We’ve entered the age of AI-powered search, where visibility in tools like ChatGPT is reshaping how users search. With ChatGPT and other AI models pulling data from search engines, this shift marks the beginning of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
In this blog, we’ll share our top strategies on how to rank on ChatGPT’s AI-generated answers. marketer, content creator, or business owner, read on to learn how your website can become the go-to source for both people and machines.
Key Takeaways
ChatGPT is built on Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Being the most helpful, reliable, and well-presented answer is key.
Not gaming the algorithm with stuffed keywords or repeated answers that target pattern recognition; instead, focus on earning trust and authority.
Focus on the principles of E-E-A-T while creating content: helpful content driven by search intent and user queries.
Own your niche with a pillar-and-cluster strategy that highlights your expertise and structured writing.
Social signals (reviews and shares) build brand trust.
Optimising for ChatGPT should be a part of your existing SEO services strategy, not an additional service.
You cannot ignore the fact that AI and ChatGPT are giving Google some competition. For the first time since 2015, Google’s search market share has dropped below 90%.
With the majority of ChatGPT users under the age of 25, if you want to reach Gen Z or those who’ve expanded the way they search beyond Google, you need to consider optimising beyond Google. As ChatGPT taps into over 1 billion searches worldwide, your content has the potential to appear in highly personalised answers, expanding your organic reach.
How Ranking Works in ChatGPT
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation):
A technique where language models retrieve up-to-date data from trusted sources to generate more accurate and contextually relevant responses.
We asked ChatGPT to give us an understanding of how it uses RAG:
And this is what it said….
ChatGPT (especially in enterprise, pro, and custom setups) can use RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to improve the accuracy, relevance, and freshness of its responses. Here’s how RAG works in ChatGPT:
🔍 What is RAG?
Retrieval-Augmented Generation is a technique that combines:
Retrieval – Searching a knowledge base (e.g. documents, databases, web, or vector store) to find relevant context.
Generation – Feeding that retrieved information into a language model (like GPT-4) to generate a coherent, informed answer.
This bridges the gap between static model knowledge and dynamic or domain-specific information.
🧠 How ChatGPT Uses RAG
1. Web Browsing / Real-Time Info Retrieval
In ChatGPT Pro with browsing enabled:
ChatGPT retrieves up-to-date content from the web.
It reads and incorporates information from reliable sources in real time.
This allows answers that reflect current events, prices, news, product specs, etc.
✅ Example: Asking for today’s weather or comparing recent phone models.
2. Custom GPTs + File Uploads
When you upload documents or create a Custom GPT with knowledge files, RAG is used:
Your files are indexed (often as embeddings in a vector store).
ChatGPT retrieves the most relevant chunks.
These are inserted as context in the prompt to generate an accurate response.
✅ Example: Upload a PDF of internal policies → Ask specific questions about rules.
National Language processing is the core of how ChatGPT works. This is the AI capability that enables ChatGPT to understand and generate human-like language based on clarity, coherence, and relevance.
ChatGPT is based on transformer-based language models (like GPT-4), which were trained using millions of texts and use deep learning + NLP techniques to:
Understand word meanings in context.
Model how humans speak and write.
Predict the next most likely word in a sequence — the core of natural language generation.
Two important concepts here are:
Natural Language Understanding (NLU): When you type a message, ChatGPT parses the sentence using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms. It recognises intent, grammar, and structure and identifies entities, such as people, locations, brands, etc. It determines the tone and sentiment and interprets context, even when the words are conversational or ambiguous.
For example: If your prompt is: “You know that tool you mentioned earlier—can I use it for design?” → ChatGPT infers what “that tool” is based on earlier messages.
Natural Language Generation: After your message has been comprehended, ChatGPT uses a big language model to generate text token by token. It ensures the content sounds relevant, fluid, and natural.
For example: You ask: “Summarise this article.” → ChatGPT uses summarisation techniques to reduce it to key points in clear English.
We asked ChatGPT how it uses NLP, and this is the summary we received:
The first step in how to get indexed in ChatGPT is Bing SEO. ChatGPT pulls from Bing’s index, so if your content isn’t ranking in Bing, it likely won’t show up in AI-generated answers either. That makes Bing SEO more crucial than ever. Just like with Google, focus on SEO content that targets user intent, is well-structured, uses schema markup, and follows core SEO principles: strong site architecture, backlinks, fast loading speeds, and mobile optimisation.
Update: A recent article on Search Engine Journal states that an SEO experiment found that ChatGPT uses Google Search snippets as a fallback when Bing fails to index a page. ChatGPT leverages Google’s indexing indirectly, reinforcing that traditional SEO remains crucial for visibility in AI-generated search responses.
Search on Google vs. ChatGPT
Google and ChatGPT both offer different ways of searching. Here’s a brief overview:
Google
ChatGPT
What is it?
Search engine
AI chatbot
Why use it?
Ideal for finding up-to-date information and points you to sources
Generates human-like responses and gives you the answer instead of pointing you to sources
What does it bring to the table?
Offers an AI overview and a list of links for information. The AI overview provides a short AI-created summary (like ChatGPT) but isn’t conversational.
Offers a conversational response and a secondary list of sources.
Ads
Has ads while browsing
Ad-free experience
AI hallucination
The AI overview carries the risk of AI hallucination. Below the AI overview, Google links straight to websites where you can find the information you searched for. It is up to the user to check if the sources listed provide reliable information or not.
AI hallucination is a concern because ChatGPT can generate outputs that are inaccurate or even fabricated if there is insufficient or biased training data. Always need to double-check the sources.
Google
What is it? Search engine
Why use it? Ideal for finding up-to-date information and points you to sources
What does it bring to the table? Offers an AI overview and a list of links for information. The AI overview provides a short AI-created summary (like ChatGPT) but isn’t conversational.
Ads: Has ads while browsing
AI hallucination: The AI overview carries the risk of AI hallucination. Below the AI overview, Google links straight to websites where you can find the information you searched for. It is up to the user to check if the sources listed provide reliable information or not.
ChatGPT
What is it? AI chatbot
Why use it? Generates human-like responses and gives you the answer instead of pointing you to sources
What does it bring to the table? Offers a conversational response and a secondary list of sources.
Ads: Ad-free experience
AI hallucination: AI hallucination is a concern because ChatGPT can generate outputs that are inaccurate or even fabricated if there is insufficient or biased training data. Always need to double-check the sources.
For example, if you’re looking for a recipe, Google will give you options to find a recipe:
ChatGPT, on the other hand, will generate a recipe for you.
To look for specific recipes, you need a new Google search. Depending on your search topic, your search results may change completely.
But you can continue the same ChatGPT conversation to see how your answer has changed.
How to Optimise Your Website Content for ChatGPT Visibility
Craft High-Quality Content
High-quality content is the foundation of your content strategy. It’s about writing content that responds to users’ needs, is factually accurate and easy to digest. Understand what your audience is searching for and create in-depth content that answers their queries.
Actionable Tip: Write with prompt-awareness. This means anticipating how users phrase questions in a conversation with ChatGPT. Match that clarity.
Showcase Depth and Structure in Content
Focus on comprehensive, well-structured content. Go beyond answering a single query on a page and cover related queries too. Building content around topic clusters helps language models recognise your authority across a subject, not just one keyword. Strong structure also supports E-E-A-T by organising helpful content to improve readability and clarity.
Some ways to do this are to use step-by-step guides, bullet points, and NLP-friendly phrasing without losing your brand’s voice. Structure is key here. Use “ChatGPT-friendly” formatting, such as:
Organise with H2s, H3s, and consistent formatting.
Add tables, comparison blocks, and pros/cons sections.
Include original, quotable assets like statistics, toolkits or checklists.
AI models can easily extract and quote these. A consistent layout across pages supports better AI pattern recognition.
Actionable Tip: Incorporate People Also Ask questions into your research to naturally cover related topics and boost relevance for ChatGPT and search engines.
Use E-E-A-T Signals to Your Advantage
The components of E-E-A-T that boost your content’s rankings play a similar role in establishing credibility with AI. AI models are struggling to provide accurate information. If your content shows transparency and expertise through knowledge and external sources, it will be recognised as a reliable source by AI models.
Demonstrate expertise by citing credible sources and internal linking. Create content that is genuinely helpful, fills an information gap and presents information in a balanced, unbiased way.
Actionable tip: Add author bios with credentials and link to expert sources in each article to strengthen authority.
Keep Content Updated with Real-Time Freshness Signals
AI search prioritises updated, high-quality content so that it can provide the most up-to-date information to users. Refresh pages regularly to signal that you have “living” content. When you refresh content, keep it unique and well-organised.
Actionable tip: Add content refreshes to your digital marketing plan. Update the publishing date, add FAQs, or link to new pages instead of a full rewrite.
Build Topical Authority
AI models use semantic search optimisation to match keywords and deliver results that are aligned with search queries. To rank in semantic and embedding-based search, focus on creating content for entire topics, not just standalone pages. Use content pillars and topic clusters to organise information around themes and entities.
A key concept here is entity salience. This means establishing a specific entity (like a person, place or concept) to help NLP systems understand which concepts are relevant to a topic. Co-occurrence modelling is an approach that analyses how different entities interact with each other. It is a way of revealing relationships and patterns between entities.
For example, if you’re selling essential oils online, establish essential oils as an entity or pillar. Then create a cluster of topics to support your content. The table below is a brief example of what this pillar-cluster strategy can look like:
Pillar
Cluster
Clusters
What is an essential oil
How to use essential oils
How-to guides
What kind of essential oils can I buy
Informational blogs on how to order
Benefits of essential oils
Benefits for skincare
Benefits for home care and maintenance
Benefits for haircare
Aromatherapy benefits
How are essential oils made
Manufacturing Australian essential oils
Essential oils from around the world
Internal linking establishes relationships between these topic clusters and gives two important signals to AI crawlers:
How well your website covers a topic: This depth shows your complete expertise, especially within a niche.
How different parts of your site relate to each other: No parts of your site go undiscovered.
Effective topic clustering supports embedding-based retrieval (improves how AI systems interpret your site), helping NLPs match user queries with your content more precisely.
Actionable Tip: Build one content pillar per core topic, link 5–7 supporting articles to it, and ensure entity overlap (names, terms, concepts) across the cluster.
Become a Trusted Source
NLPs and search engines assess trust through your link graph and domain reputation. Strengthen your backlink profile by securing links from authoritative sites and gaining brand mentions via digital PR. Display testimonials, certifications, and awards to show real-world trust beyond marketing. Publish case studies to add credibility and fact-check all content to reduce bias signals. This builds a digital footprint that AI models and users perceive as trustworthy and authoritative.
Actionable Tip: Use a backlink analysis tool to audit your link graph, identify low-quality links, and target high-authority domains.
Technical Enhancements to Your Website for ChatGPT Visibility
Apart from content quality and strategy, some technical enhancements improve your website’s crawlability and indexability. These enhancements will keep your website content relevant in AI search environments.
Take Advantage of Bing Webmaster Tools
To ensure your content is accessible to ChatGPT and other AI tools, start by verifying your website with Bing. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools, sign in, and add your site. Verify ownership by adding a meta tag to your homepage or uploading an XML file.
Use Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor indexing status, fix crawl errors, and improve site health. Additionally, allow AI crawlers like ChatGPT to access your site. For example, if Cloudflare supports your website, you need to permit OpenAI bots to crawl your website. These steps improve visibility among AI-driven search while maintaining your SEO health.
Create a Crawlable Site Structure
Crawlability and indexability are the foundations of SEO for AI. It is essential for ensuring search engines and AI tools like ChatGPT can find and use your content. Use an XML sitemap to guide crawlers, ensure you have canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content, and configure your robots.txt file so that you have full control over which parts of the website can be accessed and which cannot be.
Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools help identify crawl issues and indexing gaps. Check them regularly. Keep your site’s structure flat and well-linked to support easy navigation. These practices not only help traditional SEO but also enhance how AI platforms digest and present your content in responses, ultimately expanding your content’s reach.
Tap Into Schema Markup
A powerful and often overlooked strategy to help your website rank better in ChatGPT is to use schema markup.
What does it mean?
Schema markup is a type of structured data that helps crawlers better understand the content and context of your web pages. A skeleton schema gives AI a clearer idea of who you are, what is on the page and what your site is about.
You can generate this markup in several ways:
Tools like RankMath for WordPress are easy-to-use, and require some manual tweaking.
You can code the JSON manually or use third-party schema generators available online.
Be mindful that not all SEO plugins are equally flexible. Yoast, for example, doesn’t allow custom schema editing unless you purchase an add-on, and even then, options can be limited.
Drupal users may find schema integration challenging unless they use additional modules or custom development.
To make this easier, start by focusing on schema types that ChatGPT and search engines actively use to generate AI answers: FAQ, How-To, Article, and Organisation schemas are top priorities.
If your current CMS doesn’t support advanced schema customisation, consider exporting schema from competitors or third-party sources to reverse engineer your own. By using schema strategically, you’re not just optimising for search engines, you’re directly teaching AI how to understand and surface your content.
Mistakes to Avoid When Targeting ChatGPT Rankings
If you’re wondering how to do SEO for ChatGPT correctly, make sure you avoid these common mistakes:
Providing insufficient content or failing to include internal links to new pages. This limits crawlers’ understanding of your site structure.
Outdated SEO tactics like keyword stuffing or content spinning. They can harm your credibility.
Neglecting citations and external trust signals. This reduces your content’s authority.
Relying solely on AI-generated content without human review. Balance AI input with careful editing and strong SEO fundamentals.
Here’s what Paula Glynn, the Director of Search Marketing & Digital Strategy at Pixelstorm had to say:
“The best approach you can take to get visible on ChatGPT is to ensure the foundations of SEO are in place. Engaging, unique, and high-effort content, supported by really solid technical SEO. These LLMs are constantly evolving how they source data, and by understanding and following the foundations, you are setting up your content as best you can.”
Many feel that with ChatGPT and AI chatbots jumping into the search scene, SEO is dying. Rather, we think that the scope of SEO is increasing to include Answer Engine Optimisation. Optimising for ChatGPT is about structural clarity and AI-readability, which builds on the core tenets of SEO.
If you’re wondering what all this means for your organic marketing, contact us or give us a call at 03 9069 2631 to discuss next steps for your business.
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