Guide
Can you rank in ChatGPT and AI search? What helps and what is hype
By Studio Swing
You cannot buy or force a place in an AI answer, and nobody outside the companies that run these tools can promise one. What you can do is make your pages eligible and worth citing. For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google's own documentation says "the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features," that there are "no additional requirements" to appear in them, and that no special optimizations are necessary. OpenAI documents a crawler control for ChatGPT's search features, and a separate one for model training. Beyond that, the honest answer includes a list of things nobody has shown yet, and this guide ends with that list.
On this page
An email about "AI visibility"
Say you run a language school. A colleague tells you that students now ask AI tools for course recommendations. You try it: you ask a chatbot for language schools in your city and yours is not named. A week later an email arrives from a provider selling an "AI visibility package" with a monthly fee, promising that your school will be "recommended by ChatGPT."
You have three questions. Is something really different about AI search? Is there anything you should do that you were not already doing? And can the provider deliver what the email says?
The short answers, from the sources that exist: the format is different, the foundations are largely the same, and no provider can honestly promise a recommendation. The rest of this guide shows where each answer comes from.
What is actually different
The shape of results has changed. Google describes two features. AI Overviews "help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links." AI Mode is "particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed." Both may use what Google calls a "query fan-out" technique: "issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources" to build one answer, and then showing links to supporting pages. Google adds that AI Overviews "are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don't trigger."
Google's May 2025 post for site owners adds that people are asking "longer and more specific questions," with follow-up questions. A page that answers one real question in depth is better placed than a page that tries to catch a keyword.
So the places your page can appear have changed, and people may be asking different, more detailed questions. That does not mean the requirements for being a useful, findable page have changed.
What Google says to do, and not do
Google's page on AI features is explicit, so the useful part is to read it as a short list.
To be eligible. A page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet," and Google says there are "no additional technical requirements."
The fundamentals it names:
- Allow crawling in robots.txt, and also in any CDN or hosting layer that sits in front of your site.
- Make content findable through internal links.
- Provide a great page experience.
- Make sure important content is available as text.
- Support the text with high-quality images and video where relevant.
- Make sure structured data matches the visible text.
- Keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date.
What it says you do not need. "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."
What it will not promise. "Just because a page meets all requirements, best practices, and complies with the policies, doesn't mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content."
The May 2025 post puts the substance in one line: focus on "unique, non-commodity content that visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying." That is the same advice as before the AI features existed. Our guide to what SEO does for a business website covers the foundations in plain terms.
What OpenAI documents for ChatGPT
OpenAI's crawler documentation is shorter, and it is about access, not about choosing sources. It lists separate robots.txt controls:
OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." OpenAI says sites that opt out "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links," and recommends allowing it in robots.txt, and allowing requests from its published IP ranges, to help ensure a site appears.
GPTBot is used to crawl content that may be used in training OpenAI's models. OpenAI says disallowing it "indicates a site's content should not be used in training generative AI foundation models."
ChatGPT-User is used for certain actions when a person asks ChatGPT a question. OpenAI says it is not used to decide whether content may appear in search.
OpenAI says each setting works separately from the others: a site can allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in search results while disallowing GPTBot. It also says that it can take "~24 hours" after a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust.
What that page does not do, in the version we read, is explain how ChatGPT chooses which sources to name for a given question. It tells you how to be reachable, not how to be selected. We have not found an official source that says more, and we are wary of any provider who claims to know.
Three decisions that are yours
1. Is anything blocking the crawlers?
The first check is the same as for classic search. A robots.txt rule, a firewall, a login wall or a hosting setting that blocks crawlers keeps your pages out of both. If your site was built with a hidden staging copy, check that its settings did not carry over. Our guide on why a website is not showing up on Google lists the checks in order.
2. Do you want your content used for training?
This is a business choice, separate from being found. Google says its Google-Extended token governs whether content may be used for training future Gemini models and for grounding in some Google products, and that Google-Extended "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search." OpenAI's GPTBot is a separate control from its search crawler in the same way. We do not recommend one answer, because it depends on how you feel about your content being used. We do recommend that whoever manages your site knows which choice was made.
3. How much of your page may be shown?
Google says that to limit what is shown from your pages in Search, you can use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex.
Its May 2025 post notes that "more restrictive permissions will limit how your content is featured in our AI experiences."
Restricting these also limits how you appear in ordinary results, so it is a trade-off, not a free setting.
What is not yet known
An honest guide has to include this list. Each item is something we did not find established by a source we could read.
How an AI tool chooses which pages to name. Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews "may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary." OpenAI's crawler page does not describe selection. Anyone who sells a method of being chosen is relying on observation and guesswork.
Whether a given tactic raises how often you are named. Reports from tools that count "AI mentions" are estimates from samples of questions, and we have not seen a source that shows these counts predict customers.
How much traffic AI answers send to a given kind of business. Google says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are "higher quality," in the sense that people spend more time on the site, and that people are visiting a greater diversity of websites. That is Google's own statement about its product. The documentation we read does not give volumes, and it does not say what happens to a particular site.
How your visits are separated from other search traffic in your reports. Google says sites appearing in AI features are included in overall search traffic and reported in Search Console's Performance report. The documentation we read does not describe a separate view of AI Overviews alone. Our guide to Google Analytics and Search Console explains how to read the reports you do have.
How these tools will change. Google's own post says that the one predictable thing in Search is that it keeps evolving.
If you read a confident claim about any of these, ask for the source.
A hype detector
Google's guidance on hiring an SEO already anticipates this market. It suggests asking a provider who sells AI optimization, sometimes called "AEO" or "GEO", whether their advice is "aligned with Google Search's official guidance on optimizing for generative AI features." It also notes that Google does not evaluate or endorse third-party SEO tools, and warns against tools that claim to be "acceptable" or "approved" by Google Search.
Treat these as warning signs:
- A guarantee that you will be named, recommended or cited. Nobody outside the platforms can promise it.
- A required new file, markup or schema type "for AI". Google says none is needed for its features.
- A package whose deliverables are the ordinary SEO fundamentals under a new name, at a new price. The fundamentals are worth doing, and you may already be doing them.
- A report that counts "AI visibility" without saying what questions were sampled, how often, and how the sample was chosen.
Our guide to how to choose an SEO company covers the wider list of questions to ask.
What this guide will not do
It will not tell you that AI search does not matter. Google's own documentation treats it as part of Search, and OpenAI documents a search product. It will not claim the foundations are all that will ever matter, because the tools are changing. And it will not give you a trick, because we have not found one that a primary source supports.
A checklist you can use without us
- Check that robots.txt, your hosting and any firewall allow search crawlers, including Googlebot and OAI-SearchBot, to reach the pages you want found.
- Make sure each important page is indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
- Make sure important information is in the page's text, not only inside images or scripts.
- Write each page to answer one real question in depth, with details a competitor's page lacks.
- Keep structured data, if you use it, matching what the page shows. Do not add any "AI markup".
- Keep your Business Profile and any Merchant Center information up to date, if they apply to you.
- Decide, deliberately, whether to allow training crawlers such as GPTBot, and whether to restrict snippets. Record the decision.
- Judge results by enquiries and sales, not by whether a chatbot names you today.
- Ask any provider for the source behind every claim about how AI tools choose sources.
Where to go next
If you would like to see how we plan search into a site before design, our AI answers service explains what you receive. To help you show up in AI answers like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews (GEO), we keep your pages clear and easy to quote, on the same foundations as search. No one can promise a place in them, and we do not promise one. See also our SEO service.
Next, read what SEO actually does for a business website. When you want to talk about your own site, you can discuss your project with us. No technical brief is needed to start. More guides are in the Learn library.
Sources
1. Google Search Central, AI features and your website: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
2. Google Search Central Blog, Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search (21 May 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/succeeding-in-ai-search
3. Google Search Central, Google's common crawlers (Google-Extended): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
4. Google Search Central, Do you need an SEO?: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/do-i-need-seo
5. Google Search Central, Google Search technical requirements: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/technical
6. Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/using-gen-ai-content
7. Search Console Help, What are impressions, position, and clicks? (how AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828
8. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User): https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots