Why it matters to a buyer
Because ChatGPT search retrieves from a source combining OpenAI's own index with licensed search results, it does not behave exactly like optimising for Google, and it does not behave exactly like other AI assistants either, since Perplexity and Claude weigh sources differently again. For a buyer, this means a single "AI SEO" plan copied across every assistant is unlikely to perform the same in each one, and ChatGPT specifically requires its own crawler access and its own set of tracked prompts.
How it is measured or applied
Being retrievable requires allowing OpenAI's crawlers, OAI-SearchBot for search indexing and ChatGPT-User for live, user-triggered fetches, in robots.txt and at any firewall or CDN bot-blocking layer. Content is written to answer specific buyer questions directly and early, since retrieval favours tight, extractable passages over long, unstructured pages. It is measured by running a fixed list of buyer prompts inside ChatGPT with search enabled on a regular schedule and recording which pages and brands are cited, since OpenAI does not publish citation analytics the way Search Console does for Google.
Sources
- ChatGPT Search, Wikipedia
