Guide
ChatGPT SEO tools: how to track and improve your visibility in ChatGPT
A ChatGPT SEO tool can mean two things: a way to use ChatGPT for SEO work, or software that checks whether ChatGPT names your brand when buyers ask it for advice. This page answers both, then focuses on the second — what OpenAI documents about ChatGPT search, what a ChatGPT visibility tracker measures, 13 tools that cover ChatGPT, and how to check it by hand for free.
Two meanings of “ChatGPT SEO tool”
Search results for this phrase are split. Some pages explain how to use ChatGPT for SEO tasks. Others list tools that track how a brand shows up in ChatGPT's answers. Both readings are fair:
- ChatGPT as an SEO tool. You use ChatGPT to brainstorm, outline, draft or rewrite SEO work aimed at Google. ChatGPT is the tool; better content is the output.
- A tool for SEO in ChatGPT. Software asks ChatGPT your buyers' questions and records whether your brand is named, recommended and cited. It is often called a ChatGPT visibility tracker, and it is the main topic of this page.
Using ChatGPT for SEO work
ChatGPT is a writing and reasoning assistant. It can suggest topics, group a keyword list you paste in, draft outlines, title tags and meta descriptions, and rewrite text in plainer English. Treat what it writes as a draft that you check.
Numbers need more care. Search volume, keyword difficulty and rankings come from SEO data providers, so treat a figure ChatGPT gives without a source as unverified. Some SEO suites connect their data to ChatGPT instead. Ahrefs, for example, says its SEO MCP brings live Ahrefs data into ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools, on paid plans from Lite. Then the numbers come from the suite, not from the model.
None of this decides whether ChatGPT recommends your brand to buyers. That is a separate question, and the rest of this page is about it.
How ChatGPT search picks sources: what OpenAI documents
ChatGPT answers some questions from what the model learned in training and searches the web for others. When it searches, it can show the sources it used. OpenAI does not publish how it chooses or orders those sources. What it does document, in its overview of OpenAI crawlers, is access:
- OAI-SearchBot is the crawler for ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, though they can still appear as navigational links. It recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and allowing requests from OpenAI's published IP ranges, so check your CDN or firewall as well.
- After a robots.txt change, OpenAI says it can take about 24 hours for its search systems to adjust.
- GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's foundation models. OpenAI says each setting is independent, so you can allow OAI-SearchBot and still disallow GPTBot.
- ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user's request calls for it. OpenAI says it is not used to decide what may appear in search; search opt-outs go through OAI-SearchBot.
- OAI-AdsBot only visits pages submitted as ads on ChatGPT, to check them. Ads are a paid channel, not something SEO earns.
Beyond access, the usual levers are the ones in our LLM SEO guide: pages that answer buyer questions plainly, key facts in HTML text and coverage on the sites ChatGPT cites for your topic. They are common practice, not rules OpenAI has published.
What a ChatGPT visibility tracker measures
A ChatGPT visibility tracker sends a fixed set of prompts to ChatGPT, stores each answer and counts what is in it. Most run the same prompts on Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews too. The numbers are the standard AI visibility metrics:
- Mention rate: the share of answers that name your brand.
- Recommendation rate: the share that suggest your brand as a choice, not just list it.
- Average position: where you sit among the brands named.
- Citations: the URLs ChatGPT shows as sources, yours and other sites'.
- Competitors: the brands named when you are not.
What no tool can give you is a fixed “ChatGPT ranking”. ChatGPT writes a new answer each time, so the brands it names and their order can change between runs. Trackers handle this by repeating prompts and reporting rates over time, not single answers.
How to choose a ChatGPT SEO tool
Every tool in the table below names ChatGPT among its engines. Most also cover other engines, so check these points on the plan you would actually buy:
- Other engines on that plan. Several vendors sell Gemini, AI Mode or Claude as add-ons, so the entry price may cover ChatGPT and little else you need.
- Prompts and cadence. 50 prompts checked daily and 500 prompts reported weekly are different products. Work out how many ChatGPT answers a month the plan buys.
- Collection method. Answers can differ between an API call and the ChatGPT app a person uses. Ask the vendor how it collects ChatGPT answers.
- Country and language. Many entry plans cover one market, so check that it is yours.
- Sources. A tracker that records the URLs ChatGPT cites shows which pages to work on, not only whether you appear.
Our AI visibility tools comparison covers 22 trackers in more detail, including how prompts, checks and credits compare. For tools that also help with content and technical work, see LLM SEO tools.
Where Llamat fits
Llamat is not a daily tracker. It is a free, one-off LLM Visibility Report: you enter a website, review up to 20 suggested questions, and we run them on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. The report arrives by e-mail and shows mention rate, recommendation rate, average position, citation rate and the competitors named instead of you. You don't need an account.
Use the free AI visibility checker for a first ChatGPT reading before you pay for a tracker. Repeated monitoring is available on request at info@llamat.com.
Llamat is our product. It appears in the table as a free one-off report, with its limits stated, and the other rows show only what each vendor publishes. We did not buy or run these trackers.