Citino teamHow ChatGPT finds its answers
ChatGPT answers in two ways. Without search, it answers from what the model learned in training. With search, which it uses for many shopping and comparison questions, it rewrites the question into its own search queries, reads the results and cites them.
You can change the second kind of answer much faster than the first. That is where to focus.
Allow the right OpenAI crawler
OpenAI runs separate bots for separate jobs, and each one is controlled on its own in robots.txt. From OpenAI’s crawler documentation:
| Bot | What it does | Block it and… |
|---|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot | Crawls pages for ChatGPT search | Your pages are not shown in ChatGPT search answers |
GPTBot | Collects content for training | Your content is not used to train future models |
ChatGPT-User | Fetches a page when a user asks about it | Little effect: OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, since a user asked |
If you want to be cited, OAI-SearchBot must be allowed, in robots.txt and in any firewall or CDN bot rules. Many sites block “AI bots” wholesale and lose search visibility without meaning to. You can allow search and still block training:
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
OpenAI notes that robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to take effect.
What makes ChatGPT name a brand
Once ChatGPT can read your site, being named depends on what it reads.
Be on the pages it cites for your questions. Run your buyers’ questions in ChatGPT and look at the sources it links. Review sites, comparison articles and community threads come up again and again. If you are missing from them, that is a source gap, and it is usually the biggest lever.
Say it plainly on your own pages. ChatGPT repeats specific claims. If it recommends a competitor “for multi-client billing”, check whether your pages state, in text, that you do that too. If not, that is a content gap.
Keep facts current. Pricing, integrations and certifications go stale. When ChatGPT states an old price, the fix starts with the page that should state the current one, then the third-party pages repeating the old one.
Write the way answers are written. Pages that open with a direct answer, use descriptive headings and put comparisons in tables are easier to quote than long promotional prose.
How to check where you stand
- List 20 to 50 questions your buyers would ask ChatGPT.
- Ask each one several times, in a fresh chat with no memory or custom instructions.
- Record whether you are named, your position in the list, the tone, and the pages cited.
- Repeat on a schedule and compare rates, not single answers.
A single run is not a measurement. Being named in 2 of 5 runs and 3 of 5 runs can be the same visibility. See how to measure AI visibility for the margin-of-error maths.
Watch the traffic too
Clicks from ChatGPT answers commonly arrive tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com. In GA4 that gives you a separate source to watch: which pages people land on from ChatGPT, and whether they convert.
How Citino tracks ChatGPT
Citino asks your tracked questions in ChatGPT every day from a clean session, keeps every answer, and reports visibility, position and sentiment with a margin of error, alongside the pages each answer cited.