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How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and AI search
Marketing a business has always been one part strategy and one part alchemy—and this is never truer than in the world of search engine optimization (SEO), where businesses have long had to experiment with different tactics to improve their rankings. Over time, though, SEO has developed into a clear marketing discipline with set guidelines and tactics that help improve a company’s search ranking.
But marketers and small business owners can’t afford to stand still. In this era of AI search, the conversation has turned to SEO vs. GEO: generative engine optimization. Haven’t come across GEO before? This relatively new marketing term refers to the practice of optimizing your web content to make it easily found and cited by generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Top tips for improving your AI search visibility
Professionals are still working through the best strategies to bring their GEO campaigns to life, so there’s no one simple formula that will tell you how to rank in ChatGPT or other AI platforms. However, there are a range of different techniques you can try that should help boost your AI search visibility.
Create content that serves your audience’s needs
While the idea of SEO vs. GEO may seem to complicate your marketing strategy, the good news is that many of the same techniques are just as important for both. High-value content that gives your audience clear, useful information has always been the backbone of a good SEO campaign, and AI tools like ChatGPT are looking for the same thing.
Think of it this way: generative answer engines thrive on giving their users a good experience, so that they’ll come back and use the tools again and again. High-quality content allows them to do just that. Here are some principles to keep in mind.
- Content should be clear, easy to read, grammatically correct and factually accurate
- Break up content into informative sections that are easy for both humans and AI platforms to navigate, with descriptive headings and no impenetrable blocks of text
- Demonstrate your company’s expertise: focus on topics where you have real insight to offer, and make sure your content offers actionable takeaways for the reader
- Maintain a consistent schedule, posting new content regularly and refreshing old information to ensure that it stays up to date.
Considering how to rank in ChatGPT specifically, you also need to think about how to make the content easy for a chatbot to summarize. Some of the techniques that may help with this include using clear, descriptive headings, organizing information into logical sections and leading with statements that explain the main point of each section.
While there’s no guarantee that these techniques will improve your visibility in AI-generated answers, they’re good practice for making information accessible to both readers and AI systems.
Answer customers’ real questions
Popular AI tools operate as chatbots, with a Q&A format where users will ask questions and the AI will come back with a (hopefully) useful answer. With this in mind, it makes sense that generative engine optimization should focus on answering customers’ questions.
Keyword research can help you understand the type of questions that customers are likely to be asking—established SEO research tools like Semrush can help with this if you don’t know where to start. Just as good as the technical research is your own in-depth knowledge of the business: when you speak to customers about a potential purchase, what do they want to know? And how are they wording their inquiries?
Think about the real questions that people ask and then design content which explicitly answers them with useful and relevant information.
Build your business’s online reputation
Key to GEO marketing is not just getting your company mentioned, but getting it recommended. To do this, you need to be seen as a trusted authority with a positive reputation.
Some of the specific types of content that may help with this include genuine customer reviews—particularly those posted on independent sites, evidence of recognition within the industry such as awards or professional memberships, and case studies or testimonials that show your real-world expertise.
Make sure your website can be easily read by AI
Improving your AI search visibility isn’t just about what your web content says, but how it’s structured in the back end. There are a few steps to go through here, and you may want to bring in your dev team for some support if you’re not confident with managing the technical aspects of the website.
- Make sure AI search crawlers aren’t being blocked by your website, and that they’re able to access and index the relevant content pages. This is something you can talk to your web development team about.
- Structure your information correctly, using H1-H4 heading tags consistently, breaking up text into clear sections, and using additional formatting tools like lists and bullet points to help both humans and AI systems understand what they’re reading.
- Try to follow best practice advice for your website’s HTML and for JavaScript if you’re using it. While Google’s guidance is that HTML doesn’t need perfect code in order to be read by AI systems, it’s still good practice to try and keep your code as clean as possible.
Measuring GEO performance
Once you’ve put some of these tactics in place, you’ll need to understand how well the GEO campaign is performing. There are a number of key metrics you can track, including:
- How often your website is cited as a source within a defined set of relevant AI queries.
- How often your business is mentioned or recommended compared with competitors.
- How much traffic is coming through to your website from AI platforms, and what happens to that traffic once it arrives.
- Whether the information AI shares about your company is positive or negative, and how accurate it is.
Some of these metrics can be tracked quite simply using free platforms such as Google Analytics. For others, you might want to enlist the help of a specialist tool that can measure brand mentions, citations and recommendations across AI platforms.
Ultimately, improving your AI search visibility is about making your business easier to discover and building trust. By combining strong SEO fundamentals with useful content, a credible online reputation, and regular performance monitoring, you can give your business a better chance of being discovered and recommended by platforms such as ChatGPT.