ChatGPT SEO tools: using ChatGPT for SEO, and tools that track ChatGPT visibility

Work out which job you need before you compare anything. If you want help writing and analysing SEO material, ChatGPT itself is the tool and its limits come from what it can see. If you want to know whether ChatGPT recommends you, you need a separate check that asks it questions and records the answers.

What people mean by ChatGPT SEO tools

One searcher wants help writing a meta description faster. Another wants to know whether ChatGPT ever names their business when a buyer asks for a recommendation. Same words, different jobs.

Many results for this phrase blur the two, often because they are vendor pages making the case for their own product. That leaves you comparing a drafting assistant with a monitoring product as if they were rivals, when they do different things.

Each claim on this page is marked as one of three kinds:

Label	What it means
Documented	A platform’s own documentation says so (OpenAI or Google)
Researched	A named study found it, under the conditions it describes
Recommended	Our practical advice, which no platform has stated

For a wider look at SEO software that has added AI features, see our guide to AI SEO tools.

Meaning one: using ChatGPT to help with SEO work

Here ChatGPT is a tool you operate. You give it text, a brief or a list; it gives you text back; you decide what happens next.

A useful test (recommended): could a competent junior colleague do this task working only from what you pasted into the conversation? If yes, ChatGPT can probably help. If the task needs data that colleague could not see, such as your Search Console figures, the chat alone cannot do it.

What ChatGPT can help with, and what it cannot know

Useful jobs (recommended, based on practice; OpenAI does not document these):

1. Drafting and rewriting. Titles, meta descriptions, outlines and first-pass paragraphs that you then edit properly.
2. Analysing material you paste in. Give it a page and ask where the argument is thin, or paste a list of queries and ask it to group them by intent.
3. Structure and clarity. Turning a messy brief into a clean outline, or flagging sections that repeat each other.
4. Spotting gaps. Give it two drafts and ask what one covers that the other skips.

What it cannot know (recommended): your live rankings, your traffic or your Search Console data, unless you supply that data yourself. Treat anything it says about your current positions as unverified. We have not found an OpenAI page that states this directly, so read it as practical advice.

On accuracy, both platforms say something on record (documented). Google’s guidance on generative AI content warns that generative models predict a likely sequence of words from their training data, so their output can contain inaccuracies. It says to fact-check and review all AI-generated content before publishing, including titles, meta descriptions and structured data. OpenAI’s own help article on searching the web says search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect, and tells users to open the cited source and check it.

Answers also vary (recommended): in our experience, the same question asked twice, or worded differently, can produce different answers. Check anything that matters before you act on it.

Does publishing AI-assisted content hurt you with Google? Documented: Google says appropriate use of AI or automation is not against its guidelines, and that it rewards high-quality content however it is produced. Using generative AI to produce many pages without adding value for users may breach its spam policy on scaled content abuse. Our page on whether AI content is good for SEO covers this in more depth.

Meaning two: tools that check whether ChatGPT names your site

This is a separate job. A visibility tool does not help you write anything. It puts a set of questions to ChatGPT, records what comes back, and reports whether your business was named and whether your site was cited.

Mentions and citations are different things. Documented: OpenAI’s help centre says responses that use web search may include citations, which you can select to open the source. So a tool that tracks citations is in effect tracking search-backed answers. ChatGPT can also name a business without linking to it, and an outside tool cannot always tell where that mention came from (our reading; OpenAI does not say this). Our ChatGPT search guide explains how the search side works.

What a ChatGPT visibility tool can and cannot tell you

It can tell you whether your business appeared in the answers to the prompts it ran, on the days it ran them. That is a useful snapshot.

Its limits:

1. It shows what happened without the reason. The cause is still yours to work out (recommended).
2. It only covers the prompts it was given. Real buyers phrase questions in ways no list fully predicts (recommended).
3. One reading is a sample. Because answers shift between runs and wording, look at results over time before drawing conclusions (recommended).
4. Your customers may see something else. Documented: OpenAI says ChatGPT may use an approximate location based on the user’s IP address, and saved memories if memory is on, when it rewrites a search query. A tool’s results show one view among many.
5. It cannot guarantee inclusion. Documented: OpenAI’s help article says ChatGPT ranks search results using multiple factors and that placement is not guaranteed. No tool can change that.

Our guide on how to measure AI visibility sets out a method, and the measurement section of our main guide is the short version.

What can move visibility at all? Researched: Aggarwal et al. (GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024) tested content changes such as adding citations, quotations and statistics. They reported visibility gains of up to 40% on GEO-bench, their benchmark of 10,000 queries, and up to 37% in a test on Perplexity.ai. The main experiments used a generative engine the authors built from the top five Google results, ChatGPT was not the engine tested, and the effects varied by domain. The study suggests what tends to help; it does not predict what a given change will do in ChatGPT today.

What ChatGPT’s own crawler and search documentation says you control

This part is documented in OpenAI’s crawler documentation:

User agent	What OpenAI says it is for	Effect of robots.txt
OAI-SearchBot	Surfacing websites in ChatGPT’s search features	Sites opted out will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links
GPTBot	Crawling content that may be used to train OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models	Disallowing it indicates your content should not be used for training
ChatGPT-User	Visiting a page when a user asks ChatGPT or a custom GPT a question	Because the visit is started by a user, robots.txt rules may not apply; it is not used to decide whether content appears in search

The settings are independent, so you can allow OAI-SearchBot for search while disallowing GPTBot for training. OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for search to adjust after a robots.txt change. Its help article adds that to make a site eligible for search results, you should allow OAI-SearchBot and confirm your host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI’s published search bot IP addresses.

Recommended: check this before you buy anything. It is free, and it is the one part of the picture you fully control.

How to choose, and a free way to check first

Choose by the job (recommended):

• You want faster drafting and tidier analysis. Use ChatGPT as an assistant, give it your own data, and have someone who knows the business review everything before it goes live.
• You want to know whether ChatGPT names you. Run a manual check first, then decide whether a tool is worth paying for.

A free manual check (recommended):

1. Confirm your robots.txt allows OAI-SearchBot and your host or CDN is not blocking it.
2. Write a handful of questions a real customer would ask before buying what you sell.
3. Ask them in ChatGPT with search switched on. OpenAI’s help article says you can choose Search from the tools menu, or type / in the message box and select Search.
4. Note whether you are named, whether you are linked, and which sources are cited. Open those sources.
5. Repeat on another day and with different wording, and compare.

Our AI visibility checker guide walks through a lightweight version. If you then look at paid tools, ask each vendor which prompts it runs, how often, from which locations, and whether you can export the raw answers. A tool that cannot show you the answers behind its score gives you little to act on.

No tool decides whether ChatGPT names you. The tools only report on how your crawlable, accurate and genuinely useful pages are doing.