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With over 900 million active users per week, ChatGPT is changing the way people find businesses, services and experts.
This article explains what needs to happen, both technically and in terms of content, to ensure that your company doesn't fall behind.
We are currently witnessing the biggest change in search engines since the Universal Search update in 2007.
In the B2B sector, more than half of all purchasing decisions now begin with a ChatGPT query rather than a traditional search. Source G2
Source: DemandSage
In its replies, ChatGPT mentions specific brands and providers. In fact, it does so 3.2 times more often than it provides clickable sources.
Anyone who arrives at your website via ChatGPT is already showing a specific interest in making a purchase, with a conversion rate of 15.9 per cent compared to 1.76 per cent for Google Organic. That’s almost nine times higher.
Source: Seer Interactive / TechnologyChecker.io
To ensure these opportunities are not left to chance, you need to understand the mechanics behind the system.
ChatGPT operates in two fundamentally different modes. Which one is active determines whether your content stands any chance at all.
In the first mode ChatGPT draws on the knowledge it was trained on: books, academic papers, publicly accessible websites – everything that was available up to a specific cut-off date. GPT-4o is up to date with the world as of June 2024.
GPT-5, available from August 2025, has knowledge of the world up to October 2024.
What happened afterwards simply does not exist in this mode.
In the second mode, ChatGPT Search actively searches the web. The system primarily uses Bing’s index (though it also draws on Google results), re-evaluates this information according to its own logic, and provides answers with directly clickable source references.
These appear as small numbers or icons directly within the text, as well as in a list of sources in the margin, so that any claim can be verified immediately by clicking through to the original website
This mode is crucial for your business, as it determines whether or not your business will be cited.
Important: If you’re not indexed on Bing or Google, you won’t appear in ChatGPT Search. If you are indexed there but are weak in terms of technical aspects or content, you’ll still be overlooked.
Taken together, these two approaches provide the full picture, and each requires different measures.
To make this clearer, let’s look at how a typical ChatGPT response arises.
When the key mode – active web search (ChatGPT Search) – is activated, the AI goes through a multi-stage filtering process that determines which content from the web search is included in the final response.
First, the nature of the question is analysed. Can it be answered using existing knowledge (training data)? Or is up-to-date, external information required? This decision determines whether ChatGPT responds immediately or whether further research is needed.
If further information is required, ChatGPT will carry out a Google or Bing search. Before doing so, however, ChatGPT attempts to understand the meaning behind the question.
What does the user really want to know?
On this basis, ChatGPT formulates several highly specific search queries (query fanout) that are much more structured and detailed, in order to capture the true intent behind the original question.
The results found are not simply accepted at face value. Instead, a preliminary selection is made: Which pages are genuinely relevant? Which ones best match the query? Which ones appear to be trustworthy?
This is where the first filter comes into play. A lot of content is weeded out, and only a small proportion makes it through at all.
Step 4: Relevant passages are selected
Rather than using the entire content of the selected pages, only specific sections are used. The AI searches for the parts that best answer the question.
You can think of it as an editor going through several articles and highlighting only the most important passages.
It is only at the end that the actual writing begins.
ChatGPT combines the selected information with the knowledge it has learnt and uses this to formulate a new, coherent response.
This means: The quality of the answer depends heavily on what content has been found and selected beforehand.
It follows that: ChatGPT may appear to operate autonomously, but for many queries it remains heavily reliant on conventional search engines .
Source: Nerov analysis of over 8,500 ChatGPT prompts, via DigitalInformationWorld.com (Oct. 2025)
The data source for the generated responses is often drawn from content that has been indexed via Google or Bing.
A lack of visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing makes it considerably more difficult to be found within ChatGPT. Investing in traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) is therefore the essential foundation to help improve ChatGPT’s discoverability.
On-page SEO is everything that happens directly on your website. The aim is for search engines and users to understand straight away what a page is about.
Off-page SEO is everything that happens outside your website but which influences its credibility. Search engines regard this as a sign of trust.
The invisible structure that determines whether search engines can crawl and index your website at all.
EEAT doesn’t help you climb the rankings, but it does ensure that you won’t be penalised in the long term, as it forms the quality foundation required by Google, and a lack of E-E-A-T can lead to penalties from core updates (e.g. the Helpful Content System).
These classic areas of SEO remain the foundation for ChatGPT’s visibility.
Nevertheless, there are subtle differences, which is why we’ll be looking at them in more detail in the next step.
ChatGPT can only mention or quote your website if it is able to read it at all.
At a technical level, the following points in particular determine whether you are visible or not:
The robots.txt file is a simple text file located on the website. It acts as a set of house rules for crawlers: It acts as the gatekeeper for your website, which tells every crawler that requests access – from Googlebot to GPTBot – at the front door whether or not it is permitted to enter the site and read the content.
Every crawler – whether it’s Googlebot, GPTBot or OAI-SearchBot – reads this file first thing, before accessing a single page on your website. If it says ‘Disallow’, it turns back. If it says ‘Allow’, it’s allowed in.
You can find your website’s robots.txt file by entering your domain name in the browser address bar and attach: /robots.txt .
If there is no robots.txt or if it is empty, this is considered to be general authorisation for all crawlers. Nevertheless, explicit configuration is advisable:
This way, you can control which AI bots use your content for the Training and which ones can only be used for the search Suche .
OpenAI sends three of its own bots to your website, each with a different task:
This bot is OpenAI’s primary crawler for collecting content to train future generative AI models. Blocking it prevents new content from your website from being incorporated directly into model training and will affect future model versions. It falls into the category of Training Bots.
This is used for search purposes and ensures that your website appears in ChatGPT’s search results. Important: Blocking your site will prevent it from appearing in ChatGPT’s AI search results, although it may still be visible as a navigation link.
It responds to genuine user queries and retrieves content in real time. This bot is crucial for visibility, citations and potential traffic from ChatGPT. It acts as a retrieval bot, which only loads content when a user requests a specific URL or the system needs to verify information in real time.
In addition, there are two traditional search engine bots, which are just as crucial, albeit indirectly:
Googlebot indexes your site for Google Search, AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. As ChatGPT has been shown to draw on Google search data as well, blocking Googlebot is tantamount to cutting off a key data source.
Bingbot Bing is the primary search engine on which ChatGPT Search is based. Anyone who blocks Bingbot is directly undermining their own visibility in ChatGPT.
To ensure maximum visibility, your robots.txt file needs all five of these:
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
You can find your website’s robots.txt file by entering your domain name in the browser address bar and adding /robots.txt .
There, you can immediately see which bots are currently allowed or blocked. You can also use this tool to check whether the configuration for AI crawlers is complete and correct:KI-Crawlability-Checker
The ‘Allow’ directive in robots.txt only permits the Crawling (accessing and reading the content). For the actual Indexing (Visibility in search results) It must also be ensured that there are no ‘noindex’ meta tags or X-Robots-Tag headers on the pages
High speed is essential. When loading your website, ChatGPT behaves like an impatient visitor: it prefers fast response times and shows little tolerance for delays. Poor performance means that content is simply ignored. The following aspects are crucial here:
Server-Antwortzeit (TTFB): The speed at which your server responds to requests acts as the primary filter. If responses are too slow, ChatGPT will abort the process before any information can be collected. The aim should be a response time of less than one second.
Placement of key content: As ChatGPT does not necessarily analyse the entire page, information at the bottom may be overlooked. It is therefore essential to position key statements, main topics and answers to key questions in the upper, visible section.
Nevertheless, such content is significantly more difficult to access and less reliably parsable than genuine HTML text.
Prices, value propositions or key messages should therefore also appear on the page as plain text.
Alt text helps search engines, screen readers and AI systems to better understand images and contextualise them, but it is no substitute for visible text content.
Less than many people claim. Ahrefs compared 1.3 million pages with and without Schema markup and found no measurable effect on AI citation rates. Four separate tests, all with the same result: Schema does not boost AI visibility.
That doesn’t mean Schema is worthless; it remains relevant for traditional rich snippets. But if you’re short on time, it isn’t an SEO priority for ChatGPT or AI overviews. Ahrefs Studie
To summarise:
AI visibility is based on the Crawlability and Performance Your website. This requires a correct robots.txt configuration for all critical bots (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot), a server response time (TTFB) of less than one second, and the delivery of core content without relying on client-side JavaScript. Schema markup, by comparison, is not a high priority.
These technical elements enable the AI to read your content in the first place.
However, actual credibility and authority – and thus the likelihood of being cited – are determined by other signals. For this reason, we will now turn our attention to the area of off-page authority.
Traditional keyword research remains a key component of any SEO strategy. It reveals which terms people are searching for, what the search volume is, and how fierce the competition is.
However, in the age of AI search systems such as ChatGPT, this approach alone is no longer sufficient. The reason is simple: many relevant questions, problems and phrases do not appear at all in keyword tools, or only very incompletely.
Particularly in the B2B sector, search queries often arise from complex decision-making situations, internal discussions, uncertainty, objections and specific business problems.
The CORE method expands on traditional keyword research by incorporating a more in-depth qualitative analysis. It doesn’t start with tools, but with the language customers actually use.
After all, customer conversations, sales calls, emails, CRM notes, support enquiries, workshop questions, LinkedIn comments and lost deals often contain precisely the kind of information that traditional keyword tools fail to reveal.
With Google, businesses can, at least to some extent, measure how users search: via search volume, rankings, impressions, clicks and data from Google Search Console. With ChatGPT and other AI systems, this is considerably more difficult. Businesses often do not know exactly:
Traditional keyword tools and the newly introduced GEO tools can only partially bridge this gap. That is why a new form of research is needed: one that not only considers external data but also systematically analyses existing customer data. This is precisely what the CORE method is designed for. It helps companies gain a deeper understanding of:
The first step involves gathering authentic feedback from existing customer touchpoints. These include, for example, sales calls, customer conversations, emails, CRM notes, support enquiries, workshop questions, chat histories, LinkedIn comments and notes from lost deals.
This data shows how your customers actually talk about their problems. Not in polished marketing language, but in their own words. That is precisely where the value lies.
In the second step, recurring doubts, questions and barriers to purchase are identified. Typical objections might include:
These objections are not just obstacles to making a sale. They also provide valuable insights for content. After all, every recurring objection can be turned into an article, a landing page, an FAQ, a comparison or sales enablement content.
If many customers share the same concern, this is a sign that this issue needs to be addressed in a way that is clear, understandable and convincing.
The third step involves looking beyond the surface of what is being said. When a customer says, ‘We need more visibility,’ that is often not the real problem. What may lie behind it is:
The CORE method therefore asks not only: ‘What does the customer say?’, but also: ‘What search intent, what purchasing motive and what decision-making situation lie behind this?’
This step is particularly crucial for ChatGPT’s visibility. This is because, with AI search systems, companies have very little direct data on the questions users ask and how those questions are phrased.
There is no traditional Search Console for ChatGPT that provides comprehensive data on impressions, clicks and search queries. Companies therefore need to make greater use of the data they already possess. As a result, customer language is becoming one of the most important sources for modern search research.
In the final step, the insights gained are translated into specific SEO and GEO measures. The client’s input is used to develop:
The key point is this: it’s not about producing more content. It’s about developing content that answers genuine questions, breaks down barriers to purchase and builds trust. This is how high-quality research translates into a concrete visibility strategy.
Off-page authority sounds technical, but at its core it’s simple:
It’s all about what other people say about you online.
In order to define the concept of Off-page authority a comparison may help:
Imagine you’re choosing between two kebab stalls next to each other. In front of one of them, there are ten strangers and three close acquaintances, whereas the other merely has a single unknown person in front of it.
The sheer number of sources and the trust your friends place in them indicate that Option 1 is the better choice. This is exactly how search engines, such as Google, assess things: it is not just the quantity of sources (the 10 people) that counts, but also their quality and trustworthiness (the 3 friends), in order to form a consistent overall picture.
Traditional off-page SEO revolved almost exclusively around backlinks. A backlink is a link from another website to yours. For decades, search engines such as Google have regarded these links as a vote of confidence: the more credible sites that link to you, the more relevant you are.
That remains the cornerstone. Backlinks ensure that your site is indexed by Google and Bing, ranks well and is therefore included in the selection that ChatGPT searches through. Without them, nothing happens at all.
Mentions without links have become vastly more important. In the past, a search engine could do very little with text that mentioned your name but did not include a link.
ChatGPT can. It reads this text, understands the context and interprets it as a signal.
A mention on an obscure blog carries a different weight to an article in Forbes. A review on a niche platform has a different impact to a listing on G2.
ChatGPT weights sources according to their authority, and this authority is directly reflected in the Google and Bing rankings of these platforms. Content that ranks highly on Google or Bing is read, processed and cited more frequently by ChatGPT.
There is a clear hierarchy here: the higher a platform’s authority on the web, the more weight a mention there carries for your AI visibility.
This means you shouldn’t just collect mentions at random, but should focus on maintaining a presence on those platforms that carry the most authority in your industry.
ChatGPT does not work like an algorithm that counts links. It behaves more like a meticulous researcher: it reads many independent sources, compares them and draws an overall picture from them.
Anyone who is mentioned in trade journals, appears as an expert on podcasts, consistently receives good reviews on review platforms, and is quoted in industry media comes across as credible.
The sheer volume of mentions across various platforms reaches a consensus, which strengthens the credibility of your brand as a whole.
These platforms are regarded as particularly trustworthy because the reviews are independent and verified.
According to an analysis of over 680 million ChatGPT citations, G2 ranks among the most frequently cited sources of all, on a par with Forbes. Anyone who G2 rates highly, is cited by ChatGPT significantly more often.
When someone asks ChatGPT which service providers or products are recommended in a particular region (e.g. ‘Which agencies are recommended in Vienna?’), the AI draws on external ‘best of’ lists.
These lists, which are published on authoritative third-party websites such as specialist portals, constitute a crucial consensus. As soon as several independent, high-ranking sources mention a brand, this confirms its relevance and credibility, prompting ChatGPT to cite that brand as a preferred choice in response to recommendation queries.
When someone asks ChatGPT which service providers or products are recommended in a particular region (e.g. ‘Which agencies are recommended in Vienna?’), the AI draws on external ‘best of’ lists.
These lists, which are published on authoritative third-party websites such as specialist portals, constitute a crucial consensus. As soon as several independent, high-ranking sources mention a brand, this confirms its relevance and credibility, prompting ChatGPT to cite that brand as a preferred choice in response to recommendation queries.
Wikipedia, Reddit, Forbes, G2, TechRadar and Business Insider are among the most frequently cited sources in ChatGPT. And these are also platforms that have been among the strongest domains in Google and Bing rankings for years.
ChatGPT searches via Google and Bing. It then ranks pages by relevance and loads those that are technically sound, fast and indexed.
If you rank highly on Google and Bing, you increase your chances of being shortlisted. If you’re shortlisted, ChatGPT will read your work. If your work is read, it will be quoted. The circle is complete.
Not every platform is equally important for every sector. The data reveals clear patterns regarding which sources ChatGPT tends to cite, depending on the topic and sector. There is no point in investing energy in platforms that play hardly any role in your sector.
Identify the two or three platforms that perform best on Google and Bing in your industry, and systematically build up your online presence on those platforms. This is more effective than being half-hearted across all platforms at once.
Imagine someone has ten seconds to skim through your page. What do they see? If the answer is a long block of text with no clear structure, you’ve got a problem – not just for visitors, but for ChatGPT too.
AI tools do not read your website word for word. They scan for structural elements that help them understand what a page is about and which sections are relevant.
H1, H2, H3 headings: The heading structure acts as the table of contents for your page. An H1 tells ChatGPT what the page is about as a whole. H2 and H3 headings organise the subtopics. A page without a clear heading structure is difficult for ChatGPT to categorise, and content that is difficult to categorise is rarely cited.
Short paragraphs: Long blocks of text are processed less effectively than short, concise paragraphs. Two to four sentences per paragraph are ideal, both for readers and for AI systems.
Lists and numbered lists: Structured lists provide ChatGPT with clear, distinct units of information. Step-by-step guides, pros and cons, or recommendations work much better as lists than as continuous text.
The tables: ChatGPT reliably recognises comparative information, price overviews or structured data presented in tabular form, and often quotes them directly.
Question-based structure & FAQs: This is an overarching content strategy aimed at making content highly citable. ChatGPT answers millions of questions every day. If you use specific questions as headings (H2, H3) and provide the direct answer (as an ‘answer capsule’) straight away in the first sentence or paragraph, these passages are easier to cite.
The traditional FAQ section is just one of several effective ways of applying this principle.
You can find out more about the topic of ‘scannability’ in my guest article at designlassen.
ChatGPT favours content that is based on verifiable knowledge and conveys credibility.
There are two measures you can take right now that will have a particularly significant impact:
1. Quoting experts:
If you quote experts, studies or well-known figures in your industry, your content will appear more credible, both to readers and to AI systems.
For ChatGPT, a quotation with a source reference is a sign of quality; it shows that your content is based on verifiable knowledge and has not been made up out of thin air.
2. Publishing your own data and statistics:
Internal data, in-house studies or analyses are particularly valuable to ChatGPT because they are unique. If, as a company, you publish your own figures, for example:
„In our analysis of 500 client projects, we found that …„
This data is picked up, linked to and cited by other websites. This also boosts your off-page authority, as other sites link back to your original source.
For a long time, accessibility was seen as merely a ‘nice-to-have’. Today, it is a key factor in your AI visibility. As AI bots parse websites in a similar way to screen readers for people with disabilities, an accessible structure is essential for them to understand the content correctly.
Anyone who invests in accessibility today is, at the same time, optimising their content’s machine-readability for ChatGPT and similar tools.
Clean, semantically correct HTML helps AI systems to understand which content is important and which is not.
Headings that are marked as headings, lists that are formatted as lists, and paragraphs that are structured as paragraphs make your page much easier for ChatGPT to read.
AI crawlers do not ‘see’ videos in the same way as a human user, as they do not actively play back files to understand their content. Without textual support, a video remains a black box to the bot.
To ensure that your video content can be crawled, indexed and cited in AI responses, a transcript or a detailed summary directly on the page is essential.
This is the only way to convert spoken information into machine-readable data.
It depends on the type of question being asked.
When it comes to time-independent questions – such as fundamentals, concepts, historical facts or general specialist knowledge – ChatGPT draws directly on the knowledge it has been trained on. It doesn’t matter whether your article is from 2021 or 2025.
AI systems have been shown to favour more recent content for time-sensitive search queries. Analyses of over 100,000 ChatGPT search queries show that ChatGPT automatically adds the current year to 28.1 per cent of all search queries, even if the user has not explicitly mentioned it. The difference is striking: 2025 appears 184 times more frequently than 2024 in the generated search queries. Quelle: Qwairy
If someone asks ChatGPT:
“Which SEO agency would you recommend in Vienna?”,
ChatGPT generates search queries in the background (Query Fan Out), such as ‘best SEO agency in Vienna’ 2026 or SEO agency in Vienna reviews 2026.
When it comes to comparisons, recommendations, price lists, software tools, rankings or legal regulations, it is essential to prominently display the current year in the title, the H1 heading and the introductory paragraph.
To sum up:
Although the timeliness of content is not essential for every type of content, it plays a crucial role when it comes to time-sensitive topics.
Once the optimisation of all levels has been completed, starting with the technical framework on the external authority right up to strategic content architecture, the crucial phase follows: the success assessment.
But how can we determine, in concrete terms, whether these steps have actually increased brand visibility and led to greater visibility within ChatGPT?
There are now countless tracking solutions available that are specifically designed to enhance visibility in AI systems such as
to monitor and analyse ChatGPT.
Please note: None of the tools is a direct recommendation. We use Rankability and are very happy with it. That doesn’t mean it’s the best tool.
Google Analytics 4 Tracking
In GA4, ChatGPT traffic appears under:
Indexing in traditional search engines is the primary prerequisite for visibility in ChatGPT Search.
As the AI primarily tracks the index of Bing (and, to a lesser extent, Google results) as data sources, the basic rule is: If you don’t rank in traditional search engines, you won’t be found by AI.
The shift towards generative AI systems such as ChatGPT represents the biggest change in search. As more than half of B2B purchasing decisions begin with an AI query and brands are actively cited or mentioned, this visibility is essential.
The foundation: traditional SEO
The four pillars of SEO (on-page, off-page, technical SEO and EEAT) remain the essential foundation. Anyone who does not rank on Google or Bing will not be found by the AI, as ChatGPT Search primarily uses these indexes.
The three key factors for AI visibility:
Measuring success:
Measure visibility using dedicated Tracking-Tools (e.g. rankability) based on metrics such as Citation-Coverage and Share of Voice. Monitoring traditional Google and Bing rankings serves as the primary indicator of stability
We are a SEO agency in Vienna , which helps companies to rank better in search engines such as ChatGPT and Google. Our goal is to build organic traffic that not only brings visitors, but also delivers measurable business results.
With tried-and-tested SEO strategies we strengthen your brand’s authority in a sustainable way and lay the foundations for long-term success.
P.S. If you’re ready to invest in strategic SEO that delivers real business results:
We still have 4 places available for new clients until December 2026.
Managing Director of Mogaji Digital Communications OG since 2021.
Digital Marketing Expert since 2019
