AI-powered ChatGPT has quickly become a source for recommendations, from birthday gifts to songs to books. Now, we’re seeing yet another use case that may change SEO forever — the use of ChatGPT to find and evaluate businesses.

ChatGPT isn’t a search engine (it’s a language model), but that isn’t stopping people from using it like Google. And if users are on the hunt for a product or service, SEO for ChatGPT becomes something of a content popularity contest. 

Here’s why SEO for ChatGPT matters and how you can optimize your web presence to gain an AI-powered recommendation.

Why Optimize for ChatGPT

ChatGPT attracts 60 million users per day and recently racked up more than 1.43 billion visits in a single month. The platform generates more than $80 million in monthly revenue, despite having a free version. Interest is sky-high as more marketers, businesses, and casual users work to reveal its full potential.

Data shows the majority of people trust ChatGPT’s outputs as being factually correct. Ultimately, this means that if the AI-powered platform recommends your company, there’s a good chance the user will at least consider you. 

With the knowledge that ChatGPT is being explicitly asked to recommend products and services, it’s a no-brainer for organizations to optimize their web presence for ChatGPT. 

How ChatGPT Recommends Businesses

To get a better idea of how ChatGPT recommends products, services, or anything else, just ask it. Here’s how ChatGPT responded when we asked how it finds and recommends businesses:

Screenshot of ChatGPT's response to, "how do you make business recommendations?"

Unlike search engines, ChatGPT can’t simply pull information from the internet. Rather, it’s limited based on what it already knows. Right now, it’s not the best solution for recommending local businesses or those who are relatively new to the digital space. But that may change in the future.

Digital marketer Neil Patel recently tested ChatGPT as a business recommendation tool to learn how it prioritizes its recommendations. The test discovered patterns in the following factors:

  • Relevancy (correlation between keywords used in the query and the keywords on the website/product page)
  • Brand mentions (number of times a brand or product is mentioned online)
  • Online reviews (the more good reviews, the better)
  • Authority (social following, domain authority, website affiliations)
  • Age (older companies were recommended more often)
  • Recommendations (other websites recommended the product or company)

Keep in mind that ChatGPT’s knowledge is only up-to-date through September 2021. This means that new companies formed after that date aren’t considered in its recommendations (yet). Plus, any reviews, authority, recommendations, or brand mentions earned after that date won’t influence its recommendations (yet).

SEO Tips for a ChatGPT-Friendly Website

Right now, it appears that ChatGPT recommends popular companies and household names (think Amazon, Target, etc.). 

However, ChatGPT is frequently updated and improved. It will eventually get better at recommending businesses and will learn more beyond its initial September 2021 cut-off. But companies don’t have to wait to start optimizing their presence—you’ll need to play the long game here, and there’s no time like the present.

Some things you can start doing now to improve your “ChatGPT SEO” include:

  • Creating link-worthy content to improve your authority and gain recommendations
  • Publishing on guest blogs and websites to increase brand mentions
  • Share your content on social media for more brand mentions and greater authority
  • Adding keywords into new and existing content to closely match how others might search for your products or services

Any business can apply these tips for ChatGPT SEO. And truth be told, they’re helpful for traditional SEO, too!

Keep Optimizing Your Web Presence with Content Pros

ChatGPT isn’t a search engine, nor is it perfect when it comes to answering user questions. There’s still a lot that ChatGPT can’t do, such as recommending a new local restaurant or pulling real-time review data. But the more data it ingests and the more people use it, its recommendations will likely improve over time.

What businesses can prioritize right now is the commitment to continue building their web presence. Content writing provides the foundation to grow relevancy, brand mentions, online reviews, authority, and recommendations (5 of the 6 key factors that influence ChatGPT’s recommendations), and it can help you unlock your full SEO potential moving forward.

Contact Content Pros today to discuss your content marketing strategy.