How to appear in ChatGPT answers in Morocco

How does ChatGPT choose which businesses to cite?

ChatGPT answers in two ways. Either from what it learned during training, frozen at a given date. Or by searching the web when the question is asked, then citing the pages it selected. This second mode, ChatGPT search, is what lets a new or little-known business appear quickly.

OpenAI uses a dedicated crawler for this: according to OpenAI’s documentation on its crawlers, “OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features”. A page this crawler cannot read cannot be cited.

Can ChatGPT access your website?

Check three things:

• robots.txt: OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site’s robots.txt file. According to its documentation, a change takes effect in about 24 hours.
• Your firewall: some hosts and services such as Cloudflare offer one-click blocking of “AI bots”. This setting can exclude your site from ChatGPT without you noticing.
• Content visible without JavaScript: a page whose text only appears after scripts run is harder for crawlers to read.

GPTBot is another OpenAI crawler, used to train models. OpenAI explains that blocking it only signals that your content should not be used for training: it does not stop you from appearing in search.

Is your website in the search indexes?

An assistant that searches the web first finds what search engines know. A website missing from the indexes is unlikely to be cited, even if it is accessible.

Add your website to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, then submit your sitemap in both. Bing Webmaster Tools also lets you submit your key pages directly to speed up crawling.

What content should you publish to get cited?

AI assistants cite passages that clearly answer the question asked. For each important customer question:

1. Answer in the first sentence, then expand.
2. Use question-style headings, phrased the way your customers ask.
3. Name things: your business, your city, your services, your prices when possible.
4. Back your content with sourced facts. A study by researchers from Princeton and IIT Delhi, published at KDD 2024, measured that citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics increases a page’s visibility in generated answers by 30 to 40%, while keyword stuffing brings nothing.
5. Keep your pages up to date. According to an Ahrefs analysis of about 17 million citations, AI assistants cite content that is 25.7% fresher than Google’s classic results, and ChatGPT shows the strongest preference for fresh content.

In Morocco, also publish in your customers’ languages. DataReportal counts 35.5 million internet users at the end of 2025, or 92.2% of the population, asking their questions in French, Arabic, Darija and English. ChatGPT answers in the language of the question and often relies on sources written in that language.

Why do other websites matter as much as yours?

When a customer asks “what is the best agency” or “which clinic should I choose”, ChatGPT relies heavily on third-party sources. An Ahrefs study of 26,283 source pages shows that “best X” lists make up 43.8% of the pages ChatGPT cites for these questions, and that a brand ranked high in those lists appears more often in its answers.

In practice:

• Be listed in your industry’s directories and platforms, with exactly the same name, address, phone number and description as on your website.
• Create a LinkedIn page and a Google Business Profile consistent with your website.
• Aim to be included in comparisons and articles by Moroccan or specialist media.
• Publish a clear identity page on your website: who you are, what you do, where, since when. See our example: What is Houdour?

How do you know whether ChatGPT cites you?

1. List 20 questions your customers ask before choosing you, in their languages.
2. Ask them to ChatGPT once a month, noting who is cited and which sources appear.
3. Track visits from ChatGPT: according to OpenAI, ChatGPT links add the utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter, visible in your analytics.