Why Prompts That Activate ChatGPT Search Are High Priority

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Chris Long with Nectiv, and for today’s GEO tip, one of the highest priority items that you can look for when trying to optimize for ChatGPT is knowing if it uses the search function.

Sometimes ChatGPT will answer with its own internal knowledge base. Other times, it will answer using the search function. When it answers with the search function, it is using search as a wrapper — and these are easier queries or prompts to optimize for.

So, I might type in “What is the best running shoe of 2025?” or “What are the best running shoes of 2525?” And then it’s going to use this search functionality right here, where it’s actually going to go and crawl the web. It’s going to use a combination of Google and Bing to do this.

Then it’s going to draft its answer using the results it aggregated from search and give us a response. Here, you can actually see the different results that it’s pulling in. And if you want, you can even go down to the Sources column and see the exact sites it’s referencing.

These are going to be higher-priority queries to optimize for, as traditional SEO input is going to have much more impact. It’s going to look at the rankings, title tags, freshness — that type of stuff — in order to aggregate results.

At Nectiv, we actually track this in our AI tracker. We track your responses with links — so these would be responses where ChatGPT actually used the search functionality. You can see how that’s changing over time and what percentage of prompts you’re tracking include that.

And in our individual prompts, you can see which ones are more likely to use ChatGPT search. You can identify that by average links. If you sort by average links, you’ll be able to see prompts that more likely than not use search — which are easier to influence than the ones relying on ChatGPT’s internal knowledge base.

So just a quick tip to better set up your site for success with GEO: look for opportunities where it’s using ChatGPT search.