ChatGPT SEO: How to Be Findable and Citable When People Ask an Assistant

People now ask assistants questions they used to type into a search box. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT search so answers can draw on the web and link to the sources. "ChatGPT SEO" is shorthand for making your pages findable and worth citing in that setting.

It overlaps heavily with ordinary SEO. The pages that are easy to crawl, clear about what they say and backed by evidence are the pages any retrieval system has the best chance of using. What is new, in our view, is the access layer and the way answers are assembled from passages, not whole pages.

OpenAI documents its crawlers and how to allow or block them through robots.txt, with separate user agents for search and for training data. Decide which you want deliberately, because blocking the search crawler keeps you out of ChatGPT search answers (OpenAI says opted-out sites can still appear as navigational links), while the training decision is a separate business choice.

Beyond access, control the content. Open each section with the direct answer, name the entity and the facts plainly, cite your sources and keep key claims in text rather than inside images or scripts that a crawler may not read.

No one outside the provider can guarantee that a page will be cited, or reliably measure how often it is. Claims of secret prompts, schema hacks or paid placements in assistants should be treated sceptically. Google likewise says that for its AI features the same foundational SEO practices apply and no special optimisation is required.

The same caution applies to the claims you make. The FTC has said there is no AI exemption from the laws on the books, and its enforcement sweep targeted deceptive AI claims, which is a reason to keep your own marketing about what your AI work achieves truthful.

Look for referral traffic from chatgpt.com and similar assistant domains in your analytics and segment it from other sources; referrer labelling varies, so treat counts as approximate. Check whether those visitors reach key pages and convert. Test a fixed set of buyer questions monthly, record which sources appear and treat the log as a sample, not a ranking.

Pair this with branded search growth and direct enquiries that mention an assistant. Small numbers are normal; the signal is whether the pages being cited are the ones you would want a buyer to read.