Does ChatGPT care about your ratings? We checked the data

AI search optimization has a lot of opinions flying around. Most of it is noise.

So we spent two weeks doing something different: we analyzed first-party data. Not opinions. Not guesses. Actual network responses from ChatGPT, dug into to understand what signals it’s actually using.

Here’s what we found about ratings specifically.

Does ChatGPT care about ratings at all? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t show ratings to the user in the response, ratings are influencing which products get recommended. Our data was pretty clear: ChatGPT does not recommend products with an average rating below 4.0. Not sometimes. At all.

That’s a hard floor. If your product is sitting at 3.8 stars, you’re not getting into the recommendation set regardless of everything else.

Should you be putting ratings and reviews on your own product page? Yes. We found that a large proportion of the primary rating source ChatGPT uses is the brand’s own website. It also uses marketplace ratings, but which marketplaces matter depends heavily on the category. For some categories, Amazon dominates. For others, it’s a different platform entirely.

Do the number of ratings matter? Yes, but not as much as you might expect. About 10% of recommended products had fewer than 10 ratings. That means new products have a real shot at getting mentioned as long as they maintain a rating above 4. You don’t need thousands of reviews to be considered.

The implications for GEO strategy are clear:

First, fix your rating floor. If you’re below 4.0, get there before worrying about anything else.

Second, get your ratings on your own website, not just on third-party marketplaces. ChatGPT is reading your pages.

Third, if you’re a newer product with a smaller review count, keep that rating high and you can still compete.

We’re continuing to dig into this data. There’s a lot more to share on citations, reasoning patterns, and what kind of content actually gets surfaced. More soon.