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How do you rank in ChatGPT?

By Ben Tabas, Intrica Research · Updated

Answer

ChatGPT has no fixed ranking, so the goal is to be named in more of its answers to your buyers' questions. SparkToro's study, published Jan. 28, 2026, found ChatGPT and Google's AI gave the same brands in the same order about once in 1,000 runs. Your share of answers across repeated runs is the number to grow.

Why there is no position one

Each ChatGPT answer is generated fresh. SparkToro ran 12 prompts 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI and found under a 1 in 100 chance of the same brand list twice.

The study's author concluded that visibility percentage across many prompts, run many times, is a reasonable metric, and advised against tracking positions.

What raises how often you are named

  1. Allow OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's crawler documentation, checked Oct. 28, 2026, says sites that opt out are not shown in ChatGPT search answers.
  2. Publish a page for each buyer question that answers it in the first two sentences.
  3. Add named sources, quotes and statistics. The GEO paper accepted to KDD 2024 found these raised visibility in AI answers by 30% to 40%.
  4. Earn coverage on the third party sites ChatGPT already cites for your category.
  5. Work on Google rankings as a separate goal. Ahrefs found 8.0% of ChatGPT's in-text citations ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt, in a study published Aug. 11, 2025.

How to measure it

  • Fix a set of buyer questions and keep it the same each week.
  • Run each question in ChatGPT several times.
  • Record the share of runs that name you and the share that cite your pages.
  • Compare that share with your main rivals on the same questions.

A brand AI engines leave out

0 of 78 AI answers named ZenLedger across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on Sept. 18, 2026, and Google AI Mode on Sept. 23, 2026, one run per question. Rivals get 7 times its Google traffic (DataForSEO, Oct. 20, 2026).

See the data →

See the searches ChatGPT runs behind your buyers' questions, so you know which pages need to exist to be named.

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Sources

  1. NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibility · SparkToro, Jan. 28, 2026Supports: Brand lists and their order rarely repeat across runs, and visibility percentage is the suggested metric.
  2. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers · OpenAI, Oct. 28, 2026Supports: Checked Oct. 28, 2026, for the effect of opting out of OAI-SearchBot on ChatGPT search answers.
  3. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization · Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 (arXiv), June 28, 2024Supports: Cited sources, quotations and statistics raised visibility in generative engine answers by 30% to 40%.
  4. Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 for the Original Prompt · Ahrefs, Aug. 11, 2025Supports: 8.0% of ChatGPT's in-text citations ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt.

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