Does ChatGPT use my website?
Short answer: Yes, in two ways: your pages may be in its training data, and ChatGPT with search fetches live pages when a user asks something it needs to look up.
Yes, in two separate ways, and each one depends on a different crawler being allowed in.
The first is training. OpenAI's GPTBot collects public web content to train future models. If your site was crawlable when that happened, the model may already "know" your business name, location and services, although that knowledge is frozen at the training cut-off and can be months out of date.
The second is retrieval. When a user asks ChatGPT a question that calls for current information, such as "which electricians in Reading do EV charger installs", it runs a web search and reads a handful of pages before writing its answer. That uses OAI-SearchBot for indexing and ChatGPT-User for on-demand fetches. Pages it reads this way can be cited with a link.
So the practical question is not "does ChatGPT use my site" but "can it, and does it choose to". To check:
- Open
/robots.txtand confirmGPTBot,OAI-SearchBotandChatGPT-Userare not disallowed, either explicitly or by a wildcard rule. - Check your CDN or firewall logs for 403 responses to those user agents; "block AI bots" toggles are a common cause.
- Make sure your key pages render without JavaScript, because most AI crawlers do not execute it.
Whether ChatGPT then chooses your page over a directory or a competitor depends on how clearly the page answers the question. A service page whose first paragraph states what you do, where, for whom and roughly what it costs is far more likely to be lifted into an answer than one that opens with a slogan.
You can see whether ChatGPT currently mentions you for typical customer prompts with the free check at /free-check.