How to Optimize Your Brand and Website for chatGPT?

Andrei Iunisov

Is it possible to optimize your brand or website for ChatGPT?

Implementing some form of optimization for content during the rise of ChatGPT and similar large language models is becoming increasingly important as time passes, especially for highly competitive industries. While AI-supported search interactions can significantly improve a customer’s user experience, they also represent a significant change from the traditional search engine-based approach to content that industries such as SEO have been working in for decades.

At the same time, while some degree of optimization is possible, creating a separate section of a brand strategy dedicated to ChatGPT can be arduous because it is far more complex and uncertain than traditional disciplines such as SEO. The information about the logic behind ChatGPT, its methodology of pulling content from the internet, and its model learning is primarily unknown, and asking questions to LLM itself only brings limited and generalized information. 

As such, the best strategy would be a robust and flexible approach to general content strategy, combined with ongoing improvements and constant monitoring of the results. Optimizing a brand for ChatGPT can be very difficult, but this effort is necessary for any company that wants to remain relevant after the advent of AI-powered search tools.

Understanding ChatGPT and its capabilities

ChatGPT is a virtual assistant and chatbot created by OpenAI. It was launched on November 30, 2022, and gained massive popularity quickly. It is now credited as the service that started the so-called “AI boom” in different industries.

The solution uses a variant of OpenAI’s transformer architecture – a combination of OpenAI’s own Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, or GPT. These models are “trained” on massive data sets of internet-based information, resulting in ChatGPT’s ability to understand context, grammar, and more.

ChatGPT’s extensive training allows it to generate responses to user queries. The responses are formulated using natural language, mimicking many nuances of human communication styles. The vast knowledge from ChatGPT’s existing training material enables it to answer both simple and complex user queries while remembering context, subject matter, and more.

Use cases for ChatGPT

ChatGPT and its many competitors have various use cases and specialties, some of which are worth explaining in more detail. The most common examples of ChatGPT’s use cases are:

Written content generation is a frequent application of ChatGPT in many industries, be it using it for ad copies, blog articles, whitepapers, etc. Other similar use cases of ChatGPT include drafting contents, brainstorming topic ideas, and even comprehensive content creation based on a sequence of prompts.

Not only is ChatGPT capable of offering information on a specific topic as learning material, but it can also be highly adaptive – with detailed per-request explanations, supplementary information, and even the ability to adapt to specific requests of the end user.

Another significant benefit of ChatGPT is the ability to handle large volumes of customer inquiries. This drastically lowers the overall load on the customer support team, creating more free time to work on more complicated issues on a case-by-case basis.

It is not uncommon for ChatGPT to also be used in various marketing scenarios, such as implementing personalized interactions to engage potential customers. In these situations, ChatGPT should be able to qualify leads and direct those with high potential to human-led sales teams.

Fields such as marketing and sales benefit greatly from ChatGPT’s capability to generate a myriad of personalized responses for each customer based on their needs and preferences. Improved personalization is a massive advantage when creating highly tailored marketing campaigns without the disadvantage of manually scaling personalization efforts.

Another advantage of ChatGPT, which does not revolve around content generation per se, is its capability to analyze competitor content and search trends to suggest topics that may resonate with specific audiences. It can be a massive advantage for SEO and product marketing efforts for a fraction of resources compared to manually performing the same research.

Advantages of ChatGPT

The most significant advantage of ChatGPT and similar services is the ability to engage in human-like conversation while also operating with a massive knowledge base, which can be easily discerned from the aforementioned use cases.

However, there are other advantages LLMs can bring, some of which can be gathered from the use cases above. They include:

ChatGPT: Recommendations instead of answers?

Now that we know how beneficial ChatGPT is and why it is so popular, it is time to discuss how a business can optimize its content for this new LLM-oriented ruleset. 

Speaking of rules, I have to mention one thing first. ChatGPT does not have a dedicated ranking system, making it extremely difficult to ascertain your position.  

What ChatGPT does have is the ability to recommend products, services, vendors, etc. This ability implies some logic that ChatGPT operates on when choosing what to recommend. That exact logic is what many SEO and AI experts have been trying to decipher since ChatGPT was created.

The lack of a quantifiable analysis method for ChatGPT’s recommendations makes this task extremely difficult, which is why plenty of resources have been using unconventional practices to find any logic behind the chatbot’s actions. 

For example, NP Digital used over a hundred different but essential questions to see the correlation between responses, and I will cite and reference their research in this article.

Asking ChatGPT questions such as “What is the best laptop for college students?” and “What is the best electric SUV?”, among others, generated a lot of information that NP Digital analyzed afterward. 

The results of this analysis led NP Digital to believe that at least 82 different factors are involved in ChatGPT’s decision-making process. Six of these factors significantly correlate with the result: 

Optimizing a brand or a website for ChatGPT

Unfortunately, there is no information on how ChatGPT does its rankings, to begin with, and asking ChatGPT itself questions like these does not yield meaningful results, either.

This kind of evidence does not mean that improving upon all six factors would immediately show results. However, LLMs such as ChatGPT get regular index updates to provide better and more up-to-date information, which means that updated information on a specific brand should give a better chance of a ChatGPT recommendation.

NPD’s analysis results were presented as follows (on a scale of 0 to 1):

The topic of “Age” will not be discussed from the start, mainly because there is no way to affect the age of your brand. All the other factors are fair game, and we can influence them separately.

Relevancy

Relevancy in this context is the presence of a product or a brand on authoritative resources and in comparison articles. It can be improved upon by focusing SEO efforts on specific comparison-oriented keywords. Engaging a brand in authoritative partnerships is just as effective.

Brand Mentions

Brand value is the number and context of mentions the brand receives on social media, news websites, blogs, forums, etc. This factor can be improved by publishing regular press releases about new company milestones, features, or other news. Contributing improvements to your online presence by participating in discussions on Reddit or Quora is also a good idea when done correctly. OpenAI announced its content partnership with ReddIt on 16.05.2024, and I suspect there will be the same agreement with Quora shortly.

Reviews

Reviews are often credited as one of the biggest influences on a brand’s image for newcomers since they are supposed to showcase all of the product or service’s positive and negative aspects. Not only should it be possible to improve the overall number of reviews by encouraging feedback and addressing negative reviews, but these reviews can also be used as marketing materials themselves – for example, using testimonials from review platforms on your website would be a good starting point.

Authority

Authority represents a brand’s value in the eyes of the end-user and can be estimated by social media mentions, engagement levels, and SEO-related domain authority. High-quality backlinks from relevant resources definitely influence the domain authority positively. Expanding your social media presence by posting valuable content and participating in conversations is also a good idea. In addition, delving into the concept of E-E-A-T would greatly benefit your understanding of the domain authority.

Recommendations

Recommendations can be challenging to obtain from the get-go since they represent being linked or referenced by other web resources – news outlets, forums, blogs, etc. Many best practices for this step involve a relatively broad recommendation of networking and participating in community events while generating valuable content that others can reference.

ChatGPT’s focus on natural language

One of ChatGPT’s most prominent features is its ability to receive queries in natural language and respond in kind. At least one other type of content works similarly – voice-assisted content from Amazon Alexa, Google Home, etc. 

While we cannot yet create a dedicated set of recommendations for optimizing ChatGPT results, we can optimize the content for SEO as if it were designed for voice assistants.

Some of the more common recommendations for voice-assisted content are:

GEO and its connection with ChatGPT

While talking about SEO, it would also be wise to mention a new concept that has been gaining popularity with the advent of ChatGPT and various AI-assisted features in other software or hardware. The idea in question is called GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization. The original SEO concept is evolving to adapt specifically to AI-driven search engine changes.

According to the official GEO website, the GEO optimization relies on at least three different aspects that have quickly become massive pillars when optimizing ChatGPT content. These factors are: 

I apologize, but I cannot access the provided URL directly. However, I can provide a general overview of the importance of authoritative language, statistics references, and source citing in three paragraphs.

Authoritative language is crucial when conveying information, particularly in professional or academic contexts. It lends credibility and establishes the writer or speaker as a knowledgeable and trustworthy source. By using confident and assertive language, the audience is more likely to perceive the information as reliable and well-researched. 

Statistics and numerical data play a vital role in supporting arguments and claims. They provide quantitative evidence and add weight to the information presented. When using statistics, it is essential to reference the sources from which the data was obtained. Citing reputable and authoritative sources, such as peer-reviewed studies, government reports, or established organizations, enhances the credibility of the information and allows readers to verify the accuracy of the claims.

Source citing is a fundamental practice in academic writing and research. It acknowledges the intellectual property and contributions of others, avoiding plagiarism. Properly citing sources not only gives credit where it is due but also allows readers to explore the referenced materials further, fostering a deeper understanding of the topic. Additionally, source citing demonstrates the breadth of research conducted and the writer’s familiarity with the existing literature in the field.

The Future of AI in Branding

The concept of “ranking on ChatGPT” is entirely different from traditional SEO for numerous reasons. However, we went over multiple recommendations and factors that should help improve general content quality, which, in turn, improves the chances of being referenced in a ChatGPT response.

There is no 100% guaranteed way to include a brand in ChatGPT’s responses. Still, plenty of recommendations can improve the chances of existing companies, such as positive reviews, recommendations, brand mentions, authority, and relevancy. General voice assistant-oriented recommendations can also work to a certain degree, but none of them can guarantee success, especially in this specific area of interest.

Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models are still developing at an impressive pace, with new and improved features regularly introduced. The most significant push for everyone involved seems to be the addition of AI to search engines right now – with multiple news on the topic being released at a relatively fast pace:

All these news are either a month old or less, signifying how quickly everything is changing in this industry. It would be a great idea to keep track of all the future news in this industry to understand what might come next since predicting anything in such a volatile environment is borderline impossible anyway.

Andrei Iunisov is an independent lead generation and SEO expert with 18 years of worldwide experience. Since 2006 Andrei has been involved in digital marketing for the rapidly growing software company Parallels in the USA. In 2009 he co-founded one of the first Google-certified web analytics agencies in CIS. His client list included many well-known technology companies in the region. In 2014 the business was sold to the hugest independent digital marketing group in Russia - iConText Group. Since 2016 Andrei has provided individual digital marketing services to various technology companies worldwide. His deep industry expertise allows to start generating leads immediately with a predicted cost-per-lead without time-consuming experiments and rapidly increases the SEO traffic with minimum budgets.