ChatGPT
ChatGPT is OpenAI's conversational AI assistant that, with search enabled, answers questions by retrieving and citing live web sources, making it one of the most important answer engines for AEO.
ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant — and, with search turned on, a major answer engine. It answers in natural language, and when it uses search it retrieves live web pages and cites them as sources, so being one of those cited pages is a direct AEO goal.
Two different crawlers matter here. GPTBot gathers training data, while OAI-SearchBot is the one that fetches pages for ChatGPT's live search citations — the bot you most want to allow. Once you're crawlable, winning a ChatGPT citation comes down to being the most extractable answer and carrying the authority that makes you a safe source to name.
Example. Ask ChatGPT "what's the best note-taking app for students" with search on, and it returns a recommendation with linked sources beneath. AEO is the work of making your page one of those linked sources, consistently, for your target questions.
Relevant pillars
Related terms
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is a search system that responds to a question with a direct, synthesized answer instead of a list of links, usually citing the sources it drew from.
- OAI-SearchBotOAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT's search feature, making it the user-agent to allow if you want to be cited in ChatGPT's answers.
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that gathers content to train its models, identified by the GPTBot user-agent and controllable through your robots.txt file.