How the engines work
Does ChatGPT use Bing to search the web?
Yes, in part. Microsoft announced in May 2023 that Bing is the default search experience in ChatGPT, and OpenAI describes ChatGPT search as using third-party search providers together with its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. In practice, a page absent from Bing’s index rarely surfaces in ChatGPT — so Bing indexing is a prerequisite for GEO.
Updated · Citemark
What this means for your site
Treat Bing as a first-class index: verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, submit the sitemap, enable IndexNow so new and changed pages are picked up in minutes, and make sure robots.txt and your hosting firewall allow Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot. Most sites that “don’t show up in ChatGPT” have never done the first step.
Three OpenAI crawlers, three jobs
OpenAI documents three user agents: GPTBot collects data for training models, OAI-SearchBot indexes pages for ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a user’s request needs it. Blocking GPTBot does not remove you from ChatGPT search; blocking OAI-SearchBot does.
- To be cited: allow OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User.
- To stay out of training data only: disallow GPTBot and leave the other two alone.
Sources
See what AI says about you right now
The free audit runs the prompts for your category across every engine and shows, screenshot by screenshot, who gets cited — and the three things to fix first.