How to get your site into ChatGPT and Alice answers
To get into ChatGPT and Alice answers, you need a page that regular search already finds. Both AI assistants take their sources from there, so you need no special text for AI. For Alice, Yandex's AI assistant, what matters is the Yandex top ten for your question. First, check whether your page is there and whether your robots.txt file blocks the ChatGPT robot.
Roman Kaufman, founder of Kaufman Lab · Data as of: September 2026
On the day our site launched, we asked AI assistants about our topics without naming ourselves. Two weeks later we did it again. The search engines' webmaster dashboards showed no errors. In the second round, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity gave 71 answers, and we were in none of them. Why does a site that works fine mean nothing to an AI assistant? It becomes clear when you see where the AI looks for sources.
Alice takes its sources mostly from the Yandex top ten
Alice AI builds its answer from pages that usually rank high in Yandex search. Yandex itself says this in the Webmaster help pages. Yandex Webmaster is its service for site owners. In the second quarter of 2026, Alice answered 42% of Yandex queries, according to the company's report. If your page is not near the top, Alice will answer your question with other people's sites.
How near the top? The agency Ashmanov & Partners counted it, and Kommersant, a Russian business newspaper, reported on its study in June 2026. From August 2025 to January 2026, the share of sites outside the top ten in Alice answers fell from 40% to 10%.
By the agency's count, the chance of getting into an answer starts to fade after fifth place and almost disappears by places 10–12.
Yandex replied that expertise and the substance of the text are what decide. The two do not conflict. A place in the top ten lets a page into the selection, and quality decides whether Alice takes it.
ChatGPT turns your question into its own search queries
When ChatGPT searches the web, it usually rewrites your question into one or several short queries to search engines. Among its search providers, the OpenAI help pages name Microsoft, the owner of the Bing search engine. So there are two conditions.
First: your page is in such a search engine. As of September 9, we did not have a single page in Bing.
The second condition is about OAI-SearchBot, the robot (a program) that reads pages for ChatGPT search. A site closed to it does not get into search answers, the OpenAI documentation on its robots warns.
The block is set in the robots.txt file, which holds rules for robots. Our site is open to all robots, so our zero did not come from there.
An AI assistant cannot see a site that is not in search for your question
Our site was in search, but not for our questions. As of September 9, Yandex had 18 of our 21 pages in its index.
In the week up to September 9, the site appeared 122 times in Yandex results, and all 122 impressions came from queries with the lab's name. For our topics the site was not in the results, so the AI assistants had nothing to take.
Instead of us, they named 56 other sites. trigub.ru came up most often, followed by Dzen (a Russian blogging platform), RBC (a Russian business news outlet), vc.ru and Habr (a Russian tech community).
Before the measurement, we wrote down that clean technical setup and markup would bring mentions in the first weeks. They did not. Now we think the site did not rise for its topics because it is young and other sites rarely write about it. The measurement is modest. It covers one site, we asked the models through the developer access, not in the chat, and we did not check Alice a second time.
Check who AI assistants name instead of you
Since the answer is built from search, our zero out of 71 still gave us a list of 56 sites that AI assistants already read. You can make such a list for yourself in one evening.
- Write down three questions a buyer would ask an AI assistant, without your site's name.
- Ask each one three times on alice.yandex.ru and chatgpt.com, because the answers change. Write down who was named.
- Type the same questions on ya.ru for Alice and on bing.com for ChatGPT (ChatGPT does not search only there), and look for your page in the top ten.
- Open your-site/robots.txt. Find the line User-agent: OAI-SearchBot or User-agent: *. If it has Disallow: / under it (this blocks the whole site), delete that line. ChatGPT will pick up the change in about a day.
- Two weeks later, repeat steps 2 and 3. Is your page in the top ten? Also open the "Site visibility in Alice AI" report in Yandex Webmaster. It counts only queries for which the site is already in Yandex results.
If your page is not in the top ten, as ours was not on September 9, make a page for that question and check whether search has picked it up. If your page is there, write an article on one of the sites that the AI assistant named instead of you in step 2, and put a link to your page in it.
Frequently asked questions
If I block GPTBot, will my site disappear from ChatGPT?
It will not, because GPTBot collects texts to train OpenAI models. A different robot, OAI-SearchBot, brings sites into ChatGPT search answers, and their settings are independent.
Do llms.txt and markup help you get into AI answers?
Neither Google nor our measurement confirms that llms.txt or special markup help. Google's guide to AI answers from July 2026 says that AI features need no special files and no special markup. Our site had markup from launch, and it brought no mentions.
Why does a colleague see their site in an AI answer, but I don't see mine?
An AI answer changes each time you ask. Igor Novikov, an author on Habr, repeated his questions in August 2026. Alice returned the same set of sources in 67% of repeats, ChatGPT in 32 %. That is why you ask each question three times.
Can you buy a place in an AI answer?
You cannot buy a place in the ChatGPT answer itself. Ads there run as a separate block below the answer and, according to OpenAI, do not affect the answer. We help sites get into AI answers ourselves and we want your trust, so instead of promises we show a measurement. Ask a contractor not for a share of mentions but for leads and their cost.