When you launch a site on a brand-new domain, Google takes its time.
It's normal to wait weeks before you show up in search results at all, and months before you rank anywhere useful.
So what about ChatGPT?
In the summer of 2026 we launched nine product sites, each on a fresh domain.
When I lined up the logs, I found that while I was still waiting on Google, ChatGPT had already sent people who went on to sign up.
And when Google traffic to some of those sites dropped to almost nothing, ChatGPT kept sending people anyway.
This post lays out those logs in time order, and ends with what I'd do on a new site if I wanted ChatGPT to send people to it.
What I looked at
Each of the nine sites is a product page plus a blog (how-to and comparison articles).
The products are all over the place: a B2B cloud service, Mac apps, tools for group messaging and bookings.
Some sites have both Japanese and English pages, some are Japanese only.
I'm leaving the product names out and calling them Site A to Site I.
Three sources:
- Raw server access logs (for four of the sites, going back to the day the domain was registered)
- Cloudflare analytics (for the other five; nothing before September 11 is available)
- Google Analytics (all nine; how many people came and where from)
All times are Japan time.
Bots were identified by their user agent and then checked against the IP ranges each company publishes, so only the real ones are counted.
The bots in this story
- Googlebot: collects pages for Google Search
- OAI-SearchBot: collects pages for ChatGPT's search feature
- ChatGPT-User: fetches a page on the spot when someone asks ChatGPT something
- GPTBot: collects pages for training OpenAI's models
OpenAI describes each of these here:
OpenAI's crawlers
The one that matters most here is ChatGPT-User.
It doesn't crawl the web on its own schedule. It comes when a person asks ChatGPT a question.
So a ChatGPT-User hit in your logs means that, at that moment, somebody was asking ChatGPT about something.
Who showed up first
Here's Site A, from the day the domain was registered, in time order.
Walking through it:
The domain was registered in the early hours of August 29, and the SSL certificate was issued at 03:09.
Certificate issuance goes into Certificate Transparency, a public log anyone can read.
An hour later, at 04:08, four bots hit the home page within two seconds of each other.
One of them is literally named CertSignalBot, a bot that watches those certificate logs.
In other words, there are systems out there that pick up new domains and new certificates and start crawling them automatically.
If you've ever looked at your backlinks in Ahrefs and found a pile of links from random overseas sites, many of those are the same kind of thing: sites that scrape new domains and list them.
OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT's search crawler, showed up 20 minutes later, at 04:27.
Googlebot first came two days later on August 31, and Bingbot five days later on September 3.
At that point there were no articles, no press release and no backlinks.
On Site B, where I also have server logs from the start, OAI-SearchBot came about two hours after the domain was registered.
On Site D, Googlebot came first.
Which one comes first depends on the site, but both arrived within a few days of the domain going live.
Does ChatGPT find sites through Google or Bing?
You've probably heard that ChatGPT search runs on Bing.
On Sites A and B, OAI-SearchBot arrived before both Googlebot and Bingbot.
At least at the discovery stage, ChatGPT isn't waiting for Google or Bing to index a site. It sends its own bot.
What it saw to learn about the site, I can't tell you; OpenAI doesn't say.
All the logs show is that OAI-SearchBot came 20 minutes after a certificate-watching bot did.
Where ChatGPT looks for pages when it's answering a question is a separate matter, and these logs can't settle it.
On both Site A and Site B, ChatGPT-User's first visit came after Bingbot's first visit.
At first it just checks the door
One thing to watch out for.
From August 29 to September 3, OAI-SearchBot came by one to six times a day, but all it fetched was robots.txt.
robots.txt is the file that tells bots which parts of a site they're allowed into.
So it was checking whether it could come in, and leaving without reading anything.
Articles started going up on September 2, and at 00:44 on September 4 it read an article for the first time.
It came 56 times that day.
Site I shows the difference even more clearly.
Site I's domain had existed since May, and OAI-SearchBot had been coming since May.
But ChatGPT-User didn't show up until September 8, six days after the first articles went up.
As long as there was nothing to read, ChatGPT never used the site in an answer.
ChatGPT doesn't write a site off after one visit. It keeps coming to the door every day and starts reading once there's something there.
With ChatGPT, people arrive right after it reads
The first person to come to Site A from ChatGPT arrived at 12:18 on September 4.
That's six days after the domain was registered and two days after the first articles went up.
The log shows ChatGPT-User fetching the home page, and four seconds later, a visitor arriving from chatgpt.com.
The sign-ups looked the same.
September 14:
- 14:22:06 ChatGPT-User fetches the home page
- 14:23:37 (91 seconds later) a visitor arrives from chatgpt.com
- 14:23:43 they open the sign-up page
- 14:24:15 (2 min 09 s after the fetch) sign-up complete
September 25:
- 05:05:22 ChatGPT-User fetches the home page
- 05:06:37 (75 seconds later) a visitor arrives from chatgpt.com
- 05:06:42 they open the sign-up page
- 05:07:32 (2 min 10 s after the fetch) sign-up complete
I can't prove from the logs that the fetch and the visit came from the same person's question.
What I can say is that this sequence really happened: ChatGPT read the page, about a minute later someone came from ChatGPT, and they signed up on the spot.
As of October 9, Site A had zero sign-ups from people who came through Google Search.
It had three from people who came through ChatGPT, including these two.
With Google, there are stages between reading and visiting
Google isn't slow because its bot is slow.
Googlebot came to Site A two days after the domain was registered, and from then on read pages dozens to hundreds of times a day.
Google describes Search in three stages: crawling (collecting pages), indexing (understanding and storing them), and serving (showing them in results).
How Google Search works
People only arrive once you're in the results and someone clicks.
For a new site, getting from "crawled" to "near the top of the results" takes time.
With ChatGPT, reading the page and recommending it happen inside one question.
Someone asks, ChatGPT reads the page right then, and puts a link in the answer.
That's why people show up seconds to minutes after the fetch.
When three sites vanished from Google, ChatGPT kept sending people
I compared visits to all nine sites over two eight-day windows: September 25 to October 2, and October 3 to October 10.
On October 3, Sites A, B and C pretty much stopped getting visitors from Google Search.
That lines up with Google's September 2026 spam update. I wrote that part up separately:
What happened to my one-month-old site during Google's September 2026 spam update
On those same three sites, visits from ChatGPT and other AI kept coming: 15 to 7, 14 to 13, and 11 to 7.
Whatever Google decided about those sites, ChatGPT was reading them and recommending them on its own terms.
Across all nine sites, visits from AI went from 85 to 135.
Most of that increase was Site D, though.
In raw numbers, Google Search still sends far more people, four to eight times as many as AI across the nine sites.
I'm not saying ChatGPT replaces Google.
What I am saying is that during the launch period, when Google isn't sending anyone yet, ChatGPT can.
Where ChatGPT visitors landed
I counted the first page that people coming from ChatGPT opened on the nine sites (September 1 to October 10, 257 visits):
- Blog articles: 189 (74%)
- Home page: 48 (19%)
- Pricing and other pages: 20 (8%)
Three out of four landed on an article.
On Site D, a single how-to article for a group messaging app (how to message just one person in a group) brought 24 visits on its own.
ChatGPT is picking articles as the answer to someone's question and sending them there.
How to get ChatGPT to send people to a new site
Based on these logs, here's what I'd do on a new site. Call it ChatGPT SEO (some people call it LLM SEO), though it's mostly about not getting in the way and having something worth reading.
1. Don't block ChatGPT's bots from day one
OAI-SearchBot checked robots.txt on the same day the domain went live.
If you turn it away at that point, it has no reason to come back and read once you've built something.
Open https://yourdomain/robots.txt and check that there's no Disallow: / for OAI-SearchBot, for ChatGPT-User, or under User-agent: *.
According to OpenAI, sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't show up in ChatGPT's search answers.
GPTBot (training) and OAI-SearchBot (search) are configured separately, so you can opt out of training and still let search in.
Besides robots.txt, check that your CDN or server-side bot protection isn't blocking AI bots.
2. Launch once there's something to read
On Site A, OAI-SearchBot started reading articles two days after they went up, and a person came the same day.
On Site I, the domain existed from May, but as long as there were no articles, ChatGPT never used it in an answer.
If you put a domain up with nothing but a "coming soon" page, ChatGPT just checks the door and leaves.
Launch with your product pages plus a few dozen articles that answer your readers' questions, and you have a shot at being recommended in the first week.
3. Answer the questions people ask ChatGPT, one page per question
Three out of four ChatGPT visitors landed on an article.
And not product pitches: articles like "how to message just one person in a group chat" or "how to stop accepting responses on a Google Form", the kind of thing people ask when they're stuck.
ChatGPT goes looking for a page that answers each question as it's asked.
Turn each problem your product solves into an article phrased as the question, and each one becomes a way in.
4. Check it in your logs
There are two places to see whether ChatGPT is sending people.
The first is Google Analytics.
Visitors who click a link in a ChatGPT answer usually show chatgpt.com as the referrer, and the landing URL often ends in utm_source=chatgpt.com.
The second is your server access log.
grep "OAI-SearchBot" access.log | wc -l
grep "ChatGPT-User" access.log | wc -l
If ChatGPT-User is in your log, someone asked ChatGPT a question and ChatGPT came to read your site.
If there's a hit with utm_source=chatgpt.com right after it, that question sent you a person.
Anyone can fake a user agent, so to know it's really OpenAI, check the IP against the ranges OpenAI publishes.
The links to those lists are on the OpenAI crawler page above.
Wrapping up
A new site takes a while to get noticed by Google and start getting search traffic.
In the meantime, ChatGPT didn't wait for Google or Bing. It sent its own bot, started reading once there was something to read, and brought over the person who'd asked, right then.
If you've just registered a domain, first check that robots.txt isn't blocking ChatGPT's bots.
Then launch with pages that answer your readers' questions.
While you wait on Google, ChatGPT can already be sending people.
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