Life has fundamentally changed since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. It’s no longer just an AI tool for drafting emails, writing code, or solving complex math problems. Today, it’s a discovery engine. Millions of people now turn to ChatGPT to find the best local restaurants, specialized agencies, IT partners, or the right software for their business needs.
While Google still maintains its market dominance, I believe ChatGPT is on track to entirely redefine organic search over the next few years, and in many ways, it already has. Businesses that invest in ChatGPT SEO today will be miles ahead of those still tethered solely to traditional search methods.
In this guide, I’m sharing my hands-on experience on how to get your brand listed in ChatGPT results. We’ll cover the advanced strategies and technical nuances you need to get listed in those “Best Companies” recommendatio
What Is ChatGPT SEO?
When I say “ChatGPT SEO,” I’m basically talking about this: how do you appear when people don’t search on Google, but ask ChatGPT instead? Increasingly, people type phrases like “best tools for X,” “how do I fix Y,” or “which product should I choose?” directly into ChatGPT.
It takes a lot of content from across the web and then decides which brands, websites, tools, and experts to mention. ChatGPT SEO is about shaping your website, content, and brand so you become one of those brands it trusts and talks about.
I really believe businesses should invest in ChatGPT-focused SEO services because if someone asks ChatGPT for recommendations in your niche, and your brand is missing from that answer, you’re invisible right in the key moment when your buyer has an active buying intent. That’s a first impression you can never make.
You might still rank in Google, but you’re losing a new opportunity that’s quietly moving into tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others. If you care about leads, sales, and brand awareness, you can’t ignore the place where people are asking their questions.
How ChatGPT Picks Sources (What It Rewards, What It Skips)
When people ask me how ChatGPT “picks” sources, I usually tell them to imagine a very fast, very nerdy researcher who has read half the internet and also knows how to Google on top of that.
According to OpenAI, there are two factors in how it answers. First, it uses what it already “knows” from all the data it was trained on. That’s where a lot of basic facts, definitions, and general advice come from.
If the question is simple enough or the info doesn’t really change over time, it can be answered just from that memory without opening any live pages at all. In those cases, you’ll often see no links – just an answer, because it doesn’t really need to cite anyone for “what is a title tag” or “what is link-building.”
On the other hand, when the question depends on fresh information, for example, trends for 2026, new tools, pricing, case studies, news, or anything time-sensitive, it switches to search mode.
It runs a search, analyzes a bunch of pages, quickly scans them, and then writes a summary in its own words. That’s when you see citations or a “Sources” area under the answer.
Which Pages Does It Rely On?
In simple words, it’s the ones that look trustworthy, clear, and very relevant to the question. If your page has a tight match to the topic, strong topical authority, a clean structure (good headings, clear explanations, no spammy stuff), and it answers the question directly, you have a much better chance of being used as a source.
If you also have signals of being a “real” brand across the web: consistent name, strong content on that topic, other sites referencing you, that helps too. The model is trying to avoid random thin content and go for pages that look like they were written by people who know what they’re talking about.
A lot of content simply gets skipped mentally. Pages that are stuffed with keywords but don’t really say anything, very aggressive affiliate listicles, or generic “SEO content” with no clear angle are harder to quote.
They blend into all the other noise. If your page doesn’t add anything specific, original, or clearly useful, it’s much less likely to become the kind of page a chatbot relies on when it has hundreds of options.
There are also cases where ChatGPT will still use the web in the background, but won’t highlight a specific site. For example, if it pulls bits and pieces from many places and there isn’t a single standout source, it might just give the answer without calling out one brand.
In more sensitive topics, or where linking could look like promotion, it may choose to answer more cautiously and keep things generic rather than sending traffic to a specific company.
Also read: SEO Consultant vs SEO Agency
The interesting part for us, as AEOs, SEOs, and business owners, is this: you’re not just optimizing for a blue link anymore; you’re optimizing to be the “go-to example” that a chatbot reaches for when it needs to explain something.
That means very clear explanations, strong opinions backed by logic or experience, real examples, data where possible, and a page structure that makes your main points easy to grab and rephrase.
If a smart human researcher would happily quote your page in a report, there’s a good chance ChatGPT will be comfortable using it as a source too.
ChatGPT SEO vs SEO for Google
ChatGPT SEO isn’t a replacement for “normal” Google SEO. With Google, you’re trying to rank a specific URL in the top 10 results. With ChatGPT, you’re trying to become the brand or page it trusts enough to mention inside a single, summarized answer.
A few myths I see all the time: no, you can’t “prompt-optimize” your way into ChatGPT’s answers if your site is weak; no, ChatGPT does not ignore links and authority signals; and no, you don’t need a completely separate strategy that has nothing to do with classic SEO.
In most cases, your best “ChatGPT SEO” is still solid SEO, just with a bigger focus on real expertise, memorable branding, and content that doesn’t sound like every other guide on the topic.
Here is a quick comparison table:
If you’re looking for AI SEO services with real results behind them, including SEO ChatGPT, visibility in Gemini, and better coverage across other LLMs, you can consider NEWMEDIA.COM as your go-to AI SEO partner.
The 2026 SEO Playbook for ChatGPT Visibility
Over the last year, we’ve worked with a lot of mid-market and enterprise brands who suddenly cared less about “position #3 in Google” and more about “are we even mentioned in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or AI Overviews?”
We’ve run experiments that worked, some that completely failed, and a few that surprised even me after years in SEO and digital marketing. At this point, I’m confident enough to put everything on the table.
In this section, I’ll walk you through the exact 2026 playbook we use to increase visibility in ChatGPT, plus the key tactics and guardrails I’d focus on for each step.
Entity SEO for ChatGPT: Make Your Brand Easy to “Understand”
If ChatGPT can’t clearly understand who you are, what you do, and who you serve, it will struggle to confidently recommend you. Imagine your brand is an entity: a clearly defined “thing” with a name, products, people behind it, and a niche.
Your job is to make that entity stupidly easy to read. That starts with basic alignment. Your brand name, tagline, main offer, and core claims should be consistent everywhere: homepage, About page, service pages, author bios, LinkedIn, directory profiles, and even podcast descriptions if you do those.
If on one page you’re “an SEO agency for SaaS” and on another you’re “a generic digital marketing agency,” you’re sending mixed signals.
The clearer and more consistent that picture is, the easier it is for ChatGPT to say, “Okay, this brand is a safe bet to mention when someone asks about X.”
If your entity is fuzzy, you’re much more likely to be skipped in favor of a competitor whose story is sharper and more coherent.
E-E-A-T That Appears in the Content, Not Just the Footer
In my earlier guide on choosing an AEO agency, I already said something I’ll repeat here: if your content isn’t written or at least shaped by real experts, you’re already behind. It doesn’t matter whether you’re optimizing for classic Google search or for tools like ChatGPT; that rule doesn’t change.
When people talk about E-E-A-T, they mean Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. In normal language: do you actually know what you’re talking about, can you prove it, and do people have a reason to believe you?
Especially if you’re in finance, healthcare, supplements, legal, or anything that touches people’s money, safety, or health, this is non-negotiable. These are the classic “your money, your life” topics.
A generic freelance writer guessing their way through “best tax strategy for small businesses” or “how to manage high blood pressure” is risky for users and weak for your brand. A tax advisor walking through real scenarios, or a doctor explaining actual patient patterns they see, is a completely different level of content.
ChatGPT cares about this more than people realize. When it looks at pages in these niches, it tries to understand: is this written like a surface-level blog, or does it sound like someone who does this work every day?
Are there real case studies, specific numbers, clear disclaimers, and a voice that feels responsible? The more your content reads like lived experience and real practice, the more comfortable a system like ChatGPT will be pulling from it when someone asks serious questions.
Digital PR and Brand Mentions
For me, digital PR and brand mentions are non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter whether your main SEO goal is classic organic traffic from Google or being recommended inside ChatGPT and other LLMs; if nobody talks about your brand, you’re playing with the difficulty level set to “hard.”
Strong digital PR does a few things at once. It puts your name in front of real people in publications they already trust. It sends powerful signals to search engines that you’re a serious player in your niche. Finally, it creates a third-party proof that LLMs love to see when they decide which brands to mention in their answers.
Don’t get me wrong, traditional link-building is still very important. We still do guest posts, resource links, and all the usual classics. But every single day, I see the market flooded with $30 “editorials,” PBNs, link farms, and other B.S. tactics that might look good in a spreadsheet but don’t move the needle in terms of brand.
Take NEWMEDIA.COM as an example. We’ve been featured in multiple high-authority publications, from the New York Times and Forbes to dozens of niche industry sites. That is a big reason why we now see clients discovering us not only through Google, but also through tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and other LLM-powered assistants.
Reviews, Forums, and Community Proof
I keep repeating the same thing to clients: SEO takes time. If you want quick wins in the first six months, you can’t just wait for a few blog posts and backlinks to magically kick in. You need what I call “search everywhere optimization.”
That means when someone types your brand or your solution into Google, Trustpilot, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, niche communities, or even inside ChatGPT, they don’t see a ghost town. They see reviews, real conversations, profiles that look active, and content that clearly shows you do this work in real life.
ChatGPT and other AI search engines pick up on this wider footprint. If it sees your brand mentioned only on your own site and a couple of suspicious blogs, that’s weak. If it sees you in reviews, Q&A threads, comparison discussions, expert roundups, and video descriptions, it’s much easier to trust you when someone asks, “Who should I hire for X?”
So in practice, that means deliberately collecting reviews, replying to them, joining the top two or three communities in your niche, participating under your real name, and publishing content where your buyers already hang out.
It’s not glamorous, but this “everywhere” presence is often what separates brands that stay invisible in LLM answers from the ones that keep getting mentioned.
Original Research: The Citation Magnet Most Brands Skip
If you already appear in “top X tools” answers in ChatGPT, that’s great. But there’s another level: appearing as the source, not just as one of the recommended tools or services.
When you publish real data, not recycled screenshots from someone else’s report, you suddenly become useful in a different way. ChatGPT constantly needs numbers, trends, benchmarks, and specific examples to quote. If those numbers live on your site, you turn into a natural citation target.
This can be case studies, deep before/after breakdowns, or, my personal favorite, statistics content: surveys, usage data, industry benchmarks, experiments you’ve run.
For one of our SaaS clients, we published 30+ statistics-style articles based on original data. Over time, those pages earned 400+ backlinks from sites with an average DR above 60.
So when you think about ChatGPT visibility, don’t only ask “how do we get recommended?” Also ask, “What can we publish that others will need to cite?”
Get Listed in Listicle Articles
Instead of giving you a textbook definition here, let me show you how I think about it in practice. If you want ChatGPT to recommend your brand when someone asks for “Top SEO agencies in New York,” you first need to appear in the human-written top lists for that exact query.
In our case, we want to be included in listicles like “Top SEO agencies in New York” and dozens of similar roundups across different cities.
Why is this so powerful? Because when ChatGPT builds those “top X” answers, it doesn’t invent the brands. It relies on existing listicle articles.
If you’re consistently listed in those roundups, you’re already part of the data it sees when it tries to compile a shortlist. You’ve basically moved yourself into the pool of “usual suspects” it can pick from.
The practical playbook is simple.
Type your dream prompts into ChatGPT, look at the sources on the right, and note which listicles it used.
Then go to those sites directly, find the article, and do honest outreach: explain who you are, why you’re a good fit, and ask if they’d consider adding your brand to the list.
It’s not instant, but it works. I’ve seen this approach move brands from “never mentioned anywhere” to “suddenly showing up in multiple ChatGPT recommendations” just by being proactive about the listicles everyone else forgets to optimize for.
Also read: SEO vs. PPC: 2026 Comparison
Content Types That Win Inside ChatGPT Answers in 2026
When you look at answers inside ChatGPT, you’ll notice something very simple: it doesn’t pick random URLs. It keeps leaning on the same “workhorse” page types over and over. That’s why you can’t just publish anything and hope to be quoted. You have to be very picky about which formats you invest in.
The first group I always focus on is decision pages. Comparison pages that help someone choose between options, not just copy-pasted feature tables.
If you can honestly say, “Here’s where Tool A is better, here’s where Tool B wins, here’s who each one is for,” you become incredibly quotable. The same goes for “X alternatives to Y” pages. Those pick up a ton of “brand vs brand” prompts, because users literally type “best alternative to [famous tool]” into ChatGPT, and it needs a clear, structured answer.
Then you have what I call structure pages: glossaries and definition hubs. The ones that clearly define a term, set boundaries around what it is and isn’t, and then give two or three concrete examples. These pages are gold because they’re easy for a model to scan and reuse when someone asks, “What does [term] mean in this context?”
Next come the pain pages: troubleshooting guides for very specific problems. “X isn’t working, what do I do?” type content. When you write these with real-world steps and not generic advice, they often appear in answers for high-intent, “please fix this now” questions.
Same story with pricing and cost pages. If you’re brave enough to share honest price ranges, explain what drives costs up or down, and show a couple of scenarios, you suddenly become the adult in the room. ChatGPT loves such clarity when people ask, “How much does X actually cost?”
Finally, the classic “best X” pages, but with strict standards. Not a random list of everyone who sent you an email, but a shortlist with clear criteria, pros and cons, and who each option is suited for.
When you treat these pages like real recommendations instead of sponsored dumps, they don’t just rank better; they also become the #1 resource ChatGPT feels comfortable relying on when it has to give a single, helpful answer in one shot.
How to Prove ChatGPT SEO Progress
I usually split it into four buckets. First, track prompts, not just keywords. Make a simple sheet where you list the core prompts you care about: “best [your niche] agencies,” “[your brand] alternatives,” “[your niche] pricing,” “[your niche] tools for startups,” etc.
Every month, you or your team run those exact prompts in ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and mark: did we get mentioned, yes or no? Did they link us? Did they quote any of our content? That alone gives you a basic visibility trend.
Second, monitor your brand footprint across the web. Classic stuff, but now with an LLM angle. Branded searches are growing in Google, more reviews on third-party sites, more mentions on Reddit, Quora, industry forums; all of that feeds the systems that later “learn” who you are.
I like to tag “LLM-friendly” URLs in Search Console: comparison pages, pricing pages, statistics pieces, glossaries. If those keep getting more impressions and clicks, it’s usually a sign that the same content is also becoming more reference-worthy for chat systems.
Third, build a simple citation log. Every time you see your brand or one of your pages cited inside a ChatGPT / Copilot / Perplexity answer, log it: date, exact prompt, a screenshot or copy of the answer, and the source page it pulled.
Over time, you’ll see patterns: which page types get cited, what kind of language seems to trigger you as a source, and which prompts you keep winning.
Finally, tie this to revenue. In our case, every time a new lead comes in, we ask a very simple question: “How did you find us?” When someone says, “I asked ChatGPT who to talk to about X, and you came up,” that goes straight into our CRM notes.
After a few months, you can look back and say, “Okay, LLM-driven discovery helped start X number of conversations and Y amount of closed revenue.”
Common Mistakes I See Brands Repeat
I don’t want to pretend I know everything here. I’ve seen “mistakes” that accidentally turned into wins, and I’ve also seen “best practices”that just did not pay off. But after going through hundreds of proposals and audits, there are two patterns I keep running into.
The first is this idea that to appear in ChatGPT, you need to burn everything down and start again. Full redesign, full rewrite, new brand voice, new everything.
People talk about “ChatGPT SEO” like it’s a completely different sport. In reality, the fundamentals haven’t changed: you still need clear, useful content, a strong presence across the web, real brand mentions, and a site that reflects what you do.
The second mistake is when a client says, “We only care about ChatGPT; we don’t need anything for Google.” It doesn’t work like that. If you’re improving your content, information architecture, backlinks, reviews, and brand footprint, you’re doing it for all discovery channels at once.
You can’t really separate “ChatGPT work” from “Google work” in a clean way, and in most cases, the budget you invest is going into the same core assets. You’re not buying two different SEO universes; you’re building one strong brand that all these systems can confidently recommend.
The Key Takeaways
Today I shared the whole picture: the key strategies, habits, and small details that move the needle for ChatGPT SEO. If you’re serious about appearing in these answers, this is not something to “look into later.” You really should start investing in it today, while most of your competitors are still ignoring it.
We recently released new national benchmark data showing that 87% of U.S. businesses do not appear in AI-generated search results, even when many of those businesses rank on the first page of Google. The findings come from the 2025 RankOS™ AI Visibility Benchmark, a national analysis conducted using RankOS™, the company’s proprietary operating system for brand visibility across AI-powered and traditional search platforms.
If you’re looking for a straightforward, trusted SEO and AEO partner, one that’s already helped hundreds of medium-sized and enterprise brands improve their visibility in Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs, you can treat NEWMEDIA.COM as your go-to team.
Can ChatGPT Cite My Site if I Rank on Page 2 in Google?
Yes, it can. ChatGPT doesn’t only look at the top 3–5 blue links; it cares more about how clear, useful, and authoritative your page is overall. Good content, strong branding, and solid links can still get you cited even if you’re “only” on page two.
Do I Need Page Schema for ChatGPT SEO?
You’re not invisible without schema, but it helps. Clean organization, article, product, FAQ, and author schema make it easier for any system to understand who you are, what the page is about, and who’s behind it.
Does Link Building Still Matter?
Yes, a lot. In fact, more than ever. High-quality links and digital PR are still some of the strongest signals that you’re a real, trusted brand. Cheap links and link farms don’t help here; credible coverage and earned mentions do.
How Do I Pick Prompts Worth Targeting?
Start from real buyer questions: what people ask on calls, in emails, and inside your support inbox. Turn those into prompts like “best X for Y,” “[your niche] pricing,” “[tool] alternatives,” and “[service] for [segment].” If you’d be happy to get a lead from that question, it’s a prompt worth tracking.
Can AI-Written Content Rank and Get Cited?
Yes, if it’s heavily guided, edited, and checked by real experts. Generic, unedited AI text is usually too shallow to earn trust or citations. Human insight, original angles, and real examples are what make a page worth quoting.
Is Brand Search Volume Important for ChatGPT SEO?
It’s not an official metric, but it’s a very useful signal. Growing branded search usually means more people know you and talk about you, and the broader footprint makes it easier for systems like ChatGPT to treat you as an established entity.
Can Internal Links Influence ChatGPT’s Visibility?
Indirectly, yes. Clear internal linking helps search engines and crawlers figure out which pages are your “main” resources on a topic. Those strong hub pages are exactly the ones that tend to get reused and cited more often.
