How to rank in ChatGPT
To rank in ChatGPT, let its search crawler in, answer the exact question a buyer asks, and get other sites to mention you.5,8 There is no fixed rank: the aim is to be named more often.18
- Mentions beat links: 0.664 against 0.218 for backlinks, across 75,000 brands.8
- No shortcut file: 97% of llms.txt files got no requests at all.13
- No fixed rank: the same list came back less than 1% of the time.18
We read 25 sources on 30/10/2026: the engines’ own crawler documentation, large AI-citation datasets, click studies and the paper that named GEO. Most datasets come from firms that sell SEO or AI-visibility tools, and we say so beside them.
01
How to rank in ChatGPT: where it looks
ChatGPT searches the web and writes from what it finds. Its search crawler has to be allowed in.
| Answer engine | How it finds pages | To stay in it |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | OAI-SearchBot | Let it in |
| Google AI Overviews | Google’s own index | Be indexed |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot | Let it in |
| Claude | Claude-SearchBot | Let it in |
| Microsoft Copilot | Bing grounding queries | Be in Bing |
- Search, not training: OAI-SearchBot puts sites in answers; GPTBot gathers training data.5
- Blocked means absent: opted-out sites “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”.5
- Bing matters: Seer found more than 87% of its citations in Bing’s top 20.19
- Check your firewall: some hosts block AI crawlers by default.
The detail
When a question needs current information, ChatGPT searches the web and writes from what it finds. OpenAI names the crawler that does this: OAI-SearchBot.5 “Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.”
GPTBot is a separate crawler that collects training data. You can say no to training and still be eligible for answers.5 Anthropic and Perplexity make the same split.6,7
Seer Interactive ran 100 questions through ChatGPT, Bing and Google. More than 87% of ChatGPT’s citations matched Bing’s top 20, against 56% for Google.19
Ahrefs later tested 15,000 longer prompts and found much less overlap. About 12% of cited links sat in Google’s top 10, and about 8% for ChatGPT alone.9
The reason is that the assistant does not search your buyer’s exact words. It rewrites the question, often splits it, then picks passages that answer each part. Semrush counts an average of 15 sources per ChatGPT response.16
Most of the third column is already true for a site that is set up properly. The catch is that some firewalls block AI crawlers by default, opting a site out without anyone deciding to.
02
What gets a business named in AI answers
Mostly, what other websites say about it. Brand mentions tracked AI visibility far more closely than backlinks did.
| Signal | Correlation |
|---|---|
| Mentions on other sites | 0.664 |
| Brand-name link text | 0.527 |
| Searches for the brand | 0.392 |
| Domain Rating | 0.326 |
| Number of backlinks | 0.218 |
- Not proof: Ahrefs says correlation is not cause; famous brands get mentioned anyway.8
- ChatGPT’s top source: Wikipedia, at 7.8% of its citations.15
- Local questions: the business’s own site was 42% of citations; Google Business Profile 28.5%.17
- What experts rank first: “best of” lists and a page for each service.23
The detail
Ahrefs compared 75,000 brands against how often each appeared in Google’s AI Overviews.8 The strongest relationship was with branded web mentions, at 0.664; plain backlinks came in at 0.218.
Every signal near the top of that list lives off your own site. Well-known brands are mentioned more for many reasons, so read it as direction, not cause.
Where mentions sit matters too. Profound counted 680 million AI citations: Wikipedia led ChatGPT’s sources at 7.8%, Reddit led Perplexity’s at 6.6%.15
In Google’s AI Overviews, YouTube took 22.9% and Reddit 18.5% of the top 50 sites’ citations.10
Local questions look different. BrightLocal tracked about 200,000 local searches: the business’s own website made up 42% of citations, Google Business Profile 28.5% and Yelp 9.53%.17
Whitespark surveyed 47 local search experts on 187 factors.23 Their top AI factors were expert-curated “best of” lists (179), a page for each service (170) and prominence on key industry sites (167). It is an opinion survey, not a measurement.
03
How to rank in Google’s AI Overviews
By doing ordinary SEO well. Google says there are no extra requirements and no special optimisations.
- The technical bar: indexed and eligible to show in Google with a snippet.1
- On by default: Search Console’s generative AI control includes you unless switched off.3
- Query fan-out: Google runs several related searches, so each section answers a sub-question.1
- Ranking still helps: 76% of AI Overview citations came from Google’s top 10.9
- Say something new: Google asks for first-hand, non-commodity content.2
The detail
Google’s documentation says: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”1
The technical bar is a page “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”.1 The generative AI control in Search Console must stay on, which is the default.3
AI Overviews and AI Mode use “query fan-out”, running related searches across subtopics before answering.1 So each section of a page gets judged against a sub-question on its own.
Google also asks for non-commodity content: a first-hand view, not a summary of what everyone else wrote.2 Earlier Ahrefs research found 76% of AI Overview citations came from Google’s top 10.9
04
Does llms.txt or schema help you get recommended?
Not on the evidence so far. Google says it does not use AI text files, and schema barely moved citations.
- Google’s word: Google Search does not use machine-readable or AI text files.2
- Schema still has a job: it describes the business clearly; it is not an AI shortcut.1
- Agents may read llms.txt: it can help a tool reading your site, not the answers.13
The detail
Google says: “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search”.2 It adds: “Google Search itself doesn’t use them.”
Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains in May 2026. 28% publish an llms.txt file, and 97% of those files got no requests at all.13
Ahrefs also tracked 1,885 pages that added schema against 4,000 matched pages.14 ChatGPT citations moved +2.2% and AI Mode +2.4%, both indistinguishable from zero.
AI Overview citations fell 4.6%, which Ahrefs calls “real but unexplained”.14 Google says “no special schema.org structured data” is needed.1
On chopping pages up, Google says: “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”2 A heading that asks the question and a first line that answers it serves both readers.
05
What your site should say to get recommended
The facts an assistant needs to match you: what you do, for whom, where, roughly what it costs, how to reach you.
| Cited by | Average age |
|---|---|
| AI assistants | 1,064 days |
| Google organic results | 1,432 days |
- One page per service: in the words buyers use.23
- Add evidence: statistics, quotes and sources lifted visibility up to 40%; keyword stuffing didn’t.22
- Update for real: a genuine update with a visible date; changing the date alone does not count.
- Same words everywhere: site, Google Business Profile and directories tell one story.
The detail
Write down what you do, for whom, where you work, roughly what it costs and how to reach you. Give each service its own page, in the words buyers use.
The research behind generative engine optimisation, from Princeton and others, tested this.22 Adding statistics, quotations and cited sources lifted visibility by up to 40%; keyword stuffing did not help.
That was a lab test on an older model, so treat it as direction, not a forecast.
Ahrefs compared nearly 17 million cited URLs.11 Pages cited by AI assistants averaged 1,064 days old, against 1,432 days for Google’s organic results.
Keep the description the same everywhere. If your website, Google Business Profile and directories describe one business in the same words, an assistant has one clear story to repeat.
06
How to check whether ChatGPT recommends you
Ask it many times and count. AI answers change almost every run, so one screenshot tells you very little.
| AI answer | With a link |
|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | 10.7% |
| ChatGPT | 26.9% |
| Google AI Mode | 36.8% |
| Perplexity | 51.6% |
- Lists rarely repeat: the same list came back less than 1% of the time.18
- Local is no steadier: repeat runs shared only 20% to 33% of the businesses named.17
- Copilot has a count: Bing Webmaster Tools shows citations, but not clicks.24
- Our own start: HagoDigital was named in 0 of 16 answers on 08/10/2026.26
The detail
SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 12 brand-recommendation prompts 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI.18 The same list came back less than 1% of the time; the same order, less than 0.1%.
Rand Fishkin put it plainly: “any tool that gives a ‘ranking position in AI’ is full of baloney.”18 BrightLocal saw the same on local searches.17
The measure that holds steady is how often you are named across many runs. So we track a fixed set of buyer questions every month, each run several times.
We count three things apart: named, linked and recommended. ChatGPT linked a brand in 26.9% of its mentions, AI Overviews in 10.7%.12
On 08/10/2026 HagoDigital was named in 0 of the 16 answers we could read.26 A new business with no mentions elsewhere starts from nothing.
For Copilot, Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report shows how often your pages are cited, though not how many people clicked.24
07
Is being recommended by AI worth the effort?
Yes, but count it in enquiries and names, not clicks. AI summaries cut clicks, and being cited softens that.
| Study | Without a summary | With a summary |
|---|---|---|
| Pew: a result clicked | 15% of visits | 8% of visits |
| Seer: organic click-through | 1.62% | 0.61% |
- Cited brands do better: 0.70% click-through against 0.52% when not cited.20
- Google’s claim: clicks from AI results are “higher quality”.1
- The answer is the shortlist: ask for three options and there is no page two.
- Nothing wasted: the same work earns a place in Google and Google Maps.
The detail
Pew Research Center followed the browsing of 900 US adults.21 With an AI summary, people clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, against 15% without.
They clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits.21 Seer Interactive measured organic click-through at 0.61% with an AI Overview, against 1.62% without.20
Being cited softens that: cited brands got 0.70% against 0.52%, about 35% higher.20 Google says the clicks that do come from AI results are “higher quality”.1
The bigger reason is that the recommendation is often the decision. If an assistant gives three options and you are not one, there is no list below to scroll.
And the work that earns a recommendation also earns a place in Google and Google Maps. None of it is wasted if the AI tools change their habits again.
08
What I’d do
- I’d start with the checks you control: OAI-SearchBot and Google let in, a complete Google Business Profile.
- I’d give every service its own page: what it is, who it’s for, what it costs.
- Then I’d put most of the effort off the site: listings in your trade, reviews, a reason to be mentioned.
- I’d walk away from anyone selling llms.txt or schema as the way in, or an “AI ranking”.
- I’d judge it by the same ten questions each month, counting how often you’re named.
Juan Pablo Tagliaferro, founder, HagoDigital
09
Questions people ask next
Can I submit my business to ChatGPT?
Not through a form. ChatGPT finds sites through its OAI-SearchBot crawler, and the one thing you control there is not blocking it.5 The rest is being found anywhere: a clear site, a complete Google Business Profile, and other sites that mention you.
Does ranking on Google help me show up in ChatGPT?
It helps, but it is not the same list. Seer found more than 87% of ChatGPT’s citations in Bing’s top 20 and 56% in Google’s.19 Ahrefs found about 8% of ChatGPT’s cited links in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt.9
Should I block AI bots from my website?
Block the training crawlers if you like, but not the search ones. OpenAI separates GPTBot, for training, from OAI-SearchBot, for answers; Anthropic and Perplexity make the same split.5,6,7 Some hosting firewalls block AI bots by default, so check yours.
How long does it take to get recommended by ChatGPT?
Nobody can honestly give you a date, and no study we found measures one. AI answers lean toward recently updated pages11 and toward businesses other sites already talk about,8 which builds over months of ordinary work.
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
SEO is being found in a search engine’s results. AEO is being the passage an assistant quotes; GEO is being cited when an AI writes its reply.25 In practice they are one job, because AI answers search the same web.
Sources
The engines' own documentation
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary"; AI Overviews and AI Mode may use "query fan-out", "issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources"; a supporting link must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet"; "no special schema.org structured data that you need to add"; clicks from results with AI Overviews are "higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site)" (Google's own claim). Link (updated 10/12/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search"; "Google Search itself doesn't use them"; "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it"; recommends non-commodity content with unique, first-hand perspectives. Link (updated 10/07/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Google Search Console Help, Search generative AI control: inclusion in AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover is the default; excluding a site means "links to your site and your site's content won't appear" in them; the control "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search". Link (read 30/10/2026)
- Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google: local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence; "Prominence means how well-known a business is"; "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google". Link (read 30/10/2026)
- OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers: "OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features"; "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers"; GPTBot gathers content that may be used to train models; blocking it is separate from search. Link (read 30/10/2026)
- Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?: "Claude-SearchBot navigates the web to improve search result quality for users"; blocking it "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results". Link (updated 07/04/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers: PerplexityBot "is designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity"; it "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models". Link (read 30/10/2026)
Large datasets (each publisher sells SEO or AI-visibility tools)
- Ahrefs, An analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors (75K brands): 75,000 brands; Spearman correlation with AI Overview brand visibility: branded web mentions 0.664; branded anchors 0.527; branded search volume 0.392; Domain Rating 0.326; backlinks 0.218; "correlation ≠ causation". Link (published 26/05/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, Only 12% of AI cited URLs rank in Google's top 10 for the original prompt: 15,000 long-tail prompts; averaged across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, about 12% of cited links appear in Google's top 10 for the same prompt; about 10% appear in Bing's top 10; ChatGPT's in-text citations 8.0% in Google's top 10; Perplexity 28.6%; in earlier Ahrefs research, 76% of AI Overview citations came from Google's top 10. Link (published 11/08/2025 (data July 2025), read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, The 50 most-cited websites in Google AI Overviews: over 3 million US queries; youtube.com 22.9% and reddit.com 18.5% of the top 50's citations; en.wikipedia.org 4.0%. Link (updated 02/09/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, Do AI assistants prefer to cite fresh content?: 16.975 million cited URLs; average age of URLs cited by AI assistants 1,064 days against 1,432 days for organic results, age counted from when Ahrefs' crawler first saw the page. Link (published 28/07/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, Do AI assistants link when mentioning brands?: more than 31,000 brand mentions; share of mentions with a link: AI Overviews 10.7%; ChatGPT 26.9%; AI Mode 36.8%; Perplexity 51.6%. Link (published 26/11/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, We analyzed 137K sites: 97% of llms.txt files never get read: 137,210 domains; 28% publish an llms.txt file; 97% of the files got no requests at all; "the cons outweigh the pros right now". Link (published 15/06/2026 (data May 2026), read 30/10/2026)
- Ahrefs, We tracked 1,885 pages adding schema. AI citations barely moved: 1,885 pages against 4,000 matched controls, 30 days either side; ChatGPT +2.2% and AI Mode +2.4%, both indistinguishable from zero; AI Overviews −4.6%, "real but unexplained"; every page was already cited 100+ times, so the result covers visible pages. Link (published 11/05/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Profound, AI platform citation patterns: 680 million citations, August 2024 to June 2025; ChatGPT's top source Wikipedia 7.8%; Perplexity's top source Reddit 6.6%. Link (published 05/06/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Semrush, 2026 AI Visibility Index (press release): 126 million US AI search prompts; ChatGPT "cites an average of 15 sources per response". Link (published 26/06/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- BrightLocal, Local AI visibility study: about 200,000 local searches and 1.9 million AI citations, on ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews; only 20% to 33% average overlap between result sets on repeat searches (ChatGPT 23%, AI Mode 21%, AI Overviews 33%); Google Business Profile 28.5% of citations; business websites 42% of citations; Yelp 9.53%; Google Maps names a tracked business in 66% of searches, ChatGPT in 33%. Link (published 16/09/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Search Engine Journal (SparkToro and Gumshoe study), AI recommendations change with nearly every query: 2,961 runs of 12 brand-recommendation prompts on ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI; the same list came back less than 1% of the time; same list in the same order less than 0.1%; "any tool that gives a 'ranking position in AI' is full of baloney" (Rand Fishkin); visibility percentage across many runs is the stable measure. Link (published 30/01/2026, read 30/10/2026)
Click and citation studies (Seer is an agency; Pew is independent)
- Seer Interactive, 87% of SearchGPT citations match Bing's top results: more than 500 citations from 100 queries; "more than 87% of ChatGPT search citations matched Bing's top 20 organic results"; 56% matched Google. Link (published 06/02/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Seer Interactive, AI Overviews' impact on Google CTR, September 2025 update: 3,119 search terms, 25.1 million organic impressions, 42 client organisations; organic CTR 0.61% with an AI Overview against 1.62% without (September 2025); brand cited in the AI Overview 0.70% against 0.52% not cited, "35% higher organic CTR". Link (published 04/11/2025, read 30/10/2026)
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results: browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025; 18% of searches showed an AI summary; a traditional result clicked in 8% of visits with a summary against 15% without; a link inside the summary clicked in 1% of visits. Link (published 22/07/2025, read 30/10/2026)
Research and expert surveys
- Aggarwal and others, Princeton and IIT Delhi (KDD 2024), GEO: Generative Engine Optimization: "GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses"; the best methods were quotation addition, statistics addition and citing sources; keyword stuffing offered "little to no improvement"; tested on a GPT-3.5-turbo engine and Perplexity.ai, so directional. Link (submitted 16/11/2023, revised 28/06/2024, read 30/10/2026)
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026: 47 experts, 187 factors; top AI search visibility factors: on expert-curated "best of" lists (179); a dedicated page for each service (170); prominence on key industry domains (167); an expert survey, not a measurement. Link (published 06/11/2025, read 30/10/2026)
Trade press on the reporting tools
- Practical Ecommerce, Bing's improved AI performance section: Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report counts citations in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and select partners; it shows grounding queries and cited pages, but "not the number of views or clicks". Link (published 22/06/2026, read 30/10/2026)
- Search Engine Roundtable, Microsoft Advertising releases guide to AEO and GEO: Microsoft Advertising's guide "From discovery to influence: A guide to AEO and GEO", written for retailers; AEO "optimizes content for AI agents and assistants"; GEO "optimizes content for generative AI search environments". Link (published 14/01/2026, read 30/10/2026)
Our own work
- HagoDigital, our first AI-answer baseline, read with OpenSEO’s AI visibility tracker: 16 answers read, HagoDigital named in 0 of them (recorded in our search scoreboard). (08/10/2026)
HagoDigital sells SEO, and tracking AI answers is part of that work, so we have an interest here; every claim is sourced.
Our prices live on the pricing page, not here. If you want this done for your business, this is what we do.