GUIDE

How to optimize content for AI search

Put your answer first in plain HTML with quotes (+41% in the KDD 2024 GEO study) and focus on your own pages, cited 20.1% of the time in our study.

Updated October 30, 20265 min read

+41%Position-adjusted word count gain from quotes (KDD 2024 GEO paper)
51.2%Retrieved vendor pricing pages cited by ChatGPT (FoundByChat, Oct 2026)
+2.2%ChatGPT citation change with JSON-LD (Ahrefs, not significant)

In short

Start pages and sections with direct answers, as OpenAI's search index stores ~200-character snippets.
Add quotes, statistics and sources; the KDD 2024 GEO paper reported 30% to 40% relative gains for its top methods on a position-adjusted word count metric.
Build dedicated pricing, product and documentation pages on your site, which ChatGPT cited far more often than blogs or reviews in our October 2026 study of 4,203 results.
Serve all facts in plain HTML without relying on client-side JavaScript or Schema.org markup, as OpenAI's crawlers do not execute JS and the cited studies do not establish that JSON-LD boosts AI citations.

OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's search crawler, and ChatGPT can cite retrieved pages in its answers.

What happens when AI search reads your page

For how ChatGPT search works, OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot for search indexing, ChatGPT-User for user-triggered fetches, and GPTBot for model training. Blocking GPTBot in robots.txt does not remove your site from ChatGPT search.

ChatGPT's search keeps a page title and a snippet of about 200 characters. Menu or cookie text can leak into the snippet, and the opening sentence and facts up front are among the audit's checks.

Four steps to write content for AI search

Our guide to what is generative engine optimization covers the background; these four steps cover page-level execution.

1. Answer the query in the first sentence

Answer the page's main question in the first body sentence, and start every section by answering its heading. Ensure your HTML template keeps menu labels and cookie notices out of the ~200-character snippet.

2. Add quotations, statistics and named sources

In "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (posted November 16, 2023 on arXiv; published at KDD 2024), Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande tested edits across 10,000 GEO-bench queries using Google's top 5 sources with gpt-3.5-turbo, plus Perplexity.ai tests. On their position-adjusted word count metric (19.3 baseline), three edits scored as follows:

Adding quotations scored 27.2 (+41% over baseline) and +22% on Perplexity.ai.
Adding statistics scored 25.2.
Citing sources scored 24.6, boosting rank 5 pages by +115.1% (rank 1 dropped -30.3%, showing lower-ranked pages gained most).

The top methods gave 30% to 40% relative gains; "up to 40%" is a best case rather than an average. The authors note that visibility metrics are proxies rather than clicks and that methods may need to adapt as engines change.

3. Publish one page per question on your own site

In FoundByChat's October 2026 study of 4,203 search results across 211 ChatGPT answers, a company's own retrieved pages were cited 20.1% of the time versus 3.9% for third-party pages about the company (13.1 odds ratio).

Page type	Share of retrieved pages cited by ChatGPT	Source
Vendor pricing pages	51.2%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
Vendor product pages	28.4%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
Docs and help pages	23.0%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
Vendor blog posts	14.5%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
Third-party listicles and reviews	7.5%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
"A vs B" comparison pages	4.2%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)
PDFs	0.4%	FoundByChat research (Oct 2026)

Give pricing and each product or service its own URL, and put specs in HTML tables rather than PDFs. For local businesses, directories still matter: in FoundByChat's October 2026 local tests, businesses on cited pages had 3.3x odds of being named for plumbers and 2.1x for dentists (the 1.6x lift for agencies was not statistically significant). See how to get recommended by ChatGPT for more on third-party mentions.

4. Put every fact in plain, server-rendered HTML

A December 17, 2024 Vercel and MERJ study found no major AI crawlers render JavaScript, including OpenAI (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot), Anthropic (ClaudeBot), Meta, ByteDance and Perplexity. They download JS files without running them (11.50% of ChatGPT's requests and 23.84% of Claude's). By contrast, Google's Gemini uses Googlebot's JS-rendering infrastructure, and Applebot renders via a browser.

Because OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity publish no JS execution docs, this study is the main public evidence. Render all text, pricing and tables in initial HTML without client-side scripts.

Common AI content optimization mistakes

Two traditional SEO tactics have limited evidence for improving AI search visibility:

Keyword stuffing: In the KDD 2024 GEO paper, repeating target keywords scored 17.7, below the 19.3 baseline.
Adding JSON-LD schema for AI bots: Google's 2026 AI optimization guide states "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add"; structured data can still help with rich results. Ahrefs compared 1,885 pages adding JSON-LD against 4,000 matched controls: AI Overview citations changed by -4.6%, AI Mode by +2.4% and ChatGPT by +2.2% (the last two not statistically different from zero). A 2026 Roskilde University RCT with 8 synthetic brands (4 with Schema.org) found no evidence that markup improved visibility in Gemini with Google Search grounding. A February 20, 2026 SSRN study of 1,736 pages found schema did not predict AI citation once controlled, whereas Google organic rank mattered most (43% citation odds at rank 1 vs 5% at rank 7). OpenAI never stated ChatGPT parses JSON-LD, and in a post dated May 28, 2026, Mark Williams-Cook described hiding a fake address in deliberately invalid JSON-LD that ChatGPT and Perplexity still returned, proving they read it as plain HTML text.

How to check how ChatGPT sees your pages

Run the free GEO audit (up to 5 daily audits, no account needed) to fetch your page using the OAI-SearchBot user agent. It rebuilds the title and ~200-character snippet ChatGPT keeps, looks the page up in ChatGPT, and checks bot protection, OAI-SearchBot access, non-JS HTML text, menu or cookie snippet leaks, and opening facts.

Because one check never proves an edit caused a citation change, FoundByChat is free to start and asks ChatGPT your customers' questions with web search every 2 hours (in US English or Netherlands Dutch). It tracks whether pages are Found or Cited, shows indexed titles and snippets, and emails you when pages enter the index or snippets change. See our guide to ChatGPT citations.

FOUNDBYCHAT

Know the moment ChatGPT picks up your pages

We ask ChatGPT your questions every 2 hours and mail you what its index picked up or rewrote. Free to start: sign in with Google or an email link.

Start free Or run the free GEO audit

Questions

Does FAQ schema help my page get cited by ChatGPT?

The cited studies do not establish a citation benefit from adding JSON-LD schema. Ahrefs Found a statistically insignificant +2.2% change in ChatGPT citations across 1,885 pages, and In a post dated May 2026, Mark Williams-Cook described an invalid JSON-LD block containing a fake address that ChatGPT returned, showing it read that block as plain text in the HTML. Put your questions and answers in visible HTML headings and paragraphs instead.

Which pages on my website should I optimize first?

Start with your pricing page, core product pages and documentation pages. In FoundByChat's October 2026 study of 4,203 retrieved results, ChatGPT cited retrieved vendor pricing pages 51.2% of the time, product pages 28.4% and docs 23.0%, compared with 14.5% for vendor blog posts and 0.4% for PDFs.

Can ChatGPT read text inside JavaScript tabs or accordions?

Vercel and MERJ found that OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User and GPTBot do not execute JavaScript, so text injected only by browser JavaScript may be absent from what those crawlers fetch. Make sure the full text is present in the server-rendered HTML.

Does blocking GPTBot stop my content from appearing in ChatGPT answers?

No, blocking GPTBot only opts your pages out of OpenAI's model training crawl. Live search indexing uses OAI-SearchBot and user-triggered page fetches use ChatGPT-User, so allow OAI-SearchBot for search indexing and ChatGPT-User for user-triggered page fetches.