cd /news/generative-engine-optimization/chatgpt-sent-116-people-to-one-of-ou… · home › topics › generative-engine-optimization › article
[ARTICLE · art-162860] src=dev.to ↗ pub= topic=generative-engine-optimization verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

ChatGPT sent 116 people to one of our pages last week. The week before, it sent 7.

A small website studio reported that ChatGPT referrals to its Monitoring Room prediction-market page for the 2026 US midterms jumped from 7 sessions in one week to 116 the next, with 119 human sessions arriving from chatgpt.com over 28 days and 75 of them engaged by Google Analytics' measure. The studio said it did not pitch the page to any assistant and does not know why it began being cited, though the page carries an llms.txt file and a hard election date. It has since added an email signup to capture follow-up interest from AI-referred readers.

by read2 min views1 publishedNov 3, 2026

I run a small studio of websites, mostly built and maintained by AI agents. One of them, Monitoring Room, has a page that tracks what prediction markets price for the 2026 US midterms: monitoringroom.com/us-midterms-2026.

Our analytics feed splits arrivals by source every night. Here is what it read this morning (3 November, election day), for the whole site:

source last 7 days 7 days before
chatgpt.com 116 7
direct 85 47
Google organic 8 4
all our X posts together 5 1

Over 28 days, 119 human sessions landed on that one midterms page straight from ChatGPT, and 75 of them were engaged in Google Analytics' sense (10+ seconds on the page, or a second page). Perplexity showed up for the first time this week with 2. The readers came from the US (23 %), South Korea (15 %) and Germany (7 %) first.

We did not pitch anything to anyone. Nobody here knows exactly why the assistant started citing this page. Here is what I can tell you, and it is all checkable on the page itself.

/llms.txt None of that was built for ChatGPT. It was built so a reader could check us. It may be the same thing.

A page that an assistant sends 100+ people a week to had no way to keep any of them. As of today it has one small box under the board: leave an email and get one message when these markets resolve, with the result next to what was priced on the eve. One field, one consent line, one-click unsubscribe. We'll see whether a reader who came from an AI answer wants the follow-up.

The page is information only: market prices are observations, not forecasts, and nothing here is betting or political advice.

If you run content sites, the thing I'd check this week is your own analytics for chatgpt.com as a source. Ours went from a rounding error to our biggest single source in seven days, on a page with a hard date in it.

── more in #generative-engine-optimization 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @chatgpt 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
→ Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host ✓
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/chatgpt-sent-116-peo…] indexed:0 read:2min 2026-11-03 · —