How to Get Your Startup Cited by ChatGPT

Last updated: 2026-10-16

TL;DR

• ChatGPT cites written pages, not video. In our August 2026 audit of past TwoSetAI podcast guests, ChatGPT reached guests through written surfaces (founder profiles, twosetai.com pages, Medium posts), not through the YouTube episode itself [1].
• ChatGPT does not always search. When it answers from training without live retrieval, no citation attaches at all. OpenAI has not published search-invocation rates, so this is observational rather than quantified.
• The playbook has six steps: build the written companion to any video, earn Bing’s index (practitioners treat it as one of ChatGPT Search’s inputs; OpenAI has not documented the mix), create a canonical founder page, earn third-party corroboration, publish specific-claim content, measure.
• What will not work: keyword stuffing, video-only content, paid or advertorial content (0.3 percent of AI citations per Muck Rack [2]), or generic AI-generated content without voice provenance.

The question “how do I get my startup cited by ChatGPT” is a different question from “how do I get cited by AI search.” Google AI Mode and Perplexity behave one way; ChatGPT behaves another. The playbook below is specifically for ChatGPT. For the broader framing, see What Is Founder Visibility in AI Search?.

Does ChatGPT cite YouTube videos?

Rarely, in our data and in the industry data.

In our August 2026 audit of past TwoSetAI podcast guests, ChatGPT reached guests through third-party authoritative written pages (founder profiles, twosetai.com pages, Medium posts), not through the YouTube episode itself [1]. The clearest single case: a search for “best interviews with Alex Berger” (COO, Bolt.new) in incognito returned our TwoSetAI episode as the “Best overall” answer, and the links behind it were Medium posts, not the YouTube URL.

Industry data points the same way. OtterlyAI’s 2026 YouTube Citation Study found that ChatGPT accounts for roughly 4 percent of YouTube AI citations industry-wide, while Google AI Mode and Perplexity carry the bulk [3]. ChatGPT is not the engine that cites your video; it is the engine that cites the written surface around your video.

The practical implication is that a founder whose entire content strategy is video with no written companion is largely invisible to ChatGPT. The video can be excellent and still never reach the engine, because the engine does not reach for it.

How does ChatGPT actually find pages to cite?

Three steps happen inside ChatGPT before a page gets cited. Understanding each one tells you where you can intervene.

1. The decision to search. ChatGPT does not always invoke live web search. When a query can be answered from the model’s parametric knowledge, it answers without searching, and no citations attach. OpenAI has not published a search-invocation rate, so the share is observational. The practical implication: for a page to be cited, the query has to be one that pushes ChatGPT into search mode. Specific entity queries, current-event queries, and comparison queries push harder; broad definitional queries push less.

2. The search itself. OpenAI’s October 2024 launch of ChatGPT search described the tool as returning “answers with links to relevant web sources” using third-party search providers and partner content [4]. OpenAI does not publicly document the exact mix of indexes ChatGPT Search draws from. Practitioners treat Bing as a major input, since Microsoft and OpenAI have a longstanding partnership, but OpenAI also appears to maintain its own cache or partial index [11]. The practical implication for a founder is the same either way: Bing’s index is a documented value in its own right (even if the Bing-to-ChatGPT path is practitioner inference), and OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI’s own crawler for its search surface. Both should be allowed in your robots.txt.

3. The citation choice. From the candidate set, ChatGPT selects pages that score as authoritative, specific, and text-dense. Studies disagree on the exact share of each platform, which is a healthy sign that the data is not a single leaked internal number. Analyze AI’s analysis of 83,670 citations put Wikipedia at 12.1 percent of ChatGPT citations [5]; Ahrefs’ July 2026 Brand Radar analysis of US ChatGPT citations across all topics put Reddit at 16.7 percent and Wikipedia at 8.9 percent [12]; Semrush’s March 2026 study of 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited by AI search found ChatGPT Search cited LinkedIn in 14.3 percent of responses, the highest among the three engines Semrush tested [6]. Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis of over 1 million AI-cited links put journalism at 27 percent of citations and paid or advertorial content at 0.3 percent [2].

The pattern across studies is consistent even where the specific percentages are not: ChatGPT prefers encyclopedic entities, community discussions (Reddit), authored long-form (LinkedIn), and journalism, in roughly that order.

The six-step playbook

Step 1: Build the written companion to any video content

A YouTube video alone will not get you cited by ChatGPT. A written article that opens with the same thesis, carries the same sentences a buyer could lift, and lives on a crawlable text URL stands a much better chance.

Our own standing stack for every recorded conversation includes a published written editorial page, a Medium article, and a Substack post, each distinct enough to earn its own citation and each pointing at the others. The full stack is covered at the Founder Visibility Program.

Step 2: Earn Bing’s index and allow OpenAI’s crawler

Being indexed by Google is necessary but not sufficient for ChatGPT. Two documented paths exist and both are worth taking:

• Bing’s index. OpenAI and Microsoft’s longstanding partnership makes Bing a plausible candidate index for ChatGPT Search, even though OpenAI has not publicly documented the exact mix. IndexNow is Microsoft’s documented submission protocol for Bing (and other partner engines), and the Bing Webmaster Tools URL Submission API accepts a daily URL submission quota per site (currently 100 at the time of writing; the number has varied over the years, so check Bing Webmaster Tools for your account’s current cap). Whether these pings travel on to ChatGPT is not confirmed by OpenAI; practitioners treat the connection as inference, not vendor policy [11]. Either way, getting into Bing’s index is a documented value in itself and the cost is near-zero.
• OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. OpenAI’s own bot documentation names three crawlers: OAI-SearchBot (surfaces pages in ChatGPT Search), ChatGPT-User (direct user-initiated fetches), and GPTBot (training) [13]. OpenAI’s recommendation is to allow OAI-SearchBot. Sites that opt out “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links” [13]. Our own robots.txt names OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, and GPTBot in an explicit allowlist. Blocking any of them, intentionally or through an overbroad User-agent: * disallow, is one of the most self-inflicted citation gaps a founder can create.

Being in both indexes is the floor. It does not guarantee a citation; it makes one possible.

Step 3: Create a canonical founder page

ChatGPT reaches through named-entity pages. The clearest version is a page that lives at your name, carries a clear who-they-are paragraph, lists what they are known for, and quotes them in their own voice.

On our site this takes two forms: a /heroes/<name>/ founder page for each guest, and a long-form editorial post with the founder as the attributed voice. For a founder on their own site, the equivalent is an owned /about/ page plus one or more thesis-level posts under their own byline.

The hostile version to avoid: a page that is “about our company” with no founder attribution. That page may be useful for other purposes but is not the retrievable surface ChatGPT reaches for when a buyer asks a founder-shaped question.

Step 4: Earn third-party corroboration

Models weight claims more when multiple independent sources support them [7]. If the only page claiming you have a specific advantage is your own, the generator may soften the language, pull from a competitor’s page, or drop the claim.

Four reliable corroboration surfaces for a pre-Series B founder:

• Podcast appearances with a published transcript (not just an audio file)
• Community discussions where you are present as a named participant: Hacker News comment threads on AI topics, specific AI subreddits (r/MachineLearning, r/LocalLLaMA, r/LangChain, or a category-specific one), or category-adjacent Discord and Slack spaces where your conversations are indexed or re-posted on crawlable pages
• Trade-press mentions, even short ones, from publications with their own domain authority
• A LinkedIn long-form post that other practitioners quote back

In the audit protocol below, the “cited URLs that are not yours” column is where you learn which of these your buyer’s engine is actually reading.

Step 5: Publish specific-claim content

The GEO KDD 2024 paper reports that GEO methods can boost visibility by up to 40 percent in generative engine responses on a 10,000-query benchmark, with quotations and statistics among the strongest methods tested [8]. Keyword stuffing moved almost nothing.

Specific means a named person, a specific number, a dated event, a reversed decision. “An agent sent the email it was told not to send” beats “AI reliability is a concern.” The first can be lifted and attributed; the second cannot. We cover the pattern at The Quote That Carried the Episode.

Step 6: Measure and iterate

Running the audit from How to Audit Your Citation Gap in 30 Minutes against ChatGPT specifically shows you three cells per prompt:

• Are you named?
• Are you cited to a page where you are the voice?
• Which non-owned URLs are being read instead?

The third cell is the one most founders skip and it is where the next quarter of content work gets planned. The URLs ChatGPT reaches for are where it is actually looking.

What will not work

Four moves founders try that do not move the ChatGPT needle:

• Keyword stuffing. The GEO paper reports that keyword-focused optimization produced negligible visibility lifts [8]; LLM-assembled answers do not reward density.
• Video-only content. Our audit and OtterlyAI’s industry data agree: ChatGPT does not pull from YouTube for most queries [1][3]. A video with no written companion is largely invisible.
• Paid or advertorial content. Muck Rack’s May 2026 analysis put paid content at 0.3 percent of AI citations against journalism’s 27 percent [2]. Sponsored placements buy human reach, not ChatGPT citations.
• AI-generated content without voice provenance. Dai et al. showed neural retrievers can be biased toward LLM-generated text in some scoring setups [9], but Reinhart et al.’s 2025 PNAS study found that LLM writing differs systematically from human writing in grammar and rhetoric and that the gap persists as models get larger [10]. If your content converges on the median LLM voice, you win on neither axis. The pattern is covered at The Founder-Voice Moat and The Ghostwriter Trap.

Related reading

• What Is Founder Visibility in AI Search?
• How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Claude Each Decide What to Cite
• How to Audit Your Citation Gap in 30 Minutes
• Indexed vs Cited by AI
• How AI Cites YouTube Videos
• Founder Visibility Program

Who is TwoSetAI?

TwoSetAI is one of the top AI podcast and video studios in Silicon Valley, and the team behind this article, hosted by Angelina Yang. The show has featured 100+ AI founders and leaders on how real AI products get built, sold, and trusted. Alongside the podcast, TwoSetAI runs the Founder Visibility Program, which builds founder visibility in AI search by turning each conversation into the articles, clips, and pages that make its guests easy to find. Watch full episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/@TwoSetAI, and find every guest and episode at twosetai.com.

Glossary

• OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI’s user-agent for ChatGPT Search’s web crawler. Separate from GPTBot (training) and ChatGPT-User (direct user-initiated fetches).
• Written companion. A text-based page that carries the same thesis, named claims, and quotable sentences as a video or audio recording, published at a crawlable URL under the founder’s attributed byline.
• Founder page (also called: canonical founder surface, named-entity page). A single page at the founder’s name, under their own byline or clearly attributed to them, that an AI engine can retrieve for founder-shaped questions.
• Live search invocation. When ChatGPT invokes web search to answer a query, as opposed to answering from its parametric training. Citations only attach to answers in the first mode.

About Angelina Yang

Angelina Yang is VP of AI, a fast.ai fellow, and the host of the TwoSetAI podcast, where she has interviewed 100+ AI founders and leaders about how real AI products get built, sold, and trusted. Find her on LinkedIn, talk to her AI clone on Delphi, watch the podcast on YouTube, or browse twosetai.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does ChatGPT decide what to cite? When ChatGPT decides to search (it does not always), it draws from an index whose exact composition OpenAI has not publicly documented but which practitioners treat as a mix of Bing’s web index and OpenAI’s own cache [11]. From the candidate set, ChatGPT selects pages that score as authoritative, specific, and text-dense. Wikipedia, Reddit, LinkedIn long-form posts, and journalism are the highest-share source classes across the citation studies that have been published [5][6][12][2].

Does ChatGPT cite YouTube videos? Rarely. In our August 2026 audit of past TwoSetAI guests, ChatGPT reached guests through written surfaces (founder profiles, twosetai.com pages, Medium posts), not through the YouTube episode itself [1]. OtterlyAI’s industry data puts ChatGPT at roughly 4 percent of YouTube AI citations overall [3]. The video is cited by Google AI Mode and Perplexity; the written companion is cited by ChatGPT.

How long does it take for ChatGPT to cite a new page? There is no public documentation on the exact lag. Pinging IndexNow is the fastest documented submission path to Bing’s crawl; the time from an IndexNow ping to a Bing-indexed URL is not published by Microsoft and varies by site, account history, and page type. ChatGPT citation follows once a page accumulates enough corroboration signals to be selected from the candidate set, which practitioners typically see on a scale of weeks rather than hours.

Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitor instead of me? Three usual reasons: your competitor has more corroborating third-party pages (podcasts, press, Reddit); your competitor’s written content is more specific (named claims, specific numbers, dated examples); or you are blocking OAI-SearchBot or ChatGPT-User in robots.txt. The audit protocol at How to Audit Your Citation Gap separates the three.

Does blocking OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt remove me from ChatGPT answers? Per OpenAI’s own documentation, sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links” [13]. The practical answer: block it and you lose your citation surface. ChatGPT may still mention your brand from training data, but it will not fetch your pages to cite them. The explicit allowlist in our own robots.txt names OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, and GPTBot.

Do I need to submit to Bing Webmaster Tools? Not strictly, but it helps. Bing Webmaster Tools accepts URL submissions and sitemap pings for Bing’s index, which practitioners treat as one of ChatGPT Search’s inputs [11]. IndexNow and the Bing URL Submission API are complementary. If you have the Bing account verified, both are low-effort paths to faster indexing.

Will more LinkedIn posts help? Only if they are long-form posts in your own authored voice. Semrush’s data shows ChatGPT cites LinkedIn in 14.3 percent of responses, higher than the other engines they tested, and the cited pattern favors member-authored long-form over company reshares [6]. A twenty-word repost of someone else’s take is not what gets cited.

How do I measure if any of this is working? Run the 30-minute audit from How to Audit Your Citation Gap against ChatGPT specifically. Track three cells per prompt (named, cited to your page, which non-owned URLs showed up). Repeat the audit monthly for a trend.

References

[1] TwoSetAI (2026). Guest search audit, checked August 10 to 25, 2026, incognito, screenshots on file. Internal data; protocol in the Citation Gap audit article.

[2] Muck Rack (2026). “What Is AI Reading? New Insights (May 2026 edition).” https://muckrack.com/blog/what-is-ai-reading-new-insights-may

[3] OtterlyAI (2026). “YouTube AI Citation Study 2026.” Updated March 2, 2026. https://otterly.ai/blog/youtube-ai-citation-study-2026/

[4] OpenAI (2024). “Introducing ChatGPT search.” OpenAI blog, October 31, 2024. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/

[5] Analyze AI (2026). “AI Citation Analysis: 83,670 Citations Across Major Engines.” Referenced in Rodrigo Stockebrand, Answer Engine Optimization, O’Reilly Media, July 2026. https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/answer-engine-optimization/0642572275549/

[6] Loktionova, M. (2026). “We Analyzed 89K LinkedIn URLs Cited in AI Search: Here’s What Drives Visibility.” Semrush Blog, March 10, 2026. https://www.semrush.com/blog/linkedin-ai-visibility-study/

[7] Stockebrand, R. (2026). Answer Engine Optimization. O’Reilly Media, July 2026 (on cross-source corroboration in retrieval-augmented generation). https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/answer-engine-optimization/0642572275549/

[8] Aggarwal, P. et al. (2024). “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.” KDD 2024; arXiv:2311.09735. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735

[9] Dai, S. et al. (2023). “LLMs May Dominate Information Access: Neural Retrievers are Biased Towards LLM-Generated Texts.” arXiv:2310.20501. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20501

[10] Reinhart, A. et al. (2025). “Do LLMs write like humans? Variation in grammatical and rhetorical styles.” PNAS 122(8), e2422455122, February 25, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107

[11] Ray, L. and Schwartz, B. (2024–2026). Commentary on ChatGPT Search’s index composition and the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-search-microsoft-bing-seo-448019

[12] Ahrefs (2026). “Most Cited Domains in ChatGPT” (US, all topics, July 2026 analysis). https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-in-chatgpt/

[13] OpenAI (2026). “Overview of OpenAI Crawlers.” OpenAI Developer Documentation. https://developers.openai.com/docs/bots