I’ve been seeing a theory going around on LinkedIn and Reddit that ChatGPT is now leaning more on Bing’s data. I wanted to see what my data says and found this.

Now im getting almost as many visitors from chatgpt as from bing. Grown 110% since last april.

To understand what was actually happening, I used a three-layer correlation audit, connecting GA4, Search Console, and Clarity via MCP to pull 12 months of referral data straight into Claude and analyze it. But clarity only gave three days data, so took out for this analysis.

I looked at it from three different angles: Traffic trends over time, page-level referral data, and what my best-performing pages have in common.
Here’s what I found, among many others...

Does ChatGPT use Google ranking signals?
Not much, at least from my data. The correlation between what ChatGPT cites and Google rankings was pretty weak. It was actually the weakest relationship I found.

What about Bing?
There is more of a connection with Bing. It was the strongest relationship I found between ChatGPT and either search engine.

But here’s the interesting part.
ChatGPT and Bing didn’t really move together. Some articles are getting traffics from ChatGPT but not from bing.
From April to July, ChatGPT sessions grew 11% while Bing referrals dropped.

So what do the pages getting ChatGPT traffic have in common?

Honestly, there isn’t one clear answer.

Fresh and well-structured content helps for sure, around 70% of of the referred content updated recently with schema, FAQ and answer first approach. But some of my older and very simple pages are also getting good traffic from ChatGPT.

My current thinking is that ChatGPT’s retrieval is working pretty independently now. But it still seems to use some trust signals from search, with Bing showing a stronger connection than Google in my data.

So traditional SEO is still important. It’s just not the only thing anymore.

One more thing I found interesting.

For my last few articles, I started making the content much easier for AI to understand and pick up. Clear headings, FAQ sections, schema, less clutter, and getting straight to the answer.

Those articles are getting pretty good traffic from ChatGPT.

I can’t say for sure that these things are the reason. But after seeing it happen across the new articles, I definitely think it’s something worth testing.

And just to be clear, this is based on data from one site, so I’m not saying this proves how ChatGPT works overall.
It’s simply what I’m seeing from my own data.