800 million weekly users. More than 2 billion queries processed daily. ChatGPT is no longer a technological curiosity — it's a discovery channel that escapes your traditional SEO metrics.
When a prospect asks ChatGPT "which CRM do you recommend for a startup?", your company is either cited or it doesn't exist. No page 2 to scroll through. No result in position 8 that still has a chance of being seen. The AI generates an answer, cites a few sources, and the user moves on.
The problem: 80% of results displayed by ChatGPT don't appear in classic Google results. It's a parallel ecosystem, with its own rules. This guide details the real mechanisms that determine whether your brand will be mentioned — and the concrete actions to influence these mechanisms.
ChatGPT doesn't work like Google
The first instinct would be to think that SEO rules apply. That's partially true, but the reality is more nuanced.
ChatGPT relies on two distinct sources of information. The first: its training data, a massive corpus of texts on which the model was trained. This knowledge is "frozen" at a cutoff date. When you ask a general question without activating web search, ChatGPT draws from this pool. The issue: it generally doesn't cite its sources in this mode, and you have no control over what's already there.
The second source is real-time search via Bing. ChatGPT can query the web, retrieve page excerpts, and use them to construct its response. This is called RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In this mode, it cites its sources. And it's precisely on this mechanism that you can act.
An analysis by Seer Interactive covering more than 500 citations revealed that 87% of sources cited by ChatGPT in search mode correspond to Bing's top 10 results. The correlation is direct: if you're not well-positioned on Bing, your chances of being cited by ChatGPT collapse.
How ChatGPT selects its sources
Bing: the mandatory path everyone neglects
Most SEO strategies focus on Google. That's logical — Google represents over 90% of the search market in France. The problem: ChatGPT is connected to Bing, not Google.
This reality changes everything. A company perfectly positioned on Google but invisible on Bing will struggle to appear in ChatGPT's responses. The two engines have different algorithms, relevance criteria that don't always overlap.
Concretely, here's what this implies:
- Register on Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit your sitemap, verify page indexing, monitor crawl errors. Many companies have never set up this tool.
- Optimize for Bing Places for Business. For local searches, ChatGPT uses Bing Places as a source. If your listing doesn't exist or contains outdated information, you're invisible for geolocated queries.
- Quality backlinks. Bing gives significant weight to domain authority. Sites with over 32,000 referring domains are three times more likely to be cited than those with a few hundred.
The irony: while everyone fights for Google, optimizing for Bing represents an underexploited competitive advantage. The rules are similar, but competition is less fierce.
Domain authority: the factor that weighs heaviest
The data is clear: ChatGPT heavily favors high-authority sources. It's not a matter of preference — it's built into its selection logic.
When ChatGPT must choose between multiple sources to answer a question, it favors those with a solid backlink profile. A site with high domain authority (DA 60+) will be cited more often than a recent blog, even if the latter's content is more accurate.
The SERanking study shows that the number of referring domains is the strongest signal in the analyzed dataset. Pages with expert content — interviews, citations from identified authors, proprietary data — average more than 4 citations, compared to about 2 for those without visible expertise.
What this means for you:
- Link building remains crucial. Not spam links or dubious directories. Editorial links, from recognized sites in your industry.
- Multi-platform reputation matters. ChatGPT cross-references information. Being mentioned on multiple authority sites — specialized media, Wikipedia, recognized forums — strengthens your credibility in its eyes.
- Media partnerships take on a new dimension. OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with Associated Press, Axel Springer (Politico, Business Insider), Reuters, the Financial Times, Condé Nast. Content from these media receives preferential treatment. A mention in these publications is worth more than a hundred regular backlinks.
Content structure: what makes a page "citable"
ChatGPT doesn't read your pages like a human. It scans, extracts, and synthesizes. Content can be excellent for a reader but difficult for an AI to exploit.
Analyses of frequently cited content reveal recurring patterns:
Answer capsules are determinant. These are text blocks that directly answer a question, concisely, usually at the beginning of a section. 72.4% of articles cited by ChatGPT contain an identifiable answer capsule. The FAQ format works particularly well for this reason — each question/answer constitutes a potential capsule.
Length matters, but not as you imagine. Pages exceeding 2,900 words get an average of more than 5 citations, compared to just over 3 for those under 800 words. It's not about padding — it's that long content generally covers a topic in depth, with more potential entry points for the AI.
Proprietary data makes the difference. More than half of cited posts (52.2%) include original data or exclusive insights. When you combine answer capsules with proprietary data, you achieve the highest-performing configuration: 34.3% of citations come from content that checks both boxes.
Avoid links in answer capsules. Paradoxically, the fewer internal and external links you put in your key passages, the more ChatGPT cites them. The AI seems to prefer standalone text blocks that are directly usable.
Sources ChatGPT loves (and those it ignores)
Not all pages are equal in ChatGPT's eyes. The AI has marked preferences.
Wikipedia dominates the rankings. 7.8% of total citations come from Wikipedia — and among the 10 most cited sources, Wikipedia represents nearly half (47.9%). If your company or industry doesn't have a Wikipedia page, or if your page is poorly sourced, you're missing a major lever.
Branded sites are favored. ChatGPT cites official brand sites 3 percentage points more often than Google does. For queries involving a competitor, the gap rises to 11 points. The AI seems to give more credit to primary sources than aggregators.
Forums bring authenticity. Reddit, Quora, specialized forums — ChatGPT uses them to anchor its responses in real user experiences. If your brand is mentioned positively in these spaces, it counts.
Beware of "hermetic" content. A site with a restrictive robots.txt, content behind a paywall, or opaque HTML structure will be ignored. Technical accessibility is a prerequisite.
ChatGPT's selection process, step by step
Understanding how ChatGPT chooses its sources allows for finer optimization. Here's what we know about the process:
- Query decomposition. ChatGPT transforms the user's question into several specific search terms.
- Bing interrogation. It retrieves the top 20 to 30 results for each sub-query.
- Pre-selection. Among these results, it identifies 5 to 8 "promising" sources according to its internal criteria.
- Final selection. It retains 3 to 5 sources that meet three criteria: clearly displayed rating/reviews (for local queries), no paywall, verifiable and linkable content.
- Synthesis and citation. It extracts relevant passages, reformulates them, and cites the sources used.
This process explains why some pages well-positioned on Bing are never cited: they pass the first step but fail the final selection criteria.
Action plan: the 7 priority levers
Enough theory. Here are the concrete actions to implement, in order of priority:
1. Audit your current presence
Before optimizing, measure. Ask ChatGPT the 10 most frequent questions in your industry. Note whether your brand appears, in what context, and which sources are cited instead. Do the same with Perplexity and Claude to compare.
2. Activate Bing Webmaster Tools
If not done yet, this is the absolute priority. Verify the indexing of your key pages, submit your sitemap, fix crawl errors. Monitor your positions on strategic queries.
3. Create answer capsules on your strategic pages
For each important page, identify THE question it answers. Place a concise, standalone answer in the first 200 words, under an explicit H2. Avoid links in this paragraph.
4. Strengthen your backlink profile
Prioritize quality over quantity. Target OpenAI partner media if your industry allows. PR becomes a direct AEO lever.
5. Work on your Wikipedia presence
If your company meets Wikipedia's notability criteria, a well-sourced page is a major asset. If the page exists, verify it's up to date and properly referenced.
6. Optimize your Bing Places listing
For local searches, it's ChatGPT's primary source. Complete all information, add photos, solicit reviews.
7. Produce proprietary data
Studies, benchmarks, exclusive analyses — content with original data is cited twice as often. Investing in creating unique data pays off in the long term.
Test your visibility on ChatGPT
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Start my free auditWhat ChatGPT can't do (yet)
Let's be realistic about current limitations. ChatGPT isn't omniscient, and certain behaviors can be misleading.
Invented citations remain a problem. If you ask ChatGPT to source its statements without specifying to browse the web, it can generate plausible but fictitious references. URLs may seem credible and point to non-existent pages. Never take citations at face value without verification.
The cutoff date limits knowledge. For questions touching on recent news, ChatGPT must use web search. If the user doesn't activate it, answers can be outdated. Your recent content doesn't exist in its base memory.
The exact algorithm remains opaque. OpenAI doesn't publish the details of its source selection and weighting system. External analyses allow us to identify trends, but not absolute certainties.
Evolution to anticipate
The landscape is changing fast. ChatGPT has doubled its user count in just a few months, going from 400 to 800 million weekly between February and late 2025. Market share in search now reaches 9%, and analysts expect it to exceed 1% of the global search market (versus Google) by the end of 2025.
OpenAI's media partnerships are expanding. Each new agreement — News Corp for $250 million, Hearst for its 20 magazines and 40 local newspapers — changes the balance of favored sources. Monitoring these announcements becomes strategic intelligence in itself.
ChatGPT integration into daily workflows is accelerating. Microsoft integrates it into Windows, Edge, Office. The moment when a significant portion of your prospects discovers your brand via AI rather than Google is no longer a distant hypothesis — it's happening now.
Companies building their presence now will have a structural advantage. Those who wait will have to catch up in a more competitive environment.
