What Is GPTBot and How Can It Help Your SEO?

To block or not to block – this is a new question for marketers who are deciding whether they should block GPTbot. GPTBot is a new web crawler created by OpenAI that gathers information from websites to improve the output of ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model. GPTBot crawls websites to better understand the world and the information it contains so that when users type queries into ChatGPT, their results are more accurate. The more GPTbot can effectively index and understand web content, the better it will improve its natural language understanding and generate human-like text.

ChatGPT is not without controversy for digital marketers and content creators. If you’ve poured years of work into your content marketing articles and imagery, it makes sense that you might raise an eyebrow at AI-powered bots like GPTbot as it silently scrapes your content and intellectual property. However, allowing GPTbot access may potentially lead to improved SEO visibility as it can help search engines better understand and index website content.

As a website owner, you can control bot access to your sites using robots.txt files or meta tags. However, blocking GPTbot altogether may not necessarily provide significant benefits, as it is primarily focused on understanding content rather than scraping large amounts of data. Blocking access to GPTBot may not necessarily be a sustainable solution as generative engine optimization efforts continue to expand across the web. However you decide to make your site accessible for GPTBot, it is worth strategically considering how your SEO efforts should be adjusted to include generative engine optimization. If you are a marketer seeing ways to incorporate AI tools into your strategy, ASTRALCOM can help. We have decades of expertise navigating the shifting tides of SEO and can be a partner to you as you seek to grow your reach online.