What is SEO for ChatGPT?

SEO for ChatGPT means publishing clear, sourced answer pages that ChatGPT search can retrieve and quote. ChatGPT has two modes of answering: memory from training and live retrieval. Broad questions lean on memory. Specific, local, and timely questions lean on retrieval. Your pages target the retrieval mode.

How ChatGPT chooses what to cite

When ChatGPT uses live retrieval, it searches for pages that match the prompt, then compresses the results into an answer. It prefers pages that answer the question directly, show authorship, and look maintained. It does not prefer pages that bury the answer under context or keyword stuffing.

What to publish

• — One page per real customer question.
• — The question as the H1.
• — A direct answer in the first 80 words.
• — Sources named in the text.
• — Four FAQs with FAQPage JSON-LD.
• — Visible author and updated date.

What ChatGPT is not looking for

• — Keyword density.
• — Long introductions about industry trends.
• — Pages that answer every possible question at once.
• — Badges claiming ChatGPT recommends you.

How this gets measured

Your top customer questions are run in ChatGPT with browsing enabled before any pages are built, so there is a record of who is cited and whether you are named. Answer pages go live for the questions where you are absent, and the same questions run again after 30 days. That before-and-after snapshot is the deliverable.

Who this is for

Small service businesses with specific customer questions: prices, hours, policies, and local constraints. National brands already own broad category answers, so do not compete there.

Sources

ChatGPT search behavior is documented by OpenAI. Crawler guidance is in OpenAI's crawler documentation and Google Search Central for general indexing.