A lot of business owners ask me the same thing these days: “How do I get my website to rank on ChatGPT?” Many of them believe there is a secret trick, a special tag or a paid listing that puts a brand at the top of ChatGPT’s answers. There isn’t.
What there is, though, is a clear pattern in the kind of brands ChatGPT likes to recommend. Neil Patel’s team studied this pattern, OpenAI has published its own rules for how sites get into ChatGPT search, and several big studies from 2025 and 2026 show which sources ChatGPT actually cites. Let me explain all of it in plain words, and then give you a practical plan you can follow.
In brief: you don’t “rank” on ChatGPT the way you rank on Google. You get mentioned, cited and recommended. And that depends as much on what the rest of the web says about you as on your own website.
Is ranking on ChatGPT the same as ranking on Google?
Not really. On Google, you get a position. You are number 1, number 4 or on page two. On ChatGPT, there is usually no list of ten blue links. There is one written answer, and that answer either names your brand or it doesn’t.
So when people say “rank on ChatGPT,” they usually mean two things:
- Being recommended, for example when someone asks “What’s the best accounting software for a small bakery?” and ChatGPT names your product.
- Being cited, where ChatGPT links to your page as a source next to its answer.
Both matter. A recommendation builds trust in your brand, and a citation can send a real visitor to your site. If you want a deeper look at the citation side, I have covered it separately in my guide on how to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT Search. In this article, I want to focus on the bigger question of why ChatGPT picks one brand over another.
The audience is not small. According to TechCrunch’s report on February 27, 2026, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users. That is a lot of people asking for recommendations.
What Neil Patel’s ChatGPT ranking study found
Neil Patel and his agency NP Digital ran one of the better-known experiments on this topic. In his article How to Rank Your Website on ChatGPT, he explains that his team asked ChatGPT more than 100 questions, such as “What’s the best laptop for college students?” and “What’s the best electric SUV?”
Then a statistician and data analyst looked at 82 different factors to see which ones lined up with the brands ChatGPT recommended. Only six factors showed a strong correlation:
- Brand mentions
- Reviews
- Relevancy
- Age
- Recommendations (from affiliate sites and “best of” lists)
- Authority
He also found that 27.41% of the responses were “off”, meaning the answer was not a real solution to the question. His example was ChatGPT recommending Moz as an SEO agency, even though Moz is a software company, not an agency. In the same article he notes that, according to SimilarWeb, ChatGPT was the 28th most popular site in the world.
Neil sums up the idea well:
“AI models don’t just pull links. They pull trusted sources, brand mentions, and structured information.”
— Neil Patel, How to Rank Your Website on ChatGPT
A fair note on the age of this study
I want to be honest here. The article page is dated 2026, but the screenshots in it were uploaded in September 2023, and the article describes ChatGPT as working from fixed training data that is not updated in real time. That was true of ChatGPT in 2023. It is not how ChatGPT works today, because it now searches the web live for many questions.
The article also doesn’t publish its sample size per question, its statistical method or its correlation scores. So I treat the six factors as useful direction, not hard science. The good news is that newer studies, which I cover below, point the same way.
How to act on each of Neil Patel’s six ChatGPT factors
Knowing the factors is one thing. Doing something about them is another. Here is how I suggest you turn each one into work you can actually do.
| Factor | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Brand mentions | How often your brand is talked about across the web | Get featured in industry articles, podcasts, interviews and roundups. Unlinked mentions count too. |
| Reviews | Number and quality of reviews on your site and on platforms like Trustpilot, Amazon or BBB | Ask every happy customer for an honest review on the platforms your buyers check. |
| Relevancy | How closely the words on pages about you match the question being asked | Describe what you do in the same words your customers use, on your site and in your profiles. |
| Age | Older brands and products were recommended more often | You can’t buy age, but you can show history: founding year, track record and consistent profiles. |
| Recommendations | Being listed by affiliate and “best of” sites | Earn a spot on reputable comparison and “best of” lists in your niche. |
| Authority | Social following, domain authority and the type of sites discussing you | Build quality links and press coverage from sites your industry already trusts. |
Let me pick out two of these, because they are where most small businesses fall behind.
Reviews are now a visibility signal, not just a sales tool
Most owners think of reviews as something that helps a visitor decide to buy. That is still true. But reviews are also written content about your brand, sitting on sites that AI tools read. A business with 15 reviews has much less for ChatGPT to work with than a competitor with 400. I go deeper on this in my article on how review data shapes AI recommendations.
“Best of” lists carry real weight
Neil points out that affiliate comparison sites seemed to influence the results, and he suggests this may reflect who pays the most commission rather than who has the best product. Fair or not, these lists are where ChatGPT often finds its shortlist. If you are not on them, it is hard to be recommended. Here is my guide on how to get your brand into “best of” lists.
How ChatGPT finds websites now that it searches the web
This is the biggest change since Neil’s screenshots were taken. Today, ChatGPT doesn’t only answer from memory. According to OpenAI’s help article Searching the web with ChatGPT (accessed October 2026), ChatGPT “may search the web automatically when your question would benefit from current information.”
When it searches, it usually rewrites your question into one or more shorter, targeted search queries. For example, a question about good restaurants nearby might become “top restaurants San Francisco.” It can then run follow-up searches after reading the first results. The answer may include citations, and there is a Sources panel with more links.
This means there are now two ways your brand can show up:
- From what the model already learned during training. This is slow to change, and it is where things like brand age and long-term mentions matter most. I explain this delay in my piece on LLM positioning lag.
- From a live web search at the moment someone asks. This is where your pages, your reviews and third-party articles about you can be found and cited right away.
OpenAI is also clear that there is no shortcut. The same help article says site owners can’t request inclusion directly, and that “Placement is not guaranteed.”
Which OpenAI crawler should you allow in robots.txt?
Here is where I see a lot of confusion. OpenAI uses more than one crawler, and each has a different job. Blocking the wrong one can quietly remove you from ChatGPT search. This is what OpenAI’s Overview of OpenAI Crawlers page says (accessed October 2026):
| User agent | What it does | What blocking it means |
|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | Used to show websites in ChatGPT search results | Your site won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. Changes take about 24 hours to apply. |
| GPTBot | Collects content to make OpenAI’s foundation models more useful and safe | Signals that your content should not be used to train OpenAI’s models |
| ChatGPT-User | Visits a page when a user’s action in ChatGPT or a custom GPT asks for it; not an automatic crawler | Because a user starts these visits, robots.txt rules may not apply |
| OAI-AdsBot | Checks the safety of pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT | Not described on the page |
OpenAI’s publisher FAQ puts the main rule very simply:
“For your site content to be included in summaries and snippets in ChatGPT, make sure you aren’t blocking OAI-SearchBot.”
— OpenAI Help Center, Publishers and Developers – FAQ
So my advice is this: always allow OAI-SearchBot if you want to be found in ChatGPT. Whether you allow GPTBot is a separate business decision about AI training. Blocking GPTBot does not block you from ChatGPT search, because the two are controlled separately.
One more thing many people miss. The OpenAI help article says you also need to make sure your host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI’s published search bot IP addresses. Some firewall and bot-protection settings block these by default, so it is worth checking with your developer.
Does ChatGPT use Google to find websites?
This is one of the most common questions I get. OpenAI doesn’t say ChatGPT uses Google. Its help article says ChatGPT search “sometimes partners with other search providers,” and it links to privacy policies from Microsoft and Shopify as providers. It also says ChatGPT does not share your IP address or account details with them.
The publisher FAQ adds that OpenAI may learn about a page’s URL from a third-party search provider or by crawling other pages, even if OAI-SearchBot is blocked. In that case, the page can still show up as a plain link and title. If you want to stop that, OpenAI says to use a noindex meta tag, and the crawler has to be allowed to read the page to see it.
Now here is the interesting part. Even if ChatGPT doesn’t query Google directly, your Google performance still seems to matter. Ahrefs’ brand visibility study (published May 26, 2025, updated April 2026) cites research by Seer Interactive that found ChatGPT brand mentions correlated most strongly with Google keyword rankings (0.65), followed by Bing keyword rankings (0.50). Backlinks alone showed a weak correlation of 0.10.
In simple words: good SEO and good AI visibility tend to go together. Because Bing is in that picture, I also suggest you set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you haven’t already.
What sources does ChatGPT cite most often?
If ChatGPT finds its answers on other websites, it helps to know which websites. Two large studies give us a good picture.
Similarweb’s study (published April 14, 2026) looked at nearly 600,000 citation events across ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. For ChatGPT in the U.S. in January and February 2026, the top cited domains were:
| Rank | Domain | Share of ChatGPT citations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | wikipedia.org | 13.15% |
| 2 | reddit.com | 11.97% |
| 3 | openai.com | 6.21% |
| 4 | walmart.com | 2.90% |
| 5 | youtube.com | 2.67% |
| 6 | linkedin.com | 2.42% |
Similarweb also found that ChatGPT rarely cites homepages. Most citations go to deeper pages like blog posts, FAQs, how-to guides and product pages. And for opinion or comparison questions, it leans on community platforms and niche publishers.
Semrush’s three-month study (published November 10, 2025) tracked more than 230,000 prompts across ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode and Perplexity from July to October 2025. It found that Reddit appeared in close to 60% of ChatGPT responses in early August, then dropped to around 10% by mid-September. Wikipedia fell from roughly 55% to under 20%. Even so, they stayed ChatGPT’s two most-cited domains, while sites like Forbes, Medium and PRNewswire gained ground.
What does this tell you? Two things. First, the sources ChatGPT trusts can shift quickly, so don’t bet everything on one platform. Second, much of what ChatGPT says about your brand comes from pages you don’t own. That is why I always recommend working on third-party citations and not just your own blog.
Why brand mentions matter more than backlinks for ChatGPT
For years, SEO has been about links. Links still help, but for AI visibility, mentions seem to matter more.
The Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands looked at Google’s AI Overviews, not ChatGPT, so keep that in mind. Still, the pattern is useful. Branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with AI visibility at 0.664. The number of backlinks scored just 0.218. Ahrefs also found that brands in the bottom half for web mentions were close to invisible in AI answers.
This matches Neil Patel’s first factor almost exactly. Let me give you a simple example. Imagine two local bakeries. One has a nice website and a few links. The other has a decent website, but it was also written up by a city food blog, discussed on a local Reddit thread and listed in a “best bakeries in town” article. When someone asks ChatGPT for a bakery recommendation, the second one has far more for the AI to find.
So the job is to get talked about in the right places. That is where digital PR for AI search and focused AI citation outreach come in.
A 30-day plan to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT
Here is a practical plan I suggest to anyone starting out. It won’t make you appear overnight, but it covers the basics in the right order.
- Check your crawler access (days 1–2). Open your robots.txt file and make sure OAI-SearchBot is not blocked. Ask your host or CDN provider whether OpenAI’s search bot IPs are allowed.
- See where you stand today (days 3–5). Ask ChatGPT the questions your customers ask, like “best [your service] in [your city].” Note who gets named and which sources get cited. An AI search audit does this in a more structured way.
- Fix your own pages (days 6–12). Make sure your service and product pages clearly say what you do, who it is for and where you work, in the same words customers use. Add clear FAQ sections on key pages, because ChatGPT tends to cite deep, specific pages.
- Start a review drive (days 6–30). Ask recent customers for honest reviews on the platforms that matter in your industry. Never buy or fake reviews.
- List the third-party pages that matter (days 13–16). Find the “best of” lists, directories, comparison articles and forum threads that ChatGPT cited in step 2. These are your targets.
- Reach out and get mentioned (days 17–30). Pitch the list owners, offer expert quotes to journalists and take part honestly in community discussions where your customers already ask questions.
- Set up tracking (day 30). ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to links it sends, according to OpenAI’s publisher FAQ. Set up a report so you can see this traffic grow. My guide on tracking AI traffic in GA4 walks you through it.
After the first month, repeat steps 2, 5 and 6 every month. AI visibility is built slowly, the same way a reputation is built offline.
Questions people ask me about ranking on ChatGPT
Can I pay to rank on ChatGPT?
No, not in the regular answers. OpenAI says site owners can’t request inclusion in ChatGPT search and that placement is not guaranteed. Your crawler access and your reputation across the web are what count.
If I block GPTBot, will I disappear from ChatGPT?
Not from ChatGPT search. GPTBot is for AI training, and OAI-SearchBot is for search. OpenAI controls them separately, so you can block training and still allow search.
How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?
It depends. OpenAI says robots.txt changes for OAI-SearchBot take about 24 hours to apply, and live search can find new pages quickly. Changing how the model itself “remembers” your brand takes much longer, because that depends on training updates.
Is ChatGPT always right about which brands it recommends?
No. Neil Patel’s study found that 27.41% of responses were off. That is why it is worth checking what ChatGPT says about your brand and your competitors on a regular basis.
Do I still need traditional SEO?
Yes. Research cited by Ahrefs found ChatGPT brand mentions correlated most with Google keyword rankings. Strong SEO gives AI tools more good pages about you to find.
How we help brands get recommended in ChatGPT answers
So, to bring it all together. You don’t rank on ChatGPT with a trick. You get recommended when the web is full of trusted, relevant, positive mentions of your brand, and when ChatGPT’s search crawler can reach your pages. Neil Patel’s six factors are a good starting point. OpenAI’s own documents tell you how to keep the door open. And the newer studies show that mentions, reviews and third-party pages carry a lot of the weight.
If you would like a team to do this for you, we can help. At My SEO Experts, we look at how ChatGPT sees your brand today, fix the technical basics and build the mentions and citations that move the needle. Take a look at our SEO services, or get a free quote and tell us about your business.
Sources for this ChatGPT ranking guide
- Neil Patel – How to Rank Your Website on ChatGPT (NP Digital)
- OpenAI – Overview of OpenAI Crawlers (accessed October 2026)
- OpenAI Help Center – Publishers and Developers FAQ (accessed October 2026)
- OpenAI Help Center – Searching the web with ChatGPT (accessed October 2026)
- TechCrunch – ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (February 27, 2026)
- Ahrefs – An Analysis of AI Overview Brand Visibility Factors (75K Brands Studied) (May 26, 2025, updated April 2026)
- Semrush – The Most-Cited Domains in AI: A 3-Month Study (November 10, 2025)
- Similarweb – The Most Cited Domains by LLMs and the Signals That Get You Cited (April 14, 2026)
