For years, businesses, mine included, have been optimising their websites for search engines, particularly Google. However, search habits are changing. People are increasingly asking AI bots, like ChatGPT, questions they might have once typed into a traditional search engine. These questions can be on any topic, from finding a local service to researching a product or getting recommendations. So, how can you help ChatGPT find your website and why is it important?
Well, firstly, don't panic. The good news is that you don't need to abandon everything you know about SEO and start again to help ChatGPT find your website. You see, many of the things that make a website useful to Google and other search engines also make it easier for AI-powered search tools to understand.
However, there are some important differences and a few things worth checking if you want your website to have the best chance of being discovered.
Why Is It Important to Help ChatGPT Find Your Website?
Firstly, you might be wondering if any of this really matters to you and your business. After all, if your website already gets visitors from Google, social media, and other sources, why worry about ChatGPT too?
Well, AI searches, including ChatGPT, are being used more frequently. Many people may simply ask a device a question rather than even typing it. By optimising your website for these potential customers, you are creating another opportunity for your website to be found.
If ChatGPT uses one of your pages as a source, someone reading the answer can follow the link through to your website. This is known as AI referral traffic. For a business, that's potentially valuable new traffic coming from a source that simply wasn't part of most marketing strategies a few years ago.
This is not just about getting more clicks either. If someone is asking ChatGPT a detailed question, then they are looking for something specific. For example, imagine someone asking ChatGPT "How long does it take web designers to build a website?" If ChatGPT uses an article from Wonderful World of Websites to help answer that question and provides a link to it, then Lisa and her team have now been introduced to a potential new customer who was actively researching their service.
The value isn't necessarily the quantity of traffic; it's the opportunity to get your business and expertise in front of people at the very moment they're looking for information. That's why it is important to help ChatGPT find your website.
Of course, this does not replace Google searches; it's an additional route for potential customers to find you.
Can ChatGPT Actually Find Websites?
Absolutely, yes.
ChatGPT will search the live web when answering questions and can provide links and citations to the sources it uses. OpenAI says that any public website can potentially appear in ChatGPT searches. That doesn't mean every website will appear, of course.
In the same way that reaching the first page of Google for your keywords isn't guaranteed, there isn't a magic wand you can wave (Lisa will be disappointed by this!) to make ChatGPT recommend your business. OpenAI says its search results are ranked using a number of factors designed to identify relevant and reliable information.
So, what can you do to help ChatGPT find your website? How can you make it accessible, easy to understand, and genuinely useful?
Let's take a look:
1. Help ChatGPT Find Your Website by Making Sure It Can Be Crawled
First and foremost, before worrying about clever content strategies, start with something more basic. Can OpenAI access your website? OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot for its search features. You can control whether this crawler is allowed to access your site through the site's robots.txt file.
If OAI-SearchBot is blocked, your content may not be available for inclusion in ChatGPT's search summaries and snippets. Therefore, it is best to check. If you are not sure how to do this, ask Lisa and her team at Wonderful World of Websites to help, or your SEO specialist to check.
It is also worth me pointing out here that OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot are not the same thing. OAI-SearchBot relates to appearing in ChatGPT searches, while GPTBot relates to content that may be used to improve OpenAI's generative AI models. OAI-SearchBot is the one we are interested in. It helps OpenAI discover website content that could potentially be shown and linked to ChatGPT search results. Therefore to help ChatGPT find your website don't block this crawler.
You can control the two separately. So, for example, you can allow OAI-SearchBot to access your website because you want to have the opportunity to appear in ChatGPT search results, but then you can block GPTBot if you don't want your website's content used for model training.

