ChatGPT is reading the forgotten corners of your site
One SEO says help centers, docs and even staging sites can end up in ChatGPT answers, and suggests taking inventory.
ChatGPT is running more searches that are limited to a single website, and that means the quieter parts of your site are being used to build its answers. Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) says those searches pull in your subdomains, which are separate sections of your site that sit on their own address, like help.yoursite.com. We covered the first signs of this earlier.
What is getting read
Ray points to help centers, product documentation, forums and content hubs as the kind of material that lives on a subdomain and can now inform what ChatGPT says about you. She also flags staging sites, the unfinished test copies of a website that owners often forget are public.
That is the part worth a minute of your time. A support article written in a hurry two years ago, or a half-built test version of your site, was never meant to be the thing that describes your business to someone asking an AI tool for a recommendation.
What to do
Ray's suggestion is to start with a list. Write down every subdomain you own, including anything a developer set up and nobody shut down, then decide for each one whether you want that content available to AI tools.
"I would start by taking inventory of all of your subdomains - do you want that information to be available to LLMs? (Think about staging sites, etc.)"
She frames the rest as an opportunity rather than a cleanup job. Once you know what is out there, you can look at your help center, docs and forums and improve how they describe your products and your brand, because those pages are now doing part of the work your homepage used to do alone.
This is one SEO's observation, based on a screenshot of the URLs ChatGPT retrieved for a single query. It is not a Google or OpenAI announcement, and nobody has published numbers on how often it happens.
If you only do one thing, ask whoever built your site for a list of every subdomain pointing at it, and check whether any staging or test version is still reachable by the public.
I would start by taking inventory of all of your subdomains - do you want that information to be available to LLMs? (Think about staging sites, etc.)
Be the person who already knew
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