Last verified: 3 November 2026
To get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, make sure OpenAI’s search crawler can reach your site, then publish clear, sourced answers on your own domain to the narrower questions ChatGPT searches for when someone asks about your category. ChatGPT does not pick brands it likes; it quotes the pages that answer each part of the question most clearly.
Key takeaways
- ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers, with Bing named by OpenAI, plus content gathered by its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI).
- Sites that block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. Blocking GPTBot only affects model training (OpenAI crawler documentation).
- Answers depend on the mode: Semrush found only 25.6% of cited domains appeared in both the minimal-reasoning and high-reasoning answers to the same prompt (Semrush, June 2026).
- Reference-style pages that define things clearly are cited most: Wikipedia accounted for 7.8% of ChatGPT citations in Profound’s study of 680 million citations (Profound, 2025).
Can ChatGPT see your site at all?
Check this first, because it is the most common reason a brand never appears. OpenAI runs three user agents and they do different things:
- OAI-SearchBot crawls pages so they can appear in ChatGPT search answers. Block it and you are left out of those answers.
- GPTBot crawls content that may be used for model training. Blocking it does not affect search.
- ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user’s action asks for it. It does not decide inclusion.
A compliance team that blocks “all OpenAI bots” to keep content out of training can remove the brand from ChatGPT’s answers by accident. Look at robots.txt and any firewall or bot-management rules for OAI-SearchBot specifically.
What does ChatGPT actually search for?
Not the question as typed. Assistants rewrite a question into several narrower searches, collect candidate pages and quote the few that answer each part best. A buyer asking “which UK lenders are safe to borrow from?” may trigger separate searches for authorisation, complaints, representative APR and reviews. Each of those is a chance to be cited, and each needs a direct answer somewhere on your site.
We explain the mechanism platform by platform in how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini pick which brands to cite.
How do you become the page ChatGPT quotes?
- Baseline the prompts. Record which buyer questions in your category mention you today, which competitors appear and which URLs are cited.
- List the sub-questions. For each important question, write down the narrower ones an assistant will search for: licensing, cost, process, comparisons, risk.
- Answer first. Open each page or section with a one-to-two-sentence answer that names the subject, then give the detail.
- Put facts in text. Licence numbers, rates and timings belong in HTML text and tables, not images, PDFs or tabs loaded by script.
- Source and date your claims. A figure with a named source is easier to trust and easier to quote than an adjective.
- Make proof checkable. Registrations, published case studies and independent awards give an assistant something to verify.
Does it work for regulated brands?
Yes, for the factual, checkable parts of a buyer’s question. Cashfloat’s lending guide became the most-cited lending page in UK AI answers, above Citizens Advice and Experian, and Fast Loan UK earned 2,161 AI citations on loan queries. Both are lenders in a regulated market, and both did it with pages that answer questions plainly rather than pages that sell.
What you must not do is publish something on your own site that the advertising rules would not allow, in the hope an assistant repeats it. The ASA has regulated claims on companies’ own websites since 1 March 2011, and a page written to be quoted by AI is still a marketing communication.
How long does it take?
ChatGPT answers change as its retrieval changes, so treat citations as something to measure monthly rather than a one-off fix. Start with a baseline, change the pages that answer your most valuable questions, and track whether the cited URLs move to yours.
If you want to know where you stand today, our AI visibility team can run that baseline for you.
Marketing guidance, not legal or financial advice. Check sector rules with your compliance team before publishing.
