{"pageUrl":"https://promagen.com/how-chatgpt-decides-what-to-cite","lastModified":"2026-05-10","provenanceHash":"sha256:bcab2bc140ce2e406b2a115cabb5c2247ade9fd8a6839835cfe6dc9b00679b0b","provenanceNote":"OpenAI bot names and robots.txt behaviour are sourced from platform.openai.com/docs/bots. Structural-signal descriptions are either OpenAI-documented or industry-standard technical-SEO hygiene. This page does not claim knowledge of OpenAI's internal retrieval or ranking algorithms.","claims":[{"id":"claim-openai-does-not-publish-ranking","statement":"OpenAI publicly documents the ChatGPT bot user agents — GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot as autonomous crawlers that honour robots.txt allow/disallow rules; ChatGPT-User as a user-triggered fetcher, where OpenAI's bot docs call out that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated requests in the same way as to autonomous crawling — and their purposes, but does not publish a citation ranking or retrieval scoring algorithm. Any claim about ChatGPT internal ranking is inference from observable output, not vendor contract.","evidenceUrl":"https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:1bcc763242cbb952090416efb815bff3efc09da7ce40fb791173c444178dd324"},{"id":"claim-three-bots-distinct-controls","statement":"OpenAI documents three distinct user agents. GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot are autonomous crawlers (training and ChatGPT Search citations respectively) that honour robots.txt allow/disallow rules. ChatGPT-User is a user-triggered fetcher invoked by user action in ChatGPT; OpenAI's bot documentation calls out that robots.txt rules may not apply to user-initiated requests in the same way as to autonomous crawling.","evidenceUrl":"https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:6ce02280bb05acbaca5c73c26d7757feead249ba3b632906def02e5b8f38da54"},{"id":"claim-citation-density-observational","statement":"Observed citation density in ChatGPT Search answers is 0–4 per retrieval-augmented answer; pure model-knowledge answers typically show 0. OpenAI does not publish citation density as a documented contract; treat these numbers as observational, not guaranteed.","evidenceUrl":"https://promagen.com/sentinel/weekly","lastVerified":"2026-05-10","hash":"sha256:8a98dfdda5abe3ad4cdd005c2aeed68351948d5bd31928b1ec60b79145c6a350"}]}