Get Found in ChatGPT: The 90-Day Plan

Do not start with your company name. Start with the decision your customer is trying to make. Write three questions for each of five types: the best solution for a specific case, the comparison of two routes, switching away from the incumbent, the cost, and the typical mistakes when buying or implementing.

A useful question is specific. "What is the best CRM?" shows nothing. "What is the best CRM for a 12-person recruiting agency that needs email sequencing and has nobody to maintain the system?" shows which vendors the AI considers and which evidence it looks for.

Run each question three times in a fresh chat with web search on. Answers vary, so a single run is not a baseline. Log for each run: which brands are recommended, which URLs are cited, what kind of page each source is, and which sources recur.

After 45 runs, patterns become visible. For "best" questions the AI often cites no vendors at all, but reviews, comparison pages, trade publications, forums or videos. That list is your distribution plan: not "high-authority sites", but the exact sources already appearing for your buyers' questions.

Before investing in new content, remove the contradictions. Homepage, About page, product pages, pricing page and third-party profiles should agree on what the company is called, which category it belongs to, what the product does, who it is for, where it is available and who is behind it.

Add structured data for organization, product, article and author where it fits. Keep the facts in visible copy too; schema supports the page and must not contradict it.

Check crawler access. OpenAI describes OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT search. GPTBot is for model training and is separate. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot cannot appear in ChatGPT search.

Most companies publish opinions. AI answers need evidence. Pick one format: an original benchmark from anonymized product or customer data, a teardown of 50 to 100 websites or workflows, a transparent comparison with criteria and limits, a calculator built on real assumptions, or an analysis of customer results with sample size and method.

The asset needs one sentence another writer can safely repeat: sample, method, result. An example of the form: SE Ranking analysed about 129,000 domains and reports that domains with up to 2,500 referring domains averaged 1.6 to 1.8 ChatGPT citations, while domains with more than 350,000 averaged 8.4. One defensible number travels farther than thirty generic articles.

Do not make the reader dig the result out of 1,800 words of setup. Directly below the headline belong the answer in one sentence, the most important number, a table or chart, and a sentence on how the data was collected.

Then answer the obvious follow-ups under literal headings: What does it cost? Who is this for? How was this calculated? Clear writing is not dumbing down. It removes the reasons a machine might misread you.

Semrush tracked 1,094 categories in ChatGPT over six months. Only 15.2% had a clear leader in the answers, 31.2% an emerging one, and 53.7% none at all. In most categories the position is still open.

Do not try to own "project management software". Own a smaller decision, such as "project management software for architecture firms with client approvals". Build five pages around it: the complete guide, the best options and who each suits, the comparison with the incumbent, the pricing and total cost, and the implementation checklist. Each page answers a different question, all use the same terms and link to each other.

Ahrefs studied about 75,000 brands. For ChatGPT, visibility correlated most strongly with mentions on YouTube (0.737), then with branded web mentions (0.664). Domain Rating was at 0.266. Correlation is not causation. The gap is still hard to ignore: being talked about tracks AI visibility more closely than one authority score.

Take your citation map and choose 25 targets: ten trade publications, newsletters or resource pages, five creators, podcasts or YouTube channels, five comparison, directory or review pages, and five customers, partners or associations with a website of their own.

Do not ask for "a link". Offer the finding, the data behind it, a chart they can embed and a sentence on where the result does not apply. The pitch is not "please mention us" but "we found something your readers will want to know".

In the SE Ranking analysis, domains absent from the major review platforms averaged 1.8 citations, while domains listed on several platforms averaged 4.6 to 6.3. This too is an association, not proof that four new profiles create citations. It shows why third-party corroboration deserves attention.

Choose the two or three platforms that already appear in your citation map. Claim the profile, complete it, use the same category and description as on your site, and ask real customers for honest reviews. Manufactured reviews are not a shortcut.

A screenshot saying "we appear in ChatGPT" is not a metric. Track five things: the share of your 45 runs that cite you; the share that name you; which third-party sources recur; the visits that come from ChatGPT; and what those visits turn into.

You can recognise visits from ChatGPT in web analytics by the parameter utm_source=chatgpt.com, which ChatGPT appends to linked URLs. In our own measurements 741 of 743 URLs cited by ChatGPT carried it.

Keep the question list stable for the whole period. If you rewrite it every week, you are changing the test instead of measuring progress.