Definition
ChatGPT Search uses OAI-SearchBot to crawl and retrieve URLs in real time, then re-ranks and synthesises. Citations are inline. Schema, freshness, and explicit comparison content matter heavily; pure training-corpus signals matter less than in the default ChatGPT model.
Why it matters
ChatGPT Search sits in the "Surfaces & platforms" layer of the AI search stack. Teams that handle it well get cited more, recommended more, and earn more of the AI-mediated revenue in their category. Teams that ignore it spend a year wondering why their content investment never moves the needle inside ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Related terms
- OAI-SearchBot - OpenAI's live-retrieval crawler for ChatGPT Search. Separate from GPTBot and must be allowed independently.
- AEO - Optimizing content so answer engines (Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search) quote it as the direct answer to a query.
- RAG - A technique where an LLM retrieves external documents at inference time and uses them to ground its answer. Powers Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and AI Overviews.
- Citation share - Percentage of cited sources in an LLM answer that come from your domain. Only meaningful on grounded surfaces (Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, AI Overviews).
Apply it
The LLM SEO playbook ties every concept in this glossary into a single operating model. If you want to see how your brand performs across all the LLMs at once - mention rate, citation share, sentiment, rank - start with the free GEO audit or skip straight to a free Livesov account.