ChatGPT-User

ChatGPT-User traffic is the closest thing AEO has to a footprint of live buyer attention: every hit is a moment when a real person's conversation made ChatGPT read your page. That makes it worth watching in your logs as a leading indicator, often moving before referral clicks do. It also carries a warning for the block-happy: because these fetches happen on a user's behalf, OpenAI says robots.txt may not stop them, and aggressive bot protection that returns errors to ChatGPT-User can make your site fail at the exact moment a prospect asked about you. The engine then answers from whatever else it can find, usually a rival or a stale third-party page. Ensuring these fetches succeed, fast responses, no challenge pages for the published IP ranges, is a small technical job that decides whether those visits succeed.