ChatGPT searched the web on 14.4% of answers. Its one-site searches often checked brand sites.

When a customer asks ChatGPT who to hire, the answer may name you, your rival, or nobody. A new study shows how often ChatGPT goes to the web, and where it looks when it does. When a search stays on one site, it often looks at the company’s own site.

What changed

On October 12, Ahrefs published a study of 66.6 million ChatGPT answers from August and September 2026. All came from free, logged-out sessions. This is a vendor study: Ahrefs sells search tools.

Here is what it found:

Few answers searched. Only 14.4% of the answers triggered a web search.
Each search split up. Answers that searched ran about 1.6 searches each, called fan-out queries. Ahrefs studied 15 million of them.
Some searches stayed on one site. 6.8% of those searches used the site: operator, which limits a search to one website. They covered about 116,000 domains.
Those were mostly brand sites. Among the roughly 160 most-searched sites, 75.9% of those one-site searches went to a brand’s own site, not to retailers, government sites, forums or review sites.
Price came up more. Searches with the word “price” rose from 6.0% in August to 8.9% in September.

Ahrefs explains the brand lookups simply: “If you want a product’s price or specifications, a brand site is the obvious place to check.”

The study also looked at which sites ChatGPT cites. That part uses a separate Ahrefs data set of 2.4 to 3.8 million US answers a month. In March, about 1 in 5 answers cited Reddit. By late September, it was about 1 in 43. OpenAI’s partner publishers among the 200 most-cited domains rose from 7.5% of citations in March to 15.8% in July. They still held 12.5% in late September.

Ahrefs names limits. Free, logged-out sessions search less than paid or reasoning models. Its prompts are broad, drawn from real search demand across every topic, not only “best X” buying questions. And the study is a snapshot of a single model, which OpenAI keeps changing.

What this means if AI names your rival

Two things are true at once. Most answers do not search at all, so what the model already knows about you matters. But when ChatGPT does search, Ahrefs says it increasingly goes to whoever owns the information, like the brand that sets the price.

So your own site is one of the places the answer gets checked. If your rival’s site states its price, what is included and where it works, and yours does not, you have given ChatGPT less to read. None of this makes ChatGPT name you. It makes sure your facts are there when it looks.

There is one more catch. Profound, a company that sells AI visibility tools, wrote on October 11 that “Most AI bots go to your site and fetch the initial HTML response.” It says content that appears only after a click, such as pricing in tabs or accordions, is never seen by those bots. That is a company claim. You can check your own pages against it in a few minutes.

The own-site test

Run this on your pricing page and your main service page.

List the five facts a buyer needs before choosing you. For most owners: price or price range, what is included, who it is for, where you work, and how soon you can start.
Open the page in your browser. Right-click and choose “View page source.” The exact words vary by browser. This shows the first HTML your site sends.
Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for each fact. Search for the number itself, like the dollar amount, and for the town names you serve.
Mark each fact: in the source, on the screen only, or missing from the page.
Do the same on your rival’s matching page. It is public, and you are only reading what any visitor can read.

Decision rule: fix a fact that shows on screen but not in the source first. Fix a fact that is missing from the page second. Ask whoever runs your site to put both in the plain page text, not only behind a tab, a click or a script.

If you do not publish prices, say in words how you price. “Quoted per job after a free visit” is a fact a buyer can use.

Check the pages that get cited

Citations are shifting. Reddit fell and partner publishers rose in the Ahrefs data. So the pages that speak for you may have changed since you last looked.

Ask ChatGPT one buying question your customers ask. If it searches, open the sources it lists. If a page gets your facts wrong, ask that site for a correction and point it to your own page.

What to do this week

Write down the five facts a buyer needs from you.
Run the own-site test on your pricing page and your main service page.
Move any fact that only shows after a click into the plain page text.
State your price, or how you price, in words on your own site.
Ask ChatGPT one buying question, open the sources it cites, and note any that get your facts wrong.

If AI names a rival instead of you, name your rival. Book a war briefing with New Reward, and bring their name.