It turns "near me" into a local search
OpenAI gives the example of someone typing "What are some good restaurants near me?" from the San Francisco area: ChatGPT may rewrite that into the search query "top restaurants San Francisco". It works out the general location from the person's IP address and does not share the IP address itself with search providers.[1]
If the person chooses to share their device location, ChatGPT can use more specific information to answer questions about nearby businesses. OpenAI also suggests people include their city, neighbourhood or postcode when local results show the wrong area.[1]
It answers from search results and business listings
ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers and may send them several rewritten, more specific queries. OpenAI's help page points to Microsoft's and Shopify's privacy policies for how those providers handle queries.[1]
To tailor local answers, ChatGPT may share the person's location with trusted third-party providers, such as providers of nearby business listings. Answers that use search can include citations, and on iOS and Android relevant results may include a map.[1]
A business is more likely to be named when it shows up clearly for the plain local search ChatGPT writes (service plus town), on its own website and in the listings those providers draw on.
Only sites its search crawler can read get cited
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that decides which sites can appear in ChatGPT's search answers. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in those answers, though they can still appear as navigational links, and recommends allowing it in robots.txt. Changes to robots.txt can take about 24 hours to take effect.[2]
GPTBot is separate: blocking it signals that your content should not be used to train OpenAI's models, and OpenAI's page ties search appearance to OAI-SearchBot, not GPTBot. ChatGPT-User is used when a person asks ChatGPT to visit a page; it is not used to decide what appears in search.[2]
OpenAI publishes the IP addresses OAI-SearchBot uses. If your hosting or security service blocks unfamiliar traffic, those addresses need to be let through as well as the robots.txt rule.[2]
Sources
- Searching the web with ChatGPT (OpenAI Help Center)
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers (OpenAI)
Numbered points come from these pages, read on 23 October 2026. Lines marked “Our reading” are our interpretation, not the company's words. CiteArtemis isn't affiliated with OpenAI.