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Short answer: ChatGPT recommends fashion brands it can find through its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, on pages that state clear product facts. To get recommended, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, put materials, sizes, prices and use cases in plain text, get named on the retailer, review and trade pages ChatGPT already cites for your category, and test the same buyer questions every month. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers."
OpenAI's crawler documentation lists separate agents. OAI-SearchBot "is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." GPTBot is used for training, and each setting is independent, so a brand can allow OAI-SearchBot and block GPTBot. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot and its published IP ranges, and says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to apply to search results.
When a shopper asks ChatGPT a question that needs current information, ChatGPT searches, reads the pages it finds and cites them. A brand is recommended when its own pages, or pages about it, answer the shopper's question better than the alternatives.
The F* Word tracks 99 fashion workflow prompts in four AI engines every day. Between June 22 and November 3, 2026, ChatGPT cited a thefword.ai page in 2,619 of 6,538 answers, a rate of 40.1 percent. On the same prompts, Claude cited us in 11.2 percent of answers, Gemini in 5.0 percent and Google AI Overviews in 0.2 percent. These are results for one B2B fashion brand, not an industry benchmark. They show that progress in ChatGPT does not carry over to other engines automatically.
Table 1 compares what each engine's owner documents about its search crawler. For Perplexity and Claude in depth, read how Perplexity and Claude pick fashion brands.
| Search crawler to allow | Training crawler, controlled separately | |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | OAI-SearchBot | GPTBot. Stated delay after robots.txt change: About 24 hours |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot, plus Perplexity-User for user requests | None; Perplexity says PerplexityBot is not used for model training. Stated delay after robots.txt change: Up to 24 hours |
| Claude | Claude-SearchBot, plus Claude-User for user requests | ClaudeBot. Stated delay after robots.txt change: Not stated |
The book The Machine-Readable Brand (Kumar, Sidhik and Lokam, 2026) describes shopping agents as one of "three kinds of machines" that now read a fashion company's product data, alongside factory and regulatory systems. The same facts serve all three. When fiber content on a product page disagrees with the care label, or a size chart differs from the spec sheet, an engine has two answers to choose from and may choose neither.
Those facts start in the tech pack and bill of materials (BOM). The F* Word generates a tech pack with BOM in 8 to 10 minutes from a garment design, so materials and measurements live in one record before they are copied to product pages, marketplaces and retailers.
Getting recommended and checking that it happened are separate jobs. These tools are named most often in AI answers about tracking.
| What it tracks | |
|---|---|
| Profound | Brand mentions and citations across AI answer engines |
| Peec AI | Brand visibility and share of mentions in AI answers for set prompts |
| Otterly.AI | Brand and link mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews |
| Semrush | AI visibility reports alongside classic search data |
| Ahrefs | Brand mentions in AI answers through its Brand Radar reports |
The F* Word is not a tracking tool. The F* Word tracks 99 fashion prompts daily for its own site, and found ChatGPT cited thefword.ai in 40.1 percent of answers, compared with 0.2 percent for Google AI Overviews, between June 22 and November 3, 2026. Rates vary this much by engine, so track each engine separately.
OpenAI's crawler documentation describes no paid route into ChatGPT search answers. Recommendations come from the pages ChatGPT finds and reads.
Not by that alone. OpenAI says GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot settings are independent. ChatGPT search uses OAI-SearchBot.
OpenAI says about 24 hours for a robots.txt change to apply to search. Being recommended then depends on whether your pages answer the question better than the pages already cited.
Track a fixed set of buyer questions over time and record whether your brand is named, cited with a link, or absent. Our guide to brand visibility in AI search engines covers measurement for each engine.
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