This creates a new opportunity for B2B companies: how can you optimize your website so that it is easier for ChatGPT Search to discover, understand, and potentially cite?
There is no guaranteed method for getting a website recommended by ChatGPT. OpenAI states that ChatGPT Search uses multiple factors to rank results, and placement is not guaranteed. However, OpenAI also provides a clear technical requirement for publishers: websites that want their content to be available for ChatGPT Search should make sure they are not blocking OAI-SearchBot.
In my view, optimizing for ChatGPT Search should not mean abandoning traditional SEO. GEO is better understood as an extension of SEO. A technically accessible website, clear site structure, useful content, strong internal linking, real industry experience, and relevant external references can all contribute to making a B2B brand easier to understand across both traditional and AI-powered search.
How Does ChatGPT Search Find Websites?
ChatGPT Search can search the web and provide answers using information from relevant online sources. OpenAI explains that ChatGPT Search can use third-party search providers and other sources to find information, then provide links and citations to relevant webpages.
For website owners, this means there are two important questions to consider.
First, can ChatGPT Search access your website? Second, does your website contain information that is useful and relevant enough to be surfaced for a particular query?
The first question is technical. The second is largely about content, relevance, authority, and how clearly your business is represented online.
This is why simply adding the words “ChatGPT” or “AI search” to your website is not a meaningful GEO strategy. The goal is to make the underlying information more useful and understandable.
Make Sure ChatGPT Can Crawl Your Website
The first technical step is to make sure you are not unintentionally blocking the crawler used by ChatGPT Search.
OpenAI currently identifies OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used to discover content for ChatGPT Search. OpenAI’s publisher guidance recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to access website content if you want that content to be available for discovery, summaries, snippets, citations, and links in ChatGPT Search.
This is especially important for B2B websites using security plugins, CDN services, firewalls, bot protection, or custom robots.txt rules.
A website may be perfectly accessible to a normal visitor while still preventing an automated crawler from accessing certain pages.
Therefore, GEO optimization should start with a basic technical question: Can the relevant OpenAI crawler actually reach the pages you want to be discovered?
Check Your Robots.txt File
Your robots.txt file controls crawler access to different parts of your website. If OAI-SearchBot is unintentionally blocked, your content may not be available for ChatGPT Search in the way you expect.
For example, when reviewing a B2B website, I would check whether robots.txt contains rules that unintentionally restrict important content directories or the entire website.
You should also review your robots.txt alongside your noindex settings, XML sitemap, canonical URLs, server configuration, CDN, and security rules. A single configuration should not be considered in isolation.
OpenAI also notes that if a page is blocked from crawling but its URL is discovered elsewhere and relevant signals exist, ChatGPT may still surface a link and page title in certain contexts. If you specifically do not want a page to appear, OpenAI recommends using a noindex meta tag while allowing the crawler to access the page so that the directive can be read.
Build a Clear Website Structure
AI search optimization starts with the same foundation as good technical SEO: a website that is easy to navigate and understand.
Your website should have a logical relationship between the homepage, product categories, individual products, solutions, industries, case studies, resources, About Us, and contact pages.
For example:
Home → Products → Hotel Bed Linen → Hotel Bed Sheets
And:
Home → Solutions → Hospitality → Hotel Linen Solutions
This structure helps users understand where they are and creates clear relationships between different pieces of information.
For B2B companies, website architecture is particularly important because products are often connected to industries, applications, technical specifications, and buyer questions.
If you are planning a B2B manufacturing website, our guide on what pages a B2B manufacturing website should have covers the main page types that can support both SEO and lead generation.
Make Your Brand Easy to Understand
One of the most important GEO principles is also one of the simplest: make it obvious who your company is and what it does.
Your homepage, About Us page, product pages, and other important pages should consistently communicate your company name, business category, products, target customers, markets, and capabilities.
For example, if you manufacture hotel textiles, do not make visitors search through several pages to discover that you manufacture bed linen, towels, bathrobes, and customized hospitality products.
Clearly explain:
- Who your company is
- What products or services you provide
- Which industries you serve
- Which countries or markets you serve
- What makes your company different
- What manufacturing or technical capabilities you have
- What certifications or qualifications you hold
- What types of customers or projects you work with
This creates a stronger and more consistent brand entity across your website.
Create Content Around Real Questions
People do not always search AI tools using short keywords.
Instead of searching Google for “hotel towel GSM,” a buyer may ask ChatGPT:
“What GSM should hotel towels have for a luxury hotel?”
Instead of searching for “industrial filter manufacturer,” a buyer may ask:
“How do I choose an industrial filtration system for solid-liquid separation?”
This is why question-based content is an important part of GEO.
Useful content formats include:
- What Is articles
- How To guides
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Product comparisons
- Buying guides
- Application guides
- Technical explanations
- Case studies
- Troubleshooting guides
- Industry-specific resources
The objective is not to create hundreds of pages simply because they contain question keywords. Each page should answer a real question with useful and specific information.
Write Clear, Direct Answers
AI systems need to understand the information on a page before they can potentially use it in an answer.
That makes content clarity important.
If an article answers “What is hotel linen?” do not spend the first 500 words talking about your company’s history. Give the reader a clear explanation first, then add relevant details, examples, and company expertise.
For important questions, a useful structure can be:
Question → Direct answer → Explanation → Evidence or example → Related information
This does not mean every page needs to sound like a chatbot. You should still write naturally for human readers.
The goal is simply to make important information easy to identify, understand, and reference.
Optimize Product and Solution Pages
One mistake I see in B2B websites is putting most of the effort into blog content while leaving product pages extremely thin.
If your goal is to generate leads, product and solution pages are often more commercially important than informational articles.
A strong product page should explain what the product is, what it is used for, who it is designed for, its specifications, available options, applications, advantages, certifications, and relevant buyer considerations.
For manufacturers, include useful technical information whenever possible. Product dimensions, materials, performance data, manufacturing capabilities, customization options, MOQ, lead time, testing information, and application scenarios can make a page significantly more useful.
Then connect those product pages to supporting articles.
For example:
Technical article → Product category → Product page → Inquiry
This connects informational search with commercial intent.
Strengthen Internal Linking
Internal linking is one of the easiest ways to improve the relationship between different pieces of information on your website.
For GEO, think beyond simply passing SEO authority. Ask whether your internal links help explain the relationship between your brand, products, expertise, industries, and content.
An article about hotel towel GSM could link to your hotel towel product page. The product page could link to a guide about choosing hotel towels. Both pages could link to your hospitality solutions page, while the About Us page explains the company’s manufacturing capabilities.
This creates a connected information system instead of a collection of isolated URLs.
High-traffic informational pages should also guide relevant visitors toward commercial pages. This is particularly important for B2B websites where a visitor may need to research for weeks before contacting a supplier.
Show Real Experience and Expertise
Generic content is easy to produce. Useful industry knowledge is harder to fake.
This is where real experience becomes important.
If your company has manufacturing experience, explain actual manufacturing processes. If you have completed projects, publish case studies. If your engineers have solved specific technical problems, document those solutions.
Useful evidence can include:
- Real project examples
- Original testing data
- Technical specifications
- Factory or production information
- Customer applications
- Certifications
- Author information
- Industry experience
- Original photographs
This is much more valuable than repeatedly saying that your company is “professional,” “leading,” or “the best.”
For B2B GEO, I would focus on evidence rather than adjectives.
Build Relevant External References
Your website is only one part of your brand’s online presence.
Relevant third-party references can provide additional context around your company and expertise. These can include industry publications, professional associations, supplier directories, customer case studies, interviews, industry blogs, and other credible websites.
The objective should not be to buy hundreds of low-quality backlinks.
Instead, build a network of relevant and trustworthy references that consistently describe your business, products, expertise, and market.
This is also why SEO and GEO overlap significantly. A strong backlink strategy can support both organic search visibility and broader brand discovery.
Keep Your Brand Information Consistent
Your brand should not look like a different company on every platform.
Make sure your website, LinkedIn company page, founder profile, industry profiles, business directories, and other important online references use consistent information about your company.
This includes your:
- Brand name
- Business category
- Products and services
- Industry
- Target customers
- Website URL
- Company description
For B2B companies, LinkedIn can be particularly useful because it provides another public source connecting people, companies, products, and professional expertise.
You can also publish your website’s useful content on LinkedIn and link back to the original article. This creates another route for people to discover your brand and content.
Improve Technical SEO and Page Experience
GEO does not eliminate the need for technical SEO.
Your website should still be crawlable, indexable, mobile-friendly, fast, secure, and logically structured.
Check for common technical problems such as:
- Broken internal links
- 404 errors
- Incorrect canonical URLs
- Accidental noindex tags
- Robots.txt blocking
- Duplicate pages
- Slow page loading
- Poor mobile usability
- Orphan pages
- Incorrect redirects
These problems can make it harder for search engines and AI crawlers to access and understand your content.
OpenAI specifically recommends ensuring that your website host or CDN allows traffic from OpenAI’s published search crawler infrastructure in addition to checking crawler permissions.
Use Structured Data Where Appropriate
Structured data can help search engines understand what different elements of a page represent.
For B2B websites, relevant structured data may include Organization, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, and other types that accurately describe the content.
However, structured data should not be treated as a shortcut to ChatGPT recommendations. It is better viewed as part of a broader effort to make your website’s information machine-readable and consistent.
The structured data should accurately represent the visible content on the page. Adding irrelevant or misleading schema simply because it contains more fields is not a good GEO strategy.
Turn Informational Traffic Into B2B Leads
Optimizing for ChatGPT Search should not become another vanity project where the only goal is getting mentioned by AI.
For a B2B company, the ultimate objective is still to connect qualified buyers with the business.
Suppose an article about “How to Choose Hotel Bed Linen” attracts visitors from Google and AI search. That article should provide relevant internal links to hotel bed linen products, customization services, case studies, and a contact or quote page.
This creates a natural path:
AI search → informational article → product page → inquiry
The same model works for industrial equipment, filtration systems, machinery, electronics, building materials, and other B2B products.
High-traffic content should not become a dead end.
How to Measure ChatGPT Search Visibility
Measuring AI search visibility is still less standardized than measuring traditional SEO, so I recommend looking at several signals rather than relying on one metric.
First, monitor whether your brand is being mentioned in relevant AI answers. You can create a fixed set of questions around your products, industries, competitors, and target markets, then periodically check how your brand appears.
Second, monitor whether your website pages are being cited or linked when ChatGPT Search answers relevant questions.
Third, track referral traffic from ChatGPT in analytics. OpenAI states that referrals from ChatGPT Search include the UTM parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com, which can be used to identify this traffic in analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.
For B2B businesses, I would also connect AI visibility with traditional business metrics:
- Organic traffic
- ChatGPT referral traffic
- AI mentions
- Cited pages
- Organic conversions
- Qualified inquiries
- Target-market visibility
The goal is not simply to increase mentions. The goal is to increase relevant visibility that can eventually contribute to qualified business opportunities.
Common ChatGPT Search Optimization Mistakes
Trying to guarantee ChatGPT recommendations. No legitimate GEO technique can guarantee that a particular brand will appear in a specific ChatGPT answer. OpenAI explicitly states that search placement is not guaranteed.
Blocking OAI-SearchBot. A technically strong website cannot be surfaced through ChatGPT Search in the intended way if the relevant crawler cannot access the content.
Creating AI-generated content at scale without expertise. Publishing hundreds of generic articles does not automatically create authority. B2B websites need useful information, original experience, and evidence.
Ignoring product pages. Blog traffic is useful, but commercial pages are where B2B visitors can learn about products and contact suppliers.
Focusing only on ChatGPT. Your content should still work for Google, other search engines, human buyers, and other AI search systems. A good website should not depend on one platform.
Ignoring external brand signals. Your website is important, but your company’s wider online presence also contributes to how clearly the brand is represented.
A Practical ChatGPT Search Optimization Process
If I were optimizing a B2B website for ChatGPT Search, I would start with the technical foundation.
Step one: check crawlability. Review robots.txt, noindex directives, server responses, CDN settings, security plugins, firewalls, and other systems that may prevent legitimate crawlers from accessing important pages. In particular, verify that OAI-SearchBot is not unintentionally blocked.
Step two: clarify the brand. Make the homepage and About Us page clearly explain who the company is, what it sells, which industries it serves, and which markets it targets.
Step three: improve commercial pages. Build useful product and solution pages containing specifications, applications, buyer information, trust signals, and clear CTAs.
Step four: build question-based content. Cover the questions buyers ask before, during, and after product research. Prioritize useful FAQ, How To, What Is, comparison, application, technical, and case-study content.
Step five: connect everything with internal links. Link articles to relevant products, products to supporting content, and important pages back to the core brand and solution structure.
Step six: strengthen external signals. Publish useful content through LinkedIn, contribute to relevant industry websites, develop customer case studies, and earn credible references.
Step seven: measure and iterate. Track AI mentions, cited pages, ChatGPT referral traffic, organic visibility, and qualified inquiries. Then improve the pages and topics where the data shows an opportunity.
This is essentially the same philosophy I use for GEO: content, technical accessibility, and external brand signals should work together.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing a website for ChatGPT Search is not about finding a secret prompt, adding “GEO keywords,” or forcing an AI system to recommend your company.
It is about making your website and your wider online presence easier to crawl, understand, verify, and connect with relevant buyer questions.
Start with the basics: allow the appropriate crawler to access your content, build a clear website structure, explain your brand clearly, create useful product and educational pages, strengthen internal links, demonstrate real experience, and build relevant external references.
Then connect those efforts to measurement and lead generation.
For B2B companies, I believe the most practical approach is to treat SEO and GEO as one connected search strategy. Google can bring organic search traffic, ChatGPT Search can create another discovery channel, and a well-structured website can turn both types of visitors into business opportunities.
If you want to optimize your B2B website for both traditional search and AI search, learn more about Orangeeweb’s AI Search Optimization (GEO) services or contact us to discuss your website and search strategy.
