Can ChatGPT recommend my online store?

Yes, on two conditions. When a user asks for a product or brand recommendation with web search enabled, ChatGPT cites the sites Bing surfaces that clearly answer the question. Your store therefore needs to be indexed on Bing, and your product or category pages must state clearly what you sell, for whom, and at what price. Mentions in the press and in comparison articles raise your odds.

Is classic SEO still worth anything?

Yes, and it remains the priority. According to [Digiday](https://digiday.com/marketing/e-commerce-sites-see-low-sales-from-chatgpt-traffic-new-study-finds/), ChatGPT brings roughly 0.2% of the traffic of the e-commerce sites studied, and that traffic converts less well than Google's. Do both at once. Google says so in its May 2026 guide: optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. Content structured as questions and answers with schema.org data serves Google, its AI Overviews and ChatGPT with the same work.

How do I check whether AI engines can read my site?

Run three quick checks. Type `site:yourdomain.com` into Bing to confirm indexing. Open your robots.txt file and make sure it does not block OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT's search), ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Finally, paste a page URL into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the page: if the summary is accurate, your content is accessible and understandable. If the AI cannot manage it, you have a technical problem to fix first.

Should you block or allow AI crawlers?

For a brand selling products or services, allow at least the search crawlers. OpenAI runs two separate bots: GPTBot collects pages to train its models, OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search. Blocking GPTBot protects your content from training without removing you from answers; blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search answers. A publisher that lives off its content can defend the first block; a brand looking for customers loses out with the second. Check your robots.txt: some site templates block these crawlers by default without you knowing.

What is a citable answer?

A passage of 2 to 4 sentences that answers one precise question on its own, without depending on the paragraph before or after it. It contains the answer, a verifiable fact or figure, and makes sense out of context. Example: “At Sonho, a brand identity starts from €1,500 excl. VAT.” An AI can extract that sentence as is and quote it in an answer.

Does talking about AI in my content change anything for my search rankings?

No, mentioning AI does not lift a page. What counts is that the page clearly answers the question asked, with verifiable facts and the answer placed in the first lines. Google says so in its May 2026 guide: there is no AI-specific technique, and optimizing for its generated answers is still classic SEO. A well-structured, accurate page about your trade stands a better chance of being cited than one that piles up the words "AI" or "ChatGPT".

How is this different from paying Google?

A Google ad stops the day you stop paying, and it never shows up in a ChatGPT answer. Being cited by an AI cannot be bought: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews pick up the pages they find clearest and the brands other sites talk about. The work is on your site and your online reputation. It takes longer to show than a paid campaign, but it keeps paying off without a per-click budget.

Once the work is done, are there updates to plan for?

Yes, monthly follow-up is enough in most cases. AI answers change with model updates and with what your competitors publish. Ask ChatGPT the same questions every month, note who gets cited, and update the pages that slip: dates, figures, new questions from your customers. Show the update date: your readers can see the information is recent.

How to be visible on ChatGPT: the practical guide for a French brand

There is no submission form for ChatGPT. A brand gets cited because AI can read its site, its pages answer questions directly and other sites talk about it. Updated with the facts as of October 2026.

The short answer

Three conditions decide whether you appear on ChatGPT. ChatGPT must be able to read your site: its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, must not be blocked, and your pages must be indexed on Bing, one of the engines its web search relies on. Your pages must answer your customers' questions in the first lines. And other sites must talk about you: press, comparison articles, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube. There is no registration, and an llms.txt file changes nothing.

Why your customers are already looking for you on ChatGPT, and how much traffic it brings

The topic attracts a lot of alarmist talk, so the numbers come first. Today, traffic coming from ChatGPT represents roughly 0.2% of e-commerce site traffic, and it converts less well than Google traffic (source: Digiday). An agency promising you a wave of ChatGPT sales by tomorrow is overselling.

Usage is already widespread: 48% of French people surveyed used generative AI in 2025, according to the 2026 Digital Barometer by Arcep and CRÉDOC. Your customers are already asking ChatGPT questions before they buy, along the lines of “which French solid skincare brand should I pick”. The answers name brands, and yours may or may not be among them.

The trajectory matters more than today's volume. Few French brands have done the work, so getting cited still takes little effort, and that will change once competitors move in.

How do you know whether ChatGPT already cites your site?

You do not need a paid tool for a first assessment. Open ChatGPT and ask the questions your customers ask, in their own words: “best brand of X in France”, “is [your brand] any good”. Run the test with web search enabled and without it: without search, you measure what the model knows about you; with it, you measure whether your pages surface as sources.

For a more technical check, type `site:yourdomain.com` into Bing. If Bing returns only a handful of pages, or nothing, ChatGPT cannot find you during a web search, and that is the first thing to fix.

Repeat this test once a month with the same questions and write down the results. The method is manual, and it is currently the most reliable way to track your visibility in AI answers.

How does “ChatGPT SEO” work?

There is no way to submit your site to ChatGPT: it has no form, no account to create and no ad budget to spend. Anyone offering to “register your site with ChatGPT” is selling you something that does not exist.

ChatGPT cites brands through two mechanisms. First, its training knowledge: what the model read about you while it was being built, mostly mentions on third-party sites (press, directories, comparison articles, reviews). Second, its web search: when a question calls for up-to-date information, ChatGPT rewrites the request and sends it to partner search providers (OpenAI help), including Bing, ChatGPT's default search engine since the deal Microsoft announced in May 2023 (CNBC).

OpenAI also crawls the web with its own bot, OAI-SearchBot. Its documentation is clear: a site that blocks OAI-SearchBot does not appear in ChatGPT search answers, except as a plain navigational link (OpenAI documentation). Do not confuse it with GPTBot, the crawler that collects pages to train the models: blocking GPTBot does not remove you from search answers.

Letting OAI-SearchBot in and being indexed on Bing are therefore two prerequisites, and the rest comes down to how clear your pages are. A page that answers in two sentences at the top stands a good chance of being cited. When the answer sits in the fourth paragraph, ChatGPT reads the page and usually cites another one.

GEO, AEO, AI SEO: what are they, and what changes?

You will run into these acronyms everywhere. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: working on your visibility inside AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews). AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: structuring your content so it serves as a direct answer to a question. “AI SEO” is the catch-all term that covers both; in practice, these labels largely describe the same work.

At Sonho, SEO, AEO and GEO are built directly into the code of the sites we make, with the schemas, the direct answers and the page structure to match. The details are on /services/seo-aeo-geo.

	Before (classic SEO)	With AI engines
Goal	Getting clicked in a list of links	Getting cited in a written answer
Winning format	Long page covering one keyword	Short passages that answer a question
Trust signal	Inbound links	Brand mentions on third-party sites
What does not change	Useful content, fast site, clean structure	Exactly the same

Six levers to appear in ChatGPT's answers

We work on these six levers in this order, because they are the ones that move a brand's visibility in ChatGPT.

Be readable by ChatGPT and indexed on Bing. Check that your robots.txt lets OAI-SearchBot in, create a Bing Webmaster Tools account, submit your sitemap, check that your key pages are indexed. Brands often skip this prerequisite because they only watch Google.
Put the answer at the top of the page. Every important page must answer its main question within the first 2 or 3 sentences. Context, nuance and supporting arguments come after.
Phrase your H2s as questions. For example, “How much does a website redesign cost?” for the pricing section. AI engines match a question asked by the user with a heading that asks the same question.
Add schema.org structured data. FAQPage, Organization, Product, Service: these tags describe your content in a format machines read without ambiguity. This part is code, and many custom websites leave it out.
Earn third-party mentions. Trade press, industry directories, comparison articles, customer reviews, and also Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube: these mentions feed the model's knowledge and are what its web search finds. The figures are in the next section.
Write pages that are citable passage by passage. Every paragraph must make sense on its own, built around a fact, a sourced figure or a definition. A paragraph that needs the previous one to make sense rarely gets cited.

Why mentions on Reddit, LinkedIn or YouTube weigh as much as your own site

AI engines rarely cite a brand on the strength of its own site alone. They cross-check. Two recent studies show where they look.

Ahrefs compared 75,000 brands: the number of web mentions of a brand is the factor most closely tied to its presence in Google's AI answers (correlation of 0.664), far ahead of inbound links (0.218) (Ahrefs). In March 2026, Peec AI analyzed 30 million sources cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google in the United States: Reddit came first, ahead of YouTube and LinkedIn, then Wikipedia (Peec AI).

What this means for a French brand: a Reddit thread where customers discuss your products, a LinkedIn post where the founder explains a decision, a YouTube video showing the product in use all count in what AI knows about you. These mentions must stay genuine. The guide Google published in May 2026 explicitly lists chasing "inauthentic mentions" among the tactics to ignore (Google Search Central): buying reviews or posting from fake accounts exposes you more than it helps.

A prospect found us through ChatGPT: what it taught us

A skincare brand preparing its Shopify store contacted us after asking ChatGPT which agency to turn to. We went back over the 38 inquiries we received between November 2025 and October 2026: two came from a confirmed search, one through ChatGPT, the other through Google. That is few, and it is not a statistic, but the two inquiries looked alike.

They arrived in comparison mode. One prospect was choosing between two agencies, the other was expecting a competing quote by the end of the week. AI does not hand you a won client: it puts you on a short list. Pages that help people compare (what is included, what drives a price, which questions to ask) serve that moment.

They started from a choice question. These prospects were looking for a provider to launch or rebuild a store. The brief that followed asked in black and white what was included, the options and the recurring costs. A page that answers those three points stands a better chance of being picked up than a page describing your values.

Prospects check with AI. Another prospect, referred by a contact, had ChatGPT analyze the site of a client we cited as a reference, then sent us the list of flaws it found. A wrong figure or a sloppy page shows immediately. Everything you publish must be accurate, because AI will repeat it as is.

Should you create an llms.txt file?

llms.txt is a text file placed at the root of your site that summarizes your important pages for AI engines, modeled on robots.txt. You can create one, but expect no effect on your citations. In May 2026, Ahrefs measured across 137,000 sites that 97% of llms.txt files are never read (Ahrefs), and SE Ranking found no correlation between this file and citation frequency across 300,000 domains (Search Engine Journal). On May 15, 2026, Google published its first guide dedicated to the AI features of its search engine: it lists creating "unnecessary AI text files (like llms.txt)" among the tactics you can ignore, along with artificially chunking content (Google Search Central).

The file takes an hour of work for no measured effect. A clear, well-structured site that other sites mention gets picked up without it, and a flawless llms.txt does nothing for pages that bury their answers.

Sonho's own site has one because it costs nothing. Its citations come from direct answers at the top of pages, tagged FAQs, H2s phrased as questions, and mentions on other sites. We wrote this guide following the same rules.

What about Google AI Overviews in France?

AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers Google displays above its classic results, have been live in France since July 2026, under the name Aperçus IA, alongside AI Mode.

Everything above also works for Google. The criteria that get a page cited by ChatGPT (direct answer, question-based structure, structured data, third-party mentions) are the same ones that get it picked up in an AI Overview.

If your current site does not let you change page structure or add schemas, the topic becomes a redesign question. How to choose is covered in our guide on redesign technologies.

How long before you see results?

The timing depends first on reindexing: a restructured page with a direct answer can be picked up by ChatGPT as soon as Bing has reindexed it. Bing Webmaster Tools and the IndexNow protocol let you request that reindexing on the day of the update.

Here, “results” means being cited in answers, seeing ChatGPT show up in your traffic sources, receiving inquiries that mention “I found you through ChatGPT”. Expect a channel that grows steadily over months; tripled revenue within a quarter is not a realistic goal.

If you would rather delegate this work, Sonho offers an audit first, priced according to scope, then monthly SEO support that also covers visibility in AI engines. The offer is detailed on /services/seo-aeo-geo, and you can reach us through /contact to talk it over.

Frequently asked questions

Can ChatGPT recommend my online store?: Yes, on two conditions. When a user asks for a product or brand recommendation with web search enabled, ChatGPT cites the sites Bing surfaces that clearly answer the question. Your store therefore needs to be indexed on Bing, and your product or category pages must state clearly what you sell, for whom, and at what price. Mentions in the press and in comparison articles raise your odds.
Is classic SEO still worth anything?: Yes, and it remains the priority. According to Digiday, ChatGPT brings roughly 0.2% of the traffic of the e-commerce sites studied, and that traffic converts less well than Google's. Do both at once. Google says so in its May 2026 guide: optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. Content structured as questions and answers with schema.org data serves Google, its AI Overviews and ChatGPT with the same work.
How do I check whether AI engines can read my site?: Run three quick checks. Type `site:yourdomain.com` into Bing to confirm indexing. Open your robots.txt file and make sure it does not block OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT's search), ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Finally, paste a page URL into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the page: if the summary is accurate, your content is accessible and understandable. If the AI cannot manage it, you have a technical problem to fix first.
Should you block or allow AI crawlers?: For a brand selling products or services, allow at least the search crawlers. OpenAI runs two separate bots: GPTBot collects pages to train its models, OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT search. Blocking GPTBot protects your content from training without removing you from answers; blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search answers. A publisher that lives off its content can defend the first block; a brand looking for customers loses out with the second. Check your robots.txt: some site templates block these crawlers by default without you knowing.
What is a citable answer?: A passage of 2 to 4 sentences that answers one precise question on its own, without depending on the paragraph before or after it. It contains the answer, a verifiable fact or figure, and makes sense out of context. Example: “At Sonho, a brand identity starts from €1,500 excl. VAT.” An AI can extract that sentence as is and quote it in an answer.
Does talking about AI in my content change anything for my search rankings?: No, mentioning AI does not lift a page. What counts is that the page clearly answers the question asked, with verifiable facts and the answer placed in the first lines. Google says so in its May 2026 guide: there is no AI-specific technique, and optimizing for its generated answers is still classic SEO. A well-structured, accurate page about your trade stands a better chance of being cited than one that piles up the words "AI" or "ChatGPT".
How is this different from paying Google?: A Google ad stops the day you stop paying, and it never shows up in a ChatGPT answer. Being cited by an AI cannot be bought: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews pick up the pages they find clearest and the brands other sites talk about. The work is on your site and your online reputation. It takes longer to show than a paid campaign, but it keeps paying off without a per-click budget.
Once the work is done, are there updates to plan for?: Yes, monthly follow-up is enough in most cases. AI answers change with model updates and with what your competitors publish. Ask ChatGPT the same questions every month, note who gets cited, and update the pages that slip: dates, figures, new questions from your customers. Show the update date: your readers can see the information is recent.