What ChatGPT SEO is
ChatGPT SEO (also called GEO, generative engine optimization, or answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your business named and linked when someone asks an AI assistant a question you could answer. It overlaps with regular SEO, but the scoreboard is different. A business can rank first on Google and never come up in an AI answer. It comes down to six things:
- Make sure AI crawlers can read your site.
- Get into the search indexes ChatGPT pulls from.
- Get written about somewhere other than your own site.
- State the facts about your business plainly.
- Write the pages people actually ask about.
- Measure it from your server logs, not Google Analytics.
5 of 8Businesses we checked never named in an AI answer
13,732Bot requests to our site in 30 days
153Fetches by an AI assistant answering a person
0Of those that went to a city page
01
Make sure AI crawlers can read your site
Each AI company runs more than one crawler, and they do different jobs. Blocking the wrong one by accident is common, because website templates and security plugins often add these rules without anyone deciding to. Check your robots.txt (yoursite.com/robots.txt) for these names:
| Crawler | Company | What it does |
|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Builds the index ChatGPT search cites. Block this and ChatGPT can't link to you. |
| ChatGPT-User | OpenAI | Reads a page when a person's question needs it |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Collects text to train models. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search. |
| PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User | Perplexity | Search index and live answers |
| ClaudeBot, Claude-User | Anthropic | Training and live answers |
| Googlebot | Google | Google's AI Overviews and Gemini answer from Google's regular index, so normal Google SEO covers them |
Our free AI visibility check tests your robots.txt against ten AI crawlers in about thirty seconds.
02
Get into the search indexes ChatGPT pulls from
When ChatGPT searches the web, it doesn't only use its own crawler. It also pulls results from outside search indexes, and Bing has been one of them. Many businesses have never looked at Bing, so their pages are missing there or years out of date.
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. It takes ten minutes, and you can import the setup from Google Search Console.
- Keep Google Search Console clean. Pages Google won't index are usually pages nobody else will cite either.
- Make every page load without JavaScript. Most AI crawlers don't run it, so content that only appears after a script runs is invisible to them.
03
Get written about somewhere other than your own site
This is the step that matters most and the one most businesses skip. Before we showed our AI visibility check to anyone, we ran it on the businesses we work with. Five of the eight were never named, once, in any answer. None of them had a broken website. The businesses that did get named were the ones other websites had written about.
An AI assistant learns who exists in your market from everyone except you. These are the sources that tend to count:
- Local press and trade publications that mention you by name.
- Chamber, association, and supplier directories with your name, city, and what you do.
- Review platforms, with review volume that keeps up with your competitors.
- Partner and customer websites that link to you.
This is slow, and it's the same work that earns links for regular SEO. There is no shortcut that holds up.
04
State the facts about your business plainly
To recommend you, an assistant needs to be sure what you do, where, and for whom. If that lives in a PDF, a slider, or an image, it can't use it.
- One sentence that says who you are, used the same way on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and directories.
- Services, service area, and who you work with written out in text.
- A short FAQ on each main page that answers the questions customers ask before they call: cost, timing, process.
- Structured data (Organization or LocalBusiness schema) that matches the text on the page.
05
Write the pages people actually ask about
We read 30 days of AI crawler logs on our own site. When an AI assistant fetched one of our pages to answer a person, it went to the homepage and then to posts about marketing dashboards, tracking setup, and agency pricing. We had 24 city pages at the time. Not one was fetched by an assistant.
Assistants answer questions, so they reach for pages that answer one directly. Write the page a customer would want if they asked the question out loud: what it costs, how it works, what to watch out for. Answer in the first paragraph, then go deeper.
The full breakdown is in what AI assistants actually read on your website.
06
Measure it from your server logs
Google Analytics can't see crawlers, because crawlers don't run its JavaScript tag. To know what AI is reading, you need server logs: a log drain on Vercel, Logpush on Cloudflare, or the access log on a traditional host. Then split the AI bots into three groups, because one combined number is misleading:
| Group | Our site, 30 days | What it's worth |
|---|
| AI training | 3,135 requests, 263 pages | Nothing on its own. No visitor and no citation. |
| AI search | 1,507 requests, 165 pages | The index AI answers get cited from |
| AI assistant | 153 requests, 53 pages | A person asked, and the AI read your page to answer. The closest thing to a visitor. |
Expect far more AI reads than AI visits. For a Twin Cities HVAC company we work with, AI assistants read their pages 397 times in the first weeks we tracked it. Over the whole year, only 20 people clicked through from an AI answer, because the answer already gave them the phone number. We track both on every client's live report.
