Defined term

GPTBot

GPTBot and friends

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Definition

GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler for gathering web content. It sits alongside agents with different jobs, including OAI-SearchBot for search indexing and ChatGPT-User for fetches triggered by a user's request, and other vendors run their own set such as PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended.

Why it matters

Teams routinely block the training crawler and the retrieval agent with one rule, then wonder why they are never cited. The two decisions are separable and usually should be separated.

How to measure it

List every agent your robots.txt names and what each one is for, then confirm the server actually behaves that way for each user agent. Treat unknown agents as a review item, not as a default block.

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FAQ

Questions teams ask before they start

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap on technical access and content quality, but GEO measures the answer itself — whether the brand is named, recommended and cited — instead of a ranking position.

How often should results be remeasured?

Keep the question set stable and rerun on a fixed cadence, then compare like with like. Changing questions and cadence at the same time makes results incomparable.

Does being cited mean being recommended?

No. A page can be cited as background while a competitor is the one actually recommended. The two are reported separately.

Is this written by AI?

Drafts can be generated, but every published piece goes through human review. Nothing reaches the site automatically.

How does this relate to traditional SEO?

It overlaps but is not the same. Both reward clear, credible content; only one of them is measured by whether a model names you in an answer.

Where do the definitions come from?

From how the measurement actually works in the product, so the vocabulary on the site and the numbers in the workspace mean the same thing.

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