ChatGPT Search (SearchGPT) Optimization: The Guide

Key Takeaways:

ChatGPT Search is based on Bing: Rankings on Bing and visibility in ChatGPT are correlated but not identical.
3.8 billion visits per month – and growing: First companies are reporting increasing referral traffic from chatbots.
Compact, citable content counts: Clear answers, proprietary data, and strong readability increase the chance of being mentioned in ChatGPT.
Visibility also emerges beyond your own website: Aggregators, comparison portals, and trade media are strategically important levers.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to optimize your digital brand for ChatGPT Search (formerly SearchGPT) to appear more frequently in relevant answers.

Don’t worry – almost the same rules also apply to similar platforms like Perplexity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Significance How It Works Optimization

Why ChatGPT Search Becomes Important for Digital Brands

Although the traffic share is currently still low, ChatGPT Search shows exciting developments:

chatgpt.com has 3.8 billion monthly visits. (Source)

chatgpt.com is sending increasingly more clicks to the open web. (Source)

Is this channel already indispensable with these numbers?

No, we’re still at the very beginning.

If your SEO foundation is weak, continue focusing on that – it’s the foundation.

However, if you’re already well-positioned, it’s worth:

Taking a look at developments in your industry in the USA and
Conducting initial potential analyses including a status quo of your visibility in chatbots and AI search engines

If you’re wondering why some say “ChatGPT Search” and others say “SearchGPT,” here’s an explanation: “SearchGPT” was the project’s name when it was still a prototype. Since the release of the actual project, it’s called “ChatGPT Search.”

How Does ChatGPT Search (SearchGPT) Work?

Examples of ChatGPT Search Results

In the B2B sector, research can be made more efficient through curated AI answers.

In the B2C sector, the customer journey could be significantly compressed through generative AI combined with a search index.

Find more examples in this video:

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The First Study and Our Experiments

We’ve been working very intensively on this topic for our clients since mid-2023 and have already conducted many experiments to find out which strategies and measures deliver the greatest success.

Additionally, there’s this scientific paper on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Unfortunately, it’s limited to on-page optimization of websites.

Generative engines mainly consist of a collection of generative models and a search engine that finds relevant documents. They take a user’s query as input and generate a final answer in multiple steps, based on the found sources and containing direct source citations.

Bing Is ChatGPT’s Search Index

ChatGPT Search uses Bing as the underlying search engine.

Good rankings on Bing accordingly often correlate with mentions in ChatGPT (Source: Seer Interactive). Nevertheless, the rankings are not identical.

Our recommendation:

Check your Bing Webmaster Tools and look at your website’s performance. Yes, the impressions and clicks are significantly lower. Nevertheless, Bing is gaining importance again through this development.

Allow the OpenAI SearchBot

A dedicated bot called “OAI-SearchBot” crawls websites to verify and adjust results. You should therefore not block this from your website if you want your website to appear in ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search answers.

People Use ChatGPT Differently Than Traditional Search Engines

Important: People use ChatGPT differently than traditional search engines. They ask significantly more complex and specific questions:

Example:

Instead of “best laptops 2025,” they ask:

“Which laptops under $1,500 are best suited for video editing and gaming and have long battery life?”

ChatGPT can even deliver answers composed from multiple sources.

The Results Are Extremely Dynamic

Compared to the relatively static results in Google and Bing search, you might enter the same question twice in ChatGPT and receive a completely different answer.

Accordingly, it’s about increasing the probability of appearing in answers—nothing more.

OpenAI (Content) Partnerships

OpenAI cooperates with selected media partners. You can find a list here. Content from these partners may be preferentially treated. For this reason, mentions of your brand with these media partners are particularly valuable.

How Does Your Company Appear More Often in ChatGPT Answers?

How do you ensure that your company, products, and services appear in the answers? How do you ensure that your content is cited?

Measures on Your Website

Deliver Compact Brief Answers to Common Questions

First, we analyze demand. Specifically, we determine which questions, objections, and research steps your target audience goes through.

For a product like container homes, this could look as follows:

Learn how such demand analysis works in detail in this video:

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In the end, we should have an overview of:

Which answers we want to be mentioned in
Which sources are currently being cited
Which competitors appear
Which formats work

Now we know exactly which answers on our website need to be optimized. Content optimization for generative engines is similar to Featured Snippet optimization, just on steroids.

How to Optimize Answers on Your Website for ChatGPT Search:

Basics:

Look at what’s currently being delivered as an answer and learn from it regarding format, relevance, and length
Use simple, clear, and information-rich language (think about what works in Featured Snippets on Google)

Class leader:

Provide unique information or data not found in existing training data or on other websites (Information Gain)
Supplement your content with existing statistics and quantitative data
Add source citations from authoritative sources

Ensure High Readability of Your Content

This was actually already included above, but because it’s so important, again in detail:

Use tools like Wortliga or ChatGPT itself to improve the readability and information density of your content.

Reader-friendly texts are crucial for visibility in generative engines.

Publish Proprietary Data and Statistics

Now it gets complex – and thus the best way to establish a competitive advantage.

As our experiments and the paper on Generative Engine Optimization show, generative engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity love numbers, statistics, and unique information.

Many companies sit on a treasure trove of exciting data about their industry. Use this data to become an original source.

If you don’t have the necessary data, there’s always the option to conduct surveys or collaborate with a market research institute.

Measures Beyond Your Website

Aggressively Pursue Mentions on Influential Aggregators

In the ChatGPT Search analysis in the first step, you should have noticed that there are aggregators (typically best-of lists or database websites) that are repeatedly cited.

Secure mentions of your brand on these aggregators.

Here are two examples:

Example from B2C:

Example from B2B SaaS:

Additionally, you can experiment with your own comparison pages, as we did for SEO-blogs, for example:

Generate Publications in Influential and Relevant Media

Last but not least. Large magazines, influencers, and media are often cited in AI answers.

Therefore, place expert contributions and studies in trade magazines and with influencers who receive above-average visibility in AI answers in your industry. Online-PR increases the chance of your brand appearing in ChatGPT answers.

An example from us:

And with that, we’ve reached the end.

If you also want to understand the theory behind it, I recommend this article about Retrieval Augmented Generation and the basic functioning of generative engines.