Measured, then read literally
What does ChatGPT look for on my website?
On our own sample it searched company domains for plain, checkable words. 162 of the 595 searches we recorded contained “official”, and several restricted themselves to one company’s domain while asking for “official board certified”. Not keywords in the SEO sense. The words a person would use to confirm that a business is what it says it is.
The searches, verbatim
Each of these was issued by ChatGPT against a single company’s own domain while it answered a question about who to hire:
site:plasticsurgerygroup.net Cincinnati plastic surgery group official board certifiedsite:theplasticsurgerycenterofnorthernkentucky.com Cincinnati plastic surgeon official board certifiedsite:sportysacademy.com Cincinnati flight training official Sporty’s Academy Clermont Countysite:trihealth.com Cincinnati cosmetic plastic surgery official board certified
Three things recur: what the business is (plastic surgeon, flight training), where it operates (Cincinnati, Clermont County), and what it is certified in (board certified). 15 of the 595 searches also contained “licens”, and 17 asked about cost or price.
Source. What AI searches for when someone asks it to recommend a business · 162 of 595 search strings contain “official”, 157 contain site:, 28 contain both · all from ChatGPT (gpt-5.4) · sampled 24 and 25 August and 16 September 2026 · Vector Index’s own research runs, no client data.
What follows from it, stated carefully
We recorded the searches, not their effect. Nothing here shows that adding a sentence to a page changes an answer, and we have not run the test that would show it. Treat the finding as a checklist you can verify rather than a lever we have proved.
What you can check today, on your own site, without buying anything:
- Is your category in text? Not in a logo, a hero image, a slider or a PDF. Plain text a parser can lift.
- Is your service area in text? Named places, not a map embed and not “serving the tri-state area”.
- Are your credentials stated and attributable? The certifying body named in words, on a page, rather than a badge image with no alt text.
- Does any of it survive with JavaScript off? If the text only exists after a script runs, assume some readers never see it.
None of that is exotic and none of it is new advice. The reason to raise it is that the engines in our sample were asking for exactly these things by name.
What we are not telling you to do
We are not going to recommend an llms.txt file on the strength of this. We looked into that separately and found no evidence it is read. We are also not recommending more pages: a hundred pages that never state plainly what you are will not out-perform four that do.
What we found on llms.txt · Why it may not mention you · Whether you need Reddit · How we measure
Questions we get asked about this.
What does ChatGPT look for on my website?
On our sample it searched company domains for plain confirming words: what the business is, where it operates and what it is certified in. 162 of 595 recorded searches contained "official" and several asked a single company's domain for "official board certified".
Should I add an llms.txt file?
We found no evidence it is read, so we do not recommend paying for one. Nothing in the 595 searches we recorded went looking for such a file.
Do I need schema markup for AI search?
Structured data helps a machine state unambiguously what a page is about, which is worth having. But it is not a substitute for the same facts being in readable text, and nothing in our measurement shows markup alone changing an answer.
Does keyword density matter for AI answers?
Nothing in our data supports that framing. The searches we recorded were looking for confirmable facts, such as a category, a place and a credential, not for repeated phrases.
Will adding these words get my business recommended?
We cannot say that, and we would not. We measured what engines searched for, not what changes an answer. These are things you can verify are true and findable on your own site, which is a different and more honest claim.
We publish what we find.
We're measuring AI answers in Cincinnati and will publish what we find, including our own results, including when they're unflattering. No pitch attached.
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