ChatGPT SEO: get named when someone asks ChatGPT who to call.
ChatGPT's web answers lean on Bing's index and on pages that state facts plainly. Most businesses are invisible to it for one boring reason: Bing never indexed them.
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Key takeaways
- Why does Bing matter for ChatGPT? ChatGPT's browsing answers draw heavily on Bing's index. If Bing has not indexed your pages, ChatGPT has nothing of yours to read, however well you rank in Google.
- What does ChatGPT prefer? Pages that answer a question directly, comparison and list pages, and sources it can quote in a sentence without adding caveats of its own.
- How do you check? A site query in Bing shows how many of your pages are indexed, and we run your twenty buyer questions through ChatGPT each month and log what it said.
- What does it cost to fix the indexing? Bing Webmaster verification, sitemap submission and an IndexNow key are $149 as a one-time project, or included in every build and upgrade.
How does ChatGPT choose who to cite?
- It reads Bing's index first, so pages Bing has never seen are effectively invisible to it.
- It favours pages that answer the question in the opening lines rather than building to a conclusion.
- It leans on comparison pages, list pages and forum threads when a question asks it to choose between options.
- It prefers explicit facts it can restate safely: named business, named place, stated price, stated credential.
- It changes. Which sources it reaches for has shifted repeatedly, which is why we track the answers monthly rather than assuming last quarter's pattern holds.
What do we do about it?
- Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap and install an IndexNow key so changes are pushed rather than waited on.
- Fix the pages Bing has skipped, which is usually a robots, canonical or thin-content problem rather than a mystery.
- Write answer-first blocks under question headings so there is something clean to quote.
- Build the comparison and list pages that ChatGPT reaches for on choice questions, with real criteria rather than a table of ticks.
- Run your twenty buyer questions through ChatGPT every month and report whether you were named and who was cited instead.
ChatGPT questions
Its browsing answers lean on Bing. That is why a business can rank well in Google and still never appear in a ChatGPT answer: the two indexes are separate, and only one of them is being read.
Search Bing for site: followed by your domain. The count it returns is roughly what ChatGPT has available. Most owners are surprised by how much lower it is than Google's count.
No. There is no submission form and no paid placement. The route in is being indexed, being clear, and being the kind of source it already reaches for.
It will also remove you from the answers. That is a real trade-off with no universal right answer, and it depends on whether your business is better served by traffic or by protecting the text. We will talk it through rather than decide it for you.
It has to be crawled by Bing, indexed, and then reached for. In practice that is weeks rather than days, which is why IndexNow pushes matter and why we report movement monthly.