How can I get my site to show up in ChatGPT results?

So yesterday I wrote a longer blog post entirely about SEO and how I’ve been gaming Google to grow my organic traffic to my website over the past few months.

Quickly after posting, someone brought up a great point: “what about ChatGPT??”

As in — “isn’t traditional Search Engine Optimization a dying art now that everyone is using ChatBots (ChatGPT) and Answer-Engines (Perplexity) to find things on the internet these days?”

“I mean even Google gives answers via AI response instead of site links these days:”

And TBH, this is a great question. My view is this: SEO remains alive and well considering the majority of people still use Google & friends as their primary means of searching for things on the internet, but things are changing, and someday soon(?) AI results will be the de-facto mode of search.

Which begs the question: How do I get my website to show up in ChatGPT responses? What is the ChatGPT equivalent of SEO? Chat Engine Optimization — CEO?

I am working on a good answer for this, and honestly ranking for chat responses is still a VERY early, developing field, it’s the wild west these days. So… this may be an ongoing topic. For now I have done a bit of research, and I’ll share my thoughts here

How To Get Your Website to Show Up in ChatGPT Results

First, we must understand how LLM’s decide what to show compared to traditional search results. The short answer is: it’s different, and it’s probabilistic (AI gives different answers to the same query).

Instead of focusing on links and keyword optimization, LLMs rely on mentions of words that frequently appear together across their training data. This means brands should focus on being mentioned in relevant contexts that LLMs draw from, such as news articles, blogs, or forums that discuss topics related to your industry or product.

Unlike Google SEO, where backlinks and keyword use were key, LLMs are more influenced by contextual mentions of your brand. To me this makes Chat-Engine Optimization more of a PR exercise than a simple content exercise.

A great explainer of this comes from Rand at SparkToro:

1) Get Mentioned on Popular Sites in Your Niche

The essential point I gleamed is this: showing up in ChatGPT and Perplexity results is about getting your brand featured on other ‘high authority’ websites. While it’s still an important piece to post good content on your site and make sure it’s optimized to show up in traditional search results, the more important piece is showing up on sites that ChatGPT likes.

This means working to appear on places like: Reddit, HackerNews, Yahoo, or other popular listicle / news / forums sites.

Importantly, directories, videos, and non-text forward websites are probably less likely to show up, because these sites are more sparce in text and ChatGPT is essentially just looking for strings of text that match your query to try and predict what the next word should be.

Of course, the types of relevant websites will vary based on the industry you’re in. If you’re in the food or travel space, then websites like TripAdvisor, Eater, OpenTable, etc. will be the ones you should look for. In the finance space, websites like Yahoo Finance, Benzinga, SeekingaAlpha, Reddit, etc. will be more important.

The best way to find which sites to pay attention to is to use a tool like SparkToro or Ahrefs or SEMRush or SimilarWeb to search for the LLM query you want to show up for, and identify a list of the most popular websites.

For example, I am trying to show up for ‘stock market alerts’, so I go to SparkToro and pull a list of results for high affinity websites related to my search:

Then I suppose the next step is to figure out how to get on these websites’ radars. This is more about reaching out to editors, or commenting on their blog posts if they have a comments feature, or submitting your website to their tools. This is what I mean by it being more of a “PR exercise” because you literally have to do public relations to get noticed by these sites most often.

2. Try Feeding Your Brand into LLM Conversations Directly

This was the second piece of advice I could find when doing my initial cursory search for good answers, and to be honest I’m not convinced how well it works. But it’s worth a shot.

By this I essentially mean: you can actively provide your brand as the answer to results that LLMs provide, and in doing so you may be able to train it to respond to other people’s prompts with your brand.

Example: I ask ChatGPT what the best 10 websites are for setting stock market alerts, it responds with a list that doesn’t include my brand, I then say “What about [my brand]” then it says “oh yeah, that’s a good one” then I continue prompting it until it starts to include my brand in future results by default.

I’m weary of this for a few reasons:

1. It’s not clear how robust providing answers to ChatGPT is at making those answers available to other users. My guess is that this requires a decent amount of scale, so you’d have to do it ALOT or get other people to do the same for it to maybe work

2. Again, LLMs are probabilistic, which means their answer change even when given the exact same query. That means even if you do give ChatGPT or Perplexity your brand a hundred times, it’s still not a guarantee that it will continue showing up.

There may be some ways to scale this. Some LLMs offer API access where you can essentially feed data in programmatically that will be entered into it’s knowledge base. Another way might be to ‘game’ customer review sites to get your brand to show up often, but that is a bit shady and some models avoid presenting ‘user-generated content’ for privacy reasons.

OVERALL: It’s Still Very Unclear How to Do This Reliably

I expect that learning to make Chat-Engines show your brand in the results reliably will be a developing field for the next few years. People will probably figure out how to game the system, and the models will probably evolve.

For now, I think the best thing you can do is to continue doing your best in terms of traditional SEO, with some additional emphasis on getting high-ranking backlinks (ie. getting your brand featured on high-authority sites in your niche). You may be able to game the system by entering your brand into prompts carefully and often, but whether or not that works at scale remains to be seen.

I, for one, am very interested to see how this evolves, and will continue to monitor good ways of doing this. I’d like to do another post on this in a month or two once I’ve got some better answers. For now, if you have any ideas, please share :-)

That’s all for today!

Peace,

Ramsey