OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in November 2022. Among other things, people ask the AI system about providers and products and turn to it for recommendations. ChatGPT writes its own answers. Your business can appear in them as a plain mention in the text or as a linked source. Whether and how that happens is an important part of your AI visibility.
Two ways ChatGPT answers
ChatGPT can answer a question in two ways:
- From trained knowledge: The language models behind ChatGPT learned from large amounts of text. What they stored in the process, their parametric knowledge, only extends up to a certain date, the knowledge cutoff. Answers based on this knowledge alone usually name no sources and can contain false statements, known as hallucinations.
- With content from the web: When a question would benefit from current information, ChatGPT can retrieve content from the web on its own. Users can also trigger this deliberately. Since October 2024, OpenAI has called this capability ChatGPT search. Answers built this way can include source references, or AI citations, that lead to the page in question.
OpenAI’s crawlers
Whether a website can appear as a source in ChatGPT depends on one crawler: according to OpenAI, a site is eligible for ChatGPT search only if its robots.txt file allows OAI-SearchBot and neither its hosting provider nor a content delivery network (CDN) in front of it blocks the crawler. GPTBot, by contrast, collects content for training OpenAI’s models, and ChatGPT-User fetches pages for certain user actions in ChatGPT; neither decides whether a page can appear as a source.