ChatGPT

What does ChatGPT say when you ask how to get cited?

It sends you to OpenAI. The answer above is ChatGPT on "how to get my docs cited by ChatGPT", asked on 3 October 2026 and stored verbatim. The advice is sound: publish a public HTML page at a stable URL, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, treat GPTBot as a separate training control, and do not expect crawlable to mean cited. Every source it attached was OpenAI's own help centre or developer documentation.

That is ChatGPT in miniature. It searched, read pages, wrote its own sentences from them and linked what it used. Whether you appear depends on whether your page is among the ones it reads for that question. Across the 24 answers both engines gave to this question in the 30 days to 4 October 2026, read over the Attensira MCP, no brand was named more than once.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant. Under it is a large language model that writes answers in two ways:

• From memory. What the model learned in training, frozen at its knowledge cutoff. No links, no fresh facts.
• From search. ChatGPT runs web searches, fetches pages, reads passages and writes from them, attaching the pages as sources. This is grounding, and it is the only way anything new about you reaches an answer.

Whether a given answer searches is ChatGPT's choice, and it can vary from one run of the same question to the next.

How does ChatGPT find and read your pages?

Through OpenAI's crawlers, each with a different job, documented by OpenAI:

• OAI-SearchBot

  Job

  builds the index ChatGPT search draws on

  Controls

  block it and you will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though navigational links can still appear

• ChatGPT-User

  Job

  opens a page because a person asked

  Controls

  robots.txt rules may not apply, because a user started it

• GPTBot

  Job

  collects content that may train future models

  Controls

  blocking it is a training decision, not a visibility one

• OAI-AdsBot

  Job

  checks pages submitted as ads

  Controls

  only visits ad landing pages

OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to reach OAI-SearchBot. Which of these agents fetch your pages, and how often, is in your server logs or in Attensira's crawler logs.

Does ChatGPT name brands it cites?

Not reliably. Across the 2,349 ChatGPT answers to the 61 questions we track for attensira.com in the 30 days to 4 October 2026, read over the Attensira MCP, ChatGPT named us in 99 (4.2%) and linked our site in 154 (6.6%). Every answer that named us, on either engine, came from one of the 3 questions that contain our name.

Linked more often than named: ChatGPT uses pages as evidence and writes its own sentences, so a brand can supply the facts without getting the credit. See AI brand mentions and source citation.

What are the common misreadings of ChatGPT answers?

"ChatGPT said X about us, so ChatGPT thinks X." One answer is one sample. Each run can search again, read different pages and write different sentences, so read many answers before concluding anything.

"Blocking GPTBot hides us from ChatGPT." It refuses training. Search visibility is OAI-SearchBot.

"A link means the sentence is right." Retrieval and writing fail separately. Check the sentence against the page.

"ChatGPT and Perplexity are interchangeable." On "how to get my docs cited by ChatGPT", every ChatGPT citation in 30 days went to OpenAI domains. On Perplexity the most influential source held 13 of 113 citations, and the next five were independent sites with 5 to 8 each. Read each engine on its own. See AI search.

How does Attensira work with ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is one of the engines Attensira reads every day. It asks your buyers' questions, stores ChatGPT's answers verbatim, records whether you are named and linked with the sample size, and lists the sources that decided each answer; citation tracking shows that view. The crew then fixes your pages and earns placements on those sources, shipping each change after your approval. ChatGPT visibility covers what is read on ChatGPT, and ChatGPT optimization covers the levers.