ChatGPT SEO
SEO Back Office is a GEO agency. This page is about ChatGPT on its own, how it picks the sources it cites and what it takes to get your brand named in one of its answers.
How does ChatGPT choose which sources to cite?
ChatGPT cites pages it retrieves while it writes the answer, pulling from its own search index and from live fetches, so the cited pages tend to be pages that already rank plus the third-party pages it keeps returning to for that topic. OpenAI launched ChatGPT search on October 31, 2024 for paid users and opened it to free users that December. OAI-SearchBot is the crawler behind the index. GPTBot handles training data, and ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a question sends it there.
So getting cited isn’t a trick played on the model. It’s getting your pages into the index it reads and your brand onto the pages it keeps reading, which is ordinary search work with a different scoreboard. That’s what a GEO agency sells.
The practical consequence is that ChatGPT SEO contains almost no ChatGPT-specific work. What’s specific to ChatGPT is the crawler name in your robots.txt and the fact that the index behind ChatGPT search isn’t Google’s, so a page can rank in Google and still be missing from the one OpenAI reads.
The steps to get named by ChatGPT
- Check that OAI-SearchBot can reach the pages that matter. A robots.txt line written in 2023 to keep GPTBot out often took the search crawler with it, and the site never made it back into the index.
- Rank for the queries underneath the prompt. Someone asking for the best tool in your category gets an answer built from pages that rank for that phrase, so ranking is still the entry fee.
- Get onto the recurring third-party pages. Run the prompts yourself and write down which URLs keep coming back. That list is your outreach plan, and it’s shorter than you’d guess.
- Fix the wrong descriptions. A 2023 review carrying your old pricing gets quoted as current, and correcting the source is what stops it.
- Give it something quotable. A page that answers in the first line under the heading, with dates and numbers attached to the claims, gets lifted more often than a page that warms up for four paragraphs.
What we do on a ChatGPT engagement
We run the prompts for you, at volume and on a schedule, because doing it by hand once tells you almost nothing. The query set comes from your buyers’ questions, forty to eighty of them, and the runs repeat over two to three weeks so the rotation averages out.
Then we work the lists the log produces. The citation list goes to outreach, publisher by publisher, to get you added or corrected. The correction list goes to whoever owns the wrong description, including your own site when the stale page is yours. The full breakdown sits on the GEO services page.
Every month the same queries run again and the report shows what moved, which pages cited you and which competitor gained ground. No score, no index of our own invention. Every citation is a link you can open.
What we won’t do is write pages aimed at a model rather than a person. Google’s 2026 guidance says you don’t need to chunk your content or rewrite it for AI, and we’ve seen nothing on the OpenAI side that argues otherwise. A page that reads well and says something specific does the job for both.
What nobody can promise about ChatGPT
OpenAI changes retrieval whenever it likes, and the answer to one question differs between two people asking it at the same moment. Anyone guaranteeing you a slot in a ChatGPT answer is guessing, and charging for the guess.
What holds up over months is the boring part. Your pages stay in the index and your brand stays on the sources the model reads, with your description accurate wherever it looks.
Expect lumpy progress too. One publisher adding you to a heavily cited roundup can move your mention rate across a dozen queries in a week, and then nothing shifts for a month. The monthly report exists to show that shape rather than to smooth it into a line. If you want the same argument applied across Claude, Gemini and Perplexity rather than one platform, LLM SEO covers it.
Get named by ChatGPT.
Send us your category and your three closest competitors. We’ll run the first round of queries before the call, so the conversation starts from the answers rather than from a pitch deck.
Request an AI visibility audit No inflated promises. A clear baseline and a practical roadmap.