenAI Help Center, Shopping with ChatGPT Search, accessed Oct 16, 2026
- OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers, accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Microsoft Bing Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview (February 10, 2026), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Microsoft Advertising Blog, Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers (Krishna Madhavan, Microsoft Bing), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Ahrefs (Patrick Stox), Does Being Mentioned on High Traffic Pages Influence AI Mentions?, accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Ahrefs (Louise Linehan), An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- r/smallbusiness, Anyone had a customer say they found you through ChatGPT instead of Google? (comments by u/MrRandomNumber, u/Sherifftruman), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- r/SEO, Does ChatGPT still use Google's index when doing web search or does it use Bing's index when recommending brands? (comments by u/Financial-Monk9400, u/-3rdPlace-), accessed Oct 16, 2026
- Elmrank, robots.txt and server access log (requests for blog and service pages, Oct 14 to 17, 2026), accessed Oct 17, 2026
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