ChatGPT Search is the search feature in OpenAI's ChatGPT. Whereas ChatGPT originally only answered based on what the model had learned during training, this feature lets it fetch current information from the web. The answer is then written in plain language and includes references to the websites used as sources. Depending on the question, ChatGPT sometimes decides to search on its own, but you can also switch on the search feature explicitly.
For businesses, this means a new channel through which customers can discover you. Someone who asks "which bike shop in Oxford also repairs e-bikes?" doesn't get a list of ten links, but an answer with a few concrete names and sources.
OpenAI doesn't disclose in detail how sources are selected. What is known is that, for searches, ChatGPT uses external search partners as well as its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says that websites that block this crawler in their robots.txt won't appear as sources in search answers. It's a different crawler from GPTBot, which is used for training models. So you can allow or block each of them separately.
The principle of retrieval-augmented generation also applies here: the text extracts that are found are summarised by the language model into a single answer. Pages that answer a question clearly and concretely lend themselves best to that.
A mention in a ChatGPT answer works differently from a position in Google. There's no fixed ranking that's the same for everyone: answers vary by wording, by conversation and sometimes by user. You're either mentioned or you're not. That mention, a citation, can bring in traffic, but also trust: for many people, a recommendation in an answer feels like advice.
Take a law firm in Bristol that specialises in housing law. A clear page on "what to do if your landlord won't return your deposit", with concrete steps for tenants in England, has a good chance of being picked up as a source for questions on that topic.
You can often recognise traffic from ChatGPT in your analytics tool by the referring source chatgpt.com, although not every visit is passed on that way. What you don't see like this are the times you were mentioned without anyone clicking through. That's why it pays to test a fixed set of relevant prompts regularly and compare the results with other AI tools such as Perplexity and Gemini. By tracking your visibility in ChatGPT and other AI search engines, you can see how your business appears there today and how that changes over time.
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