How can we ensure our company appears as an answer within ChatGPT?

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh

Subject: SEO

Read time: 10 minutes

The way people find the products and services they want online is changing at a rapid pace. This is why businesses cannot afford to miss out on this significant opportunity: to get their business cited on AI platforms such as Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and ChatGPT.

The fight for visibility

It’s essential to note that organic search engine optimisation remains a crucial component of most businesses’ digital marketing strategies. However, the landscape is changing; people are now using apps such as ChatGPT to find products and services much more regularly. Therefore, companies must now be visible across a wide range of platforms.

The benefits to businesses are clear: if your business is regularly cited on ChatGPT, ranking higher on Google’s organic results, and is also regularly cited as an AI Overview answer, your business is simply is more likely to generate more sales.

 

Google is still most widely used by shoppers.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in a frenzy and believe that you have to jump on the AI bandwagon that is life or death at this moment in time.

However, its true, as data shows that an increasing number of shoppers are using AI platforms to purchase goods and services and its an opportunity businesses shouldn’t miss out on.

However, what you have to bear in mind is that Google remains the big dog. According to Datos, Google still holds a substantial 93.39% of the global search market share.

What’s always important to remember is that Google is making massive strides in integrating AI into its main page results as well. Therefore, there’s no two ways about it; your business needs to have an active AI strategy, otherwise, you could be missing out on an essential slice of the sales pie.

How does AI decide which businesses to cite?

Let’s say your marketing manager arrives at the office on a Monday morning and provides you with an ultimatum.

They have tasked you with finding out how to increase their business’s visibility on ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews as soon as possible.

A blank expression may cross your face; you don’t know where to begin with increasing your business visibility.

Do not worry, we have you covered. We are the AI, GEO, and SEO experts in the city of Cardiff.

 

LLMs and entities

First things first, it’s important to remember that the LLM, that’s large language models, have been trained on pages that already exist out on the web.

Therefore, they are trained to understand keywords and the relationships between keywords, which many leading SEO consultants like to describe as similar to “entity building”, or how “semantic web” works.

Tell me more about where Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT extract their knowledge from
It was not that long ago that ChatGPT used training data was extracted exclusively from the Bing search engine.

OpenAI and Microsoft previously used data from Bing exclusively and this is important to note- however, it’s now widely believed that ChatGPT is also utilising Google as well to use that information and cite it in the LLM’s.

This means that ChatGPT’s knowledge is colossal and mammoth, which is how the information can be so precise.

Strong cross-over with traditional SEO

So, let’s say that you’re in a bit of a panic and slightly flustered.

You believe that AI is extremely complex, and optimising for it to increase your business’s citations and overall visibility will be a somewhat of a very complex task.

However, here’s the thing: if you’ve been a busy bee and managed to get your business on the first page of

Google organically (within the organic SERP’s), well, give yourself a pat on the back.

That’s because the content marketing has already been deemed as good quality; otherwise, it would be on page one of Google. Therefore, you have already drastically increased your business’s chances of being cited and mentioned on the world’s largest AI platforms as well.

See what we mean by cross-overs. If you’re publishing your content marketing and it’s ranking well in Google’s organic search, you’ve already done most of the hard work.

 

Help you to appear in the Google AI Overviews.

All of us today are time-poor; we want to use AI platforms to do the heavy lifting, make some decisions, and blend quality advice together to help us solve problems.

Now, when you think about this logically just for a second, you have to believe that Google AI Overviews is like having an expert answer any question that you want answered.

However, for an expert to cite your business and mention it as a citation, you must be in it to win it.

By that, we mean you have to try your best to write top quality content marketing.

When you do this, your business’s page is deemed to have a high Google E-EAT score. Plus, if you’ve supplemented that page with a lot of powerful links, then that page will rank higher organically.

This means if you get the traditional ranking factors right (banklinks, content, U.X etc), then you stand a chance of your business being cited more often by the LLMs, such as Google AI Overviews.

The reason is apparent: you’ve already proven that your website and business offer a high-quality place to get information about the products or services your selling. The reason is that to rank high organically, you need to have strong ranking factors, such as links, content marketing, dwell times, and so on.

Therefore, the page is likely to be cited more often if you achieve a strong traditional SEO.
76.1% of citations in Google AI Overviews are from pages already ranked in the top 10 organic results.

What a fantastic statistic!

This shows us that the vast majority of shoppers who read a Google AI Overview will have facts taken from the organic results.

So all that link building, all that writing the content marketing, all of that getting on-page SEO spot on, it was all worth the effort.

Ahrefs, another fantastic company, also noted that 71.7% of ChatGPT’s citations originate from indexed pages that already have an organic search presence.

This clearly indicates that organic search engine optimisation has strong crossovers with improving your AI visibility.

 

So, in summary, how can I increase my business’s visibility in ChatGPT?

After reading this comprehensive and detailed article the key take-away is this, if you get your organic search engine optimisation right, you should also increase your visibility in the AI results.

Here’s some of the areas you should prioritise

Well-designed website

Ensure that your foundations are solid, and that you have a well-designed website that provides a good user experience. Of course, the homepage design is also very important.

Make sure the off-page SEO is strong

Set up a Google Business page, build business citations, and establish a large number of powerful backlinks.

Schema

Schema markup is a form of structured language; ensure you add it to your website. This can be used for a range of different reasons, from improving the CTR (click-through rate) for rich results to helping Google understand the products and services you offer.

Google E-EAT
Remember earlier in this fantastic article, we mentioned Google E-EAT. We believe that this leading SEO agency that improving your Googe EEAT score is important to ensure your business organic SEO and AI GEO is enhanced.

Therefore, ensure that a staff bio is added at the top or bottom of an article to indicate that the author is an expert at what they are talking about.

Explain a bit about their experience, what they do at the company, and link to their LinkedIn account.
This helps improve the “experience” and “expertise” elements of Google E-EAT.

 

The semantic web

As SEO consultants with over 10 years of experience, we often focus on building links as one of the primary ways to improve a business’s search engine optimisation.

This is still the case; however, we also have to consider the semantic web, which involves how our business is mentioned on the web.

Brand mentions can help improve visibility in the LLMs as well as in organic SEO, because bots, such as Googlebot, can still pick up that a business or brand is being mentioned.

The more a business is mentioned and cited, the more important that business or brand is likely to be deemed. A voice, if you like, that’s worth listening to, as otherwise, why would your name or business name be cited across relevant and authoritative pages all across the web?

Therefore, businesses now more than ever need to focus on PR work, including securing links and brand mentions.

Its not a reinvention of the wheel

When we read about GEO and LLM’s we often think that these are totally separate and different from traditional SEO.

However, as this article illustrates, there is very strong cross-overs between getting the SEO strong and being cited more by the LLM’s.

At this SEO agency we would highly recommend you focus on the organic search engine optimisation. Get the businesses ranking factors as strong as possible, by doing so, what you will be doing also improving your

businesses visibility in the LLM models as well.

Who are Walsh & Partners

We are one of the most established search marketing agencies in Wales.

We have the best and most knowledgeable SEO consultants who know how to implement white hat best practices.

Regardless of what size business you run, we will be able to help yoru business to generate more sales online.

Come to one of the best marketing agencies in Wales, contact us today

How can we get our business citated more often by Chat GPT
Our SEO agency provides our advice on how you can get your business cited more often by the LLM’s such as Chat GPT.