SEO for ChatGPT & AI - How to Rank on ChatGPT in 2025

The world of search is changing, and AI search, be it AI overviews, Google's AI Mode or ChatGPT, is rapidly taking over. AI adoption statistics are often inaccurate and struggle to keep up with the pace of adoption, but it's obvious that smart business owners are looking at how they can leverage ChatGPT and AI search to increase their brand exposure.

Impact of AI on SEO and SEM

Traditional search clicks are decreasing. You've likely heard this from your SEO or Google Ads agency already. Google is pushing AI overviews ahead of ads and organic listings. People are choosing ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity over just 'Googling' it. This makes sense.

What isn't changing? Customers are still searching. They are still enquiring. Most importantly, they are still purchasing the same products and services they always have. These things haven't changed. What has changed is how they find your business. 100% of the opportunity is still there. Your share of it depends on how you stay up to date with the changing digital landscape.

If you have one, the role of your digital marketing agency is to leverage these changes to get more exposure for your brand, rather than use it to justify declining performance. 

How to rank on ChatGPT?

There's a lot of overlap between what makes you rank for traditional organic search listings and what works for ChatGPT.

The main shift is a heavy focus on how you structure the data and your website to assist LLMs (language learning models) to crawl and understand your website.

Additionally, optimizing towards Bing is now essential as Microsoft owns almost 50% of ChatGPT.

1. Create high quality content

The text on your page still qualifies as the majority of what Google's or Bing's robots know about your business. Therefore, it is predominantly what these platforms use to identify content to use in their own ai search engines, such as ChatGPT.

Focus on conversational tones and highly informational content that aligns closely with what users would expect the output of ChatGPT to sound like.

Use bullet point lists - around 75% of ChatGPT  responses include bullet point lists.

Ensure you have a healthy quantity of text-based content. Word count isn't specifically important, but having enough content for Google and ChatGPT to consider your page to be an authority on a topic is essential.

2. Answer questions

ChatGPT is used to predominantly used by consumers to answer questions.

- who is the best plastic surgeon in x?

- which fishing rod should I buy?

- what should I bring on a trip to Rarotonga?

- how to fix a leak?

The easiest and most recommended approach for this is to include an faq section on the page. These can answer common questions, but also should be selected with a bit of thought around what potential customers would specifically ask ChatGPT.

3. Match search query intent

Tightly targeted landing pages are essential. Design each page on your website around a product or service that your potential customer would be looking for.

Just ask yourself, if you were looking for the product or service, does your page answer everything you would be looking for? 

And remember, to achieve this your target keywords should be in your headings, content and title tags. You should also have subheadings and content that is related to your target keyword.

4. Implement structured data correctly

Start by ensuring your Schema.org markup is implemented correctly using JSON-LD format. Include relevant types such as Article, Product, LocalBusiness and rich attributes including name, description, image, author, aggregateRating and review.

ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Bing Copilot often use text from featured snippets in ai responses. It has been known for a long time that FAQ schema is one of the best ways to rank in featured snippets, and this is still true for AI responses today. Make sure your FAQ schema is implemented in the correct format and clearly offers questions and thorough responses.

It is also a good idea to include author, publisher and datePublished schema where relevant as AI systems have shown to prefer content that is authoured by experts and is recent.

3. Website Structure

Structure your website in a logical way from a user perspective. Include categories and subcategories that a customer would browse.

Where possible, have separate pages for completely different things that a user would search for. 

4. Crawlability & Indexation

Although not specifically a ChatGPT ranking factor, crawlability is the most important factor influencing whether your website will be cited as a source and whether its content will be used in ChatGPT's responses.

It is essential for ChatGPT to be able to read your website. 

In the first instant, make sure you don't have any no-index tags or lines in your robots.txt file telling bots, specifically ChatGPT, not to crawl your website. You can even allow them just to be safe, here are three examples:

‍

User-agent: GPTBot

Allow: /

‍

User-agent: CCBot

Allow: /

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User-agent: Bingbot

Allow: /

‍

But above all, just make sure you don't have 'Disallow' added.

You'll also want to check Google Search Console for crawled - not indexed pages. You want to ensure every page on your website (that you want to rank) is indexed by both Google and Bing. If you have important pages not indexed then you should speak to an expert - ideally us.

Those are the major red flags, but you also want to go further by ensuring your website is extremely easy to crawl.

Ensure you use good headings, plenty of text, good internal linking, hierarchical website Structure with well-thought out silos / categories and that your pages all load reasonably quickly.

5. Internal linking and content clusters

Internal linking is as important as ever - but this time for a different reason: they enable LLMs to connect themes and topics across your website together.

These clusters of interconnected pages can help build context around your website as a whole and for each page individually. 

Internal Linking for AI:

- Helps to build your site as an authority on a topic.

- Builds context around each individual page (based on the pages that link to them or they link to).

- Makes it easier for the ChatGPT  bot to crawl your website. They're like paths between different pages.

6. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools (and Google Search Console)

Most businesses will have Google Search Console set up, but Bing has never had much of a market share here in New Zealand. As a result, many businesses and agencies haven't seen much point installing and setting up Bing Webmaster Tools.

Well this has changed. If you want to maximize your ranking in ChatGPT, then setting up Bing Webmaster Tools is non-negotiable.

7. Build mentions over backlinks

Backlinks are still important, but when it comes to specifically ranking in ChatGPT, we recommend shifting the focus to attaining mentions.

This means aiming to get your brand, and products or services, mentioned on other high quality websites.

The goal isn't quantity. A mention on one high quality website could be used by ChatGPT in it's responses. Whilst 1,000 mentions on low quality websites will be completely ignored.

We're not trying to game the system any more. We're trying to increase your authority across your industry. We want your brand to be on pages that someone would actually want to visit and that ChatGPT would want to cite as a source.

Consider PR, blogs, new websites and partners such as store locator pages.

8. Backlinks

It is clear that links are not directly used by ChatGPT to choose pages and brands to mention. This statement can be misleading, however. ChatGPT does use the pages that rank higher on Bing far more often in their answers.

Ranking in Bing is heavily influenced by a website's, and page's, backlink profile. As such, building backlinks to pages that you want to show in ChatGPT can definitely improve your chances of showing.

In many cases, we'd encourage this to be directed to your core pages, especially your homepage. We'd also recommend tying this in with Mentions and ensuring your links are on highly relevant websites.

How to measure the impact of ranking on ChatGPT?

Google Analytics For ChatGPT

Currently, the most robust way to measure AIO performance and AI web traffic is to use Google Analytics.

This data is a little hidden away under the referral channel grouping or source. The fastest way to see this data is to head over to the Traffic Acquisition report in Google Analytics and add the Source / Medium Dimension. You'll see traffic coming from ChatGPT or other AI search platforms here.

If you want to go further, I recommend updating your Default Channel Groupings to include ChatGPT. We also use Looker Studio connected to GA4 to analyse out web traffic from AI. A basic report can be built out quite easily using the same Source / Medium Dimension mentioned above.

AI Rank Tracking Software

As you can imagine, tracking visibility on ChatGPT and AI overviews is quite a challenge. 

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are a good start for measuring visibility in AI Overviews, but don't offer any insight into ChatGPT.

At this stage, we haven't found anything that can accurately measure your brands visibility on ChatGPT, so we use the methods above in combination with overall website or business performance data.

Manual Searches

For small businesses, this is often the best way to confirm that ChatGPT is mentioning your business. Pick a handful of your more important search terms (for example, a bathroom renovator might choose 'bathroom renovation + location') and search on ChatGPT. We run these searches with a VPN and a depersonalised profile each month to check.

Conclusion

We've found that focussing on traditional SEO best practices, whilst tailoring our strategy slightly towards AI, is the best approach to maximizing visibility in ChatGPT and AI overviews.

The strongest correlation we've found to brand visibility in ChatGPT is ranking in Bing, and as a result, we focus on all the things that enable a brand to rank well on Bing (and subsequently, Google). 

High quality, optimised content, high quality backlinks and mentions, and ensuring Bing can easily crawl your website remain the most important ranking factors for both traditional SEO and for showing up in ChatGPT.