The short answer
You can't rank in ChatGPT the way you rank on Google. There's no fixed list of ten positions, no official report and almost no published rules.
Here's nearly everything OpenAI says on the subject. Its help page on web search says ChatGPT ranks results on multiple factors intended to help people find relevant, reliable information, and that placement isn't guaranteed. To be eligible, you allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl your site and make sure your host or content delivery network (CDN, the service that sits between your site and visitors) accepts traffic from OpenAI's published addresses.
That's the whole official list. What follows separates what's confirmed from what's a reasonable bet, because most advice on this topic blurs the two.
Before you spend anything, find out whether this matters for you. Ask your last ten customers how they found you. If nobody mentions ChatGPT, keep this on a short leash and put the time into the pages that bring in calls and signups today.
What happens when someone asks ChatGPT about you
An answer can come from two places. One is what the model absorbed in training. The other is a live web search, which OpenAI says ChatGPT may run automatically when a question would benefit from current information.
When it searches, it typically rewrites the question into one or more targeted queries, and it sometimes sends those to partner search providers. The help page points to Microsoft's and Shopify's privacy policies for how those providers handle queries. It doesn't say how much weight any provider's results carry.
Three OpenAI programs matter here, and they're easy to mix up. This comes from OpenAI's crawler documentation:
| Program | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Finds pages for ChatGPT's search features | You won't be shown in search answers, though you can still appear as a plain navigational link |
| GPTBot | Collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models | Signals your content shouldn't be used for training. The search setting is separate |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits a page when a person's request calls for it. Not automatic crawling | OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, and this one doesn't decide search inclusion |
Check this first
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. That's the small file telling crawlers what they may read. Look for a section naming OAI-SearchBot with a Disallow rule, or a catch-all section (User-agent: *) that says Disallow: /. Either one can keep you out of ChatGPT's search answers no matter how good your pages are.
Then ask whoever runs your hosting whether a firewall or bot-protection setting blocks automated visitors. A clean robots.txt won't help if the requests never reach your site. OpenAI's crawler page lists the addresses to allow, and says a robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect in search.
Google's AI and ChatGPT are different problems
A lot of advice treats all AI answers as one thing. The evidence says otherwise.
Google's guide to its generative AI features says AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in its core ranking systems, and that optimizing for them is still SEO. An Ahrefs study of 1.9 million citations from July 2025 fits that: about 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google's top 10.
ChatGPT looks different. In a separate Ahrefs study of 15,000 long-tail prompts from August 2025, only about 8% of citations from assistants like ChatGPT also appeared in Google's top 10 for the same prompt. More than 80% didn't rank for it at all.
Treat both numbers with care. They're more than a year old and come from a company that sells SEO tools. And since ChatGPT rewrites questions before it searches, a cited page may rank well for a different query than the one typed, which would make the overlap look smaller than it is. That's a likely explanation, not a proven one.
So good Google rankings aren't wasted, and they're not a ticket into ChatGPT either.
What's worth doing, knowing it's partly inference
OpenAI hasn't published its factors, so the list below is judgment, not rule. Each item is cheap and helps your regular search traffic anyway, which is why it makes the cut.
- Say the obvious things in plain text. Say you run a two-person bookkeeping firm in Boise (a made-up example). If your home page says "financial clarity for growing businesses", nothing tells a search system that you do bookkeeping for Idaho restaurants. One sentence fixes that. Add who you serve, where and roughly what it costs.
- Have a page for the question. Since ChatGPT turns a question into targeted queries, a page about restaurant bookkeeping can match where a general services page can't. Don't take it too far: Google says making separate pages for every variation of a query, mainly to manipulate results, breaks its scaled content policy.
- Make sure Bing can see you. With Microsoft named among the search providers, it's a cheap bet. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and shows what Bing has found on your site.
- Add what only you know. Google says content people find unique, compelling and useful will likely influence its AI results more than anything else in its guide. It's talking about its own features, but a page full of real prices, real examples and real opinions is a better bet everywhere than a summary of what's already online.
- Get talked about for real. Google says its AI features can show what people say in blogs, videos and forums, and that seeking inauthentic mentions isn't as helpful as it might seem. Customers who review you and trade sites that cover you are the honest version of this. Paying for fake forum posts is a reputation risk at best.
If you're a local business, keep your listings accurate as well. OpenAI says ChatGPT may share a person's location with third-party providers to get information such as nearby business listings.
What you can skip
Google's guide says it ignores llms.txt files, needs no special markup, and doesn't require you to break content into tiny chunks or rewrite it for AI. That's Google speaking about Google. OpenAI's crawler and search pages don't list any of these as a requirement either, though they don't rule them out.
Be careful with anyone promising placement. OpenAI doesn't guarantee it, and Google says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. A promise on top of that has nothing to stand on.
Why you can't really measure this
This is the part most guides skip, and it should shape how much you spend.
- Answers vary by design. SparkToro and Gumshoe ran 12 prompts about 3,000 times in total, as reported by Search Engine Journal. ChatGPT and Google's AI returned the same list of brands less than 1 time in 100, and the same list in the same order less than 1 time in 1,000. How often a brand appeared across many runs was steadier than its position.
- Your view isn't your customer's. ChatGPT uses approximate location and, when memory is on, saved memories when it rewrites a search.
- There's no official report. Google now has a Generative AI performance report in Search Console, but it covers only Google's AI features. The OpenAI pages linked here describe no equivalent for site owners, as of November 2026.
- Clicks undercount. Search Engine Roundtable reported in June 2025 that ChatGPT's links carry a tracking tag naming it as the source, so search your analytics traffic sources for "chatgpt". Ahrefs Free also says its web analytics shows traffic from AI assistants. None of this counts the person who read your name and called you without clicking.
A cheap test beats most dashboards. Write down ten questions your customers ask. Ask each one five times in a fresh chat, and note how often you're named and which sites get cited. Repeat in a month. You'll get a rough rate rather than a rank, and a rough rate is all anyone honestly has. Since people who aren't signed in can use web search, a logged-out window keeps your own history out of it.
If you'd rather have this tracked along with the rest of your search work, our guide to SEO tools for small business covers the options.
Where Sojig fits, and where it doesn't
We make Sojig, so weigh this accordingly. Its AI search visibility check asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews up to 25 of your customers' questions every Monday, shows who's named instead of you, and turns gaps into drafted work. That includes fixes like robots.txt rules that block AI crawlers. There's more on the approach in getting named in AI answers, and on keeping a person in charge of it in AI SEO automation.
It's still a sample, so read it as a direction and not a score. It can't make ChatGPT name you, and nothing can.
It's the wrong purchase if you only want one look: the ten-question test above is free. If you want prompts checked daily instead of weekly, Semrush lists that on its $199-a-month plan and up, as of November 2026. And if you're just starting on search at all, begin with the SEO a founder should actually do, because a site Google can't find won't be helped by watching ChatGPT.