“How can I get my business to show up in ChatGPT searches” is a really common question we hear.
To be perfectly clear and upfront, if you have never heard about me or my company before, my name is Natalie Le. I am the founder of Ormi Media. I have helped businesses generate over 920 million dollars in revenue using traditional SEO and now AI-driven discovery. LLM’s form no part in our campaigns. So if you are looking for a prompt you can ask GPT about how to rank better, you won’t find that here. Also, that’s not even remotely how growing your website organically works.
The foundations of getting cited in LLMs are good quality Search Engine Optimization strategies. There’s a lot of new names floating around for this iteration of SEO that focuses on LLM visibility including but not limited to GEO, AEO and AIO. The reality is that we don’t need a new name, SEO never meant ONLY optimizing for Google. When you break down the tactics needed to be cited on an LLM vs ranked in a traditional search engine the majority overlaps completely. It’s the same discipline.
Start with understanding; What is an AI citation is and how does it all work?
In most cases when a user is asking a question related to products and services (we call these commercially geared queries) an LLM like ChatGPT is going to go through a process called Retrieval Augmentation Generation to reduce (not eliminate but that’s another story for another day) possible hallucinations. Essentially these systems rely on outside search engines like Google, Bing and then brave to pull their information from as part of the output process. Open AI is apparently putting together their own index but more about that as it evolves. Currently, the systems rely on existing search partners and platforms.
So if your current visibility on traditional search engines isn’t great, your citations won’t be great either. The good news is that in every campaign I have seen thus far Google is still absolutely crushing it when it comes to driving revenue. In fact, recently our client was generating 1600% MORE revenue from Google than all LLM’s combined, including a paid ad campaign on GPT.
Make your website worthy of citing in ChatGPT
Believe it or not one of the most common issues we see with websites is that they do not clearly convey to the target audience exactly what a company offers.
It can be difficult when you’re writing about your own company because speaking from an expert perspective can sometimes lead to assumptions of what a prospect may already know about you. It needs to be immediately clear what you offer within the first few seconds, using clear language that is not ambiguous or vague. Striking that balance between brand tonality and information conveying is of supreme importance.
A user on your site (and any crawlers or bots) should be able to understand:
- What your company does
- What products or services you provide
- The areas you service or where you ship to
- Who you serve
- What makes your company’s offer unique
- How you can be contacted
A website should follow the SEO fundamentals. Don’t have one page with a million different topics on it. Have a focus, consider the buyer journey and align the page to that experience. It should then be optimized not just for people but to lend itself well to the search engine terms to attract people in the first place.
Actually build brand authority and reviews
Simply performing some technical optimizations on your website isn’t enough to see substantial growth in this iteration of search. LLM’s are taking reviews and other content into account. They need to be current and favorable. So outside of giving your customers a good experience and product or service you should actively encourage them to leave you reviews wherever applicable for your particular business. If your website ranks well in Google but your reviews are not good you run the risk of being dropped from the output you could have been included in.
Authority is a huge factor in every search engine, you need people talking about you. We have observed over the last two decades that the volume of people looking for your brand can either enable or hinder your website growth. It’s the same case in ChatGPT because again, it’s often pulling searches to compile an answer. In a search engine if two businesses were completely equal in every other metric except for one had more people looking up their brand name, that one would take the win. So this is incredibly important. What you do outside of optimizing for traditional search and AI driven discovery is impactful. You have to think about this holistically.
Understand that personalization matters in LLMs
When an LLM does a web search (RAG) there is another process that happens before the answer is given to the end user. There’s a probability score that’s given to each word it puts out (this is actually at a token level but for this argument’s sake let’s keep it simple) and personalization is a factor here. If your user has a history that makes it pretty clear they’re a couple without kids for example and do not want kids, it could be that when they look for their next vacation that a resort that’s family friendly will be deprioritized versus the adults only inclusive resorts.
This poses a challenge when it comes to monitoring growth in this area but more about that later.
Clearing the confusion – implement schema only if you feel like it and it makes sense to
This one is controversial but I have been in SEO for 20 years. Schema is not some magical strategy that’s going to make your website rank whether it’s in traditional search or AI driven discovery. Everyone who is asking an LLM how to increase their visibility this is always a big point listed. In reality if you ask an SEO who’s actually done the job for longer than 5 minutes they’ll tell you it’s not going to create some major uptick. It used to be great for increasing click through rates from the search results themselves if you had the right business that could highlight enticing information like reviews or prices but in general. Add it if you feel like it but you don’t NEED it to get cited or for an LLM to understand your website.
In fact, Mark Williams-Cook made up a fake company to test this with fake schema types in plain text and ChatGPT returned the made up address. LLMs read html they do not parse JSON-LD or structured markup and yet if you ask one about how to increase visibility in their system they’ll tell you it’s needed.
If you’re not familiar with how LLM’s actually work, they are probabilistic answer machines that guess what the next word should be, very similar to autocomplete text software. So you cannot expect accuracy from them consistently. It’s simply not how they operate. So again, if you want to implement it you can do so but don’t let these machines gaslight you into thinking you HAVE to.
How can you measure your visibility in ChatGPT?
The long story short is you honestly cannot. A lot of these tools out there such as Ahrefs and Semrush have reports but all of it is a guess. The output from an LLM can be more personalized than we even see in Google search now. Again, these machines are probabilistic so many factors from past conversations can impact the output and citation. The only thing you can do is monitor the referral traffic to your website.
To give you specific strategies on how your particular website can increase the level it is cited in ChatGPT we would need to audit and identify the hurdles and opportunities that are analogous to your situation. But from a top level what I want you to take from this post is that there are no gimmicks and no shortcuts here. Anyone telling you otherwise is just selling you a dream. Building your business with organic traffic whether from traditional search or AI-driven discovery it takes strategic high quality work that in turn will generate compounding growth for your website. If you want to talk to our team about this get in touch.
