ChatGPT searches inside the official site. Make sure the answer is on yours.

Cloud AI cites who it can see. New data shows something more specific: once ChatGPT decides who the official source is, it goes and searches inside that source's website.

Searchable, an AI search visibility company, asked five AI assistants 30,000 questions about local news in 100 UK towns and cities on September 9 and 10, 2026. Press Gazette reported the results on October 22: the assistants often skipped local newspapers and went straight to councils and police forces. The more useful part is on Searchable's own data page, which recorded the actual web searches ChatGPT ran before answering.

The study is about local news, not about businesses. But the pattern it shows, how ChatGPT goes looking for the official answer, is the same thing a business owner is up against when someone asks ChatGPT about their kind of business.

The short version

• ChatGPT never searches your exact question. It rewrites it. Across 9,700 recorded searches, none repeated the question word for word. It added the year to 94.5% of them.
• It starts broad, then narrows to one website. In the first round of searches, 11.8% used site:, which limits a search to one domain. In the second round, 70.2% did.
• The site it searches inside usually gets cited. In the 981 answers where ChatGPT used site:, it cited at least one of the sites it searched inside 76% of the time.
• Being returned isn't being cited. About one page in four that the searches returned ended up cited.
• Official sources won the local queries. Press Gazette reports ChatGPT went to council or government sources for 81.3% of questions.
• For a business, the job is to be the obvious official source and to have the answer on your own domain, in the words a rewritten search would use.

What the searches actually looked like

Searchable's clearest example: "What decisions has the local council made in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, UK recently?" One ChatGPT answer ran four searches in two rounds. The first was broad. The next three were site:doncaster.gov.uk searches, and the last two added exact phrases in quotes, like "Cabinet" and "resolved", the words a council actually uses when it records a decision.

Those four searches returned 25 pages from 8 websites. ChatGPT cited 8 pages, and 6 of them were on doncaster.gov.uk. The Guardian, The Times and six Wikipedia pages came back in the same searches and weren't cited.

Read that again as a business owner. ChatGPT decided who the authority was, searched inside that authority's site, and used the vocabulary that authority uses. Big-name pages that were sitting right there in the results didn't make the answer.

Google describes the same general behavior for its own AI features. Its AI features documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode "may use a 'query fan-out' technique — issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources — to develop a response."

What this means for a business site

If ChatGPT treats your site as the official source for your business, it can search inside it. What it finds there is what it has to work with. Three conditions decide whether that goes well:

1. It has to be allowed in. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links." A site: search can't return what the crawler can't reach.
2. The answer has to live on your domain. If your hours, service area, pricing approach, and policies only exist on a Facebook post or a directory listing, a search inside your site comes back empty.
3. The page has to use the words the search will use. ChatGPT's searches were shorter than the question (7.8 words against 11), kept the place name almost every time, and added dates. A page titled "Services" with no town name and no dated update gives a narrowed search nothing to match.

A first-party page check (about 20 minutes)

1. Write the five questions a customer would ask ChatGPT about you. Include the town and the service.
2. Rewrite each the way the study shows ChatGPT does: drop the filler, keep the place and the service, add the year.
3. For each one, find the page on your own site that answers it. If there isn't one, that's the gap.
4. Check that each answering page names the place, names the service in the words customers use, and shows when it was last updated.
5. Open your robots.txt and confirm OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked. (Our robots.txt Field Guide walks through which token does what.)
6. Re-check monthly. Monitoring tells you what changed. It doesn't fix the page.

What this is not (honesty block)

• Not a business-query study. Every question was about local news and local services in UK towns. Searchable didn't test "best plumber near me" style questions. The mechanism is shown; the rates for business queries are unknown.
• Not OpenAI's explanation. OpenAI hasn't published how ChatGPT decides when to use site: or which site counts as official. These are observed searches, not documented rules.
• Not a guarantee. The 76% figure is about answers where ChatGPT had already chosen to search inside a site. It doesn't say how ChatGPT picks that site, and it doesn't promise your site gets picked.
• Search data covers about half the ChatGPT answers. Searchable says search details were returned for 3,002 of its 6,000 ChatGPT answers; every search figure here comes from those.
• Logged out, UK location, two days. Prompts ran with no signed-in account on September 9 and 10, 2026. Results for signed-in users, other countries, or later dates may differ.
• A vendor study. Searchable sells AI search visibility software. The data page shows its methodology; it isn't peer-reviewed.
• Not about Google's ranking. Google's query fan-out line is a general description. It doesn't say Google uses site: searches the way ChatGPT did here.

Related New Reward Field Guides

• Google is testing a top slot for the official page. Make sure it's yours.
• Cloudflare is helping ChatGPT find more pages. Found is not cited.
• robots.txt is a door, not a usage policy
• Google local pack vs AI Mode visibility

Want the fast read first?

The free AI-visibility score is a quick check: email only, no credit card, a 0–100 read across the engines we track. It won't rewrite your pages. It will show whether AI can see your business clearly.