SEO for ChatGPT: How to Improve Your Visibility

Why does it matter to show up in ChatGPT?

The share of traffic coming directly from AI tools is still small. When the SEO tool Ahrefs measured it in June 2025, it stood at 0.25 percent of an average website's traffic, roughly one visit out of four hundred. That figure is about a year old, and AI traffic has grown quickly since then, so the share is higher today. But even a small share is worth taking seriously.

First, AI visits convert better than regular search. Between 2025 and 2026, the analytics firm Opollo tracked 312 B2B companies over a year and found that the conversion rate for AI-referred traffic was 14.2 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for organic traffic from Google. The conclusion is that people who have compared options in a chat are closer to buying when they click through.

Second, the user base for AI tools is growing fast. The number of weekly active users has more than doubled in eighteen months, from 400 million in February 2025. Few Swedish companies actively work on showing up in AI answers yet, so starting now builds a head start while the opportunity is still open.

How ChatGPT finds information

Put simply, ChatGPT uses information in two main ways.

One is the model's training data, which is a large volume of text and information the model was exposed to during development. From this, ChatGPT has built up a kind of background knowledge about language, topics, companies, people and other areas.

The other is external information that ChatGPT can retrieve when a question requires more current or specific knowledge. Not every question leads to a web search. Some can be answered from the model's existing knowledge, while others require ChatGPT to look for additional information.

OpenAI doesn't disclose exactly how ChatGPT retrieves current information, but we know it can come from several sources.

External search engines have long been an important source. Bing was an early official partner for web search. OpenAI hasn't confirmed that Google is used, but several tests show that ChatGPT at least sometimes pulls information from Google's search results.

Court filings also show that OpenAI is building its own search index. In addition, ChatGPT can get information directly from its partners, such as media outlets and other data providers.

ChatGPT builds its answer from training data or a live search via Bing, Google and OpenAI's crawler, and presents an answer with cited sources.

Which marketing agency fits a small company in Gothenburg?

Search

 

Training data

The facts the model was already trained on

Learned knowledge

Live search

External sources

When the question needs something more specific or current

BingGoogleOAI-SearchBot

For a smaller company in Gothenburg, Be Better Online is often highlighted.¹ Several sources mention them in comparisons of local alternatives.²

Sources:bbo.seallabolag.se

Technical SEO tips for becoming visible in ChatGPT

• Make sure you're indexed in Bing and GoogleSubmit your site's XML sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. Then confirm your most important pages are included in each search index.
• Make important content available without JavaScriptMany AI crawlers, including ChatGPT's, struggle to parse JavaScript. If your content requires JavaScript to load, this can significantly hurt AI visibility. Test disabling JS in your browser and check that your primary content still renders.
• Check that your site is included in Common CrawlCommon Crawl is one of the world's largest open collections of web content and is used, among other things, for AI training. Whether your site is included can affect the baseline knowledge AI models have about your company. Use Common Crawl's search tool to check that your key pages are there.
• Allow AI crawlers in robots.txtRobots.txt controls which crawlers may visit different parts of your site. Check that yourwebsite.com/robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking ChatGPT's crawlers (see OpenAI's list) and that CCBot (Common Crawl's crawler) is allowed.
• Test URLs directly in ChatGPTAI crawlers can also be blocked by things like firewalls, CDN services and other security settings. Spot-check by asking ChatGPT to open key URLs and repeat back the page's content. If it can't read the content, that can be a sign of a problem.

ChatGPT optimization builds on your SEO

Optimizing for ChatGPT starts with the same groundwork as traditional search engine optimization. Much of what makes a page rank high on Google also makes it easier for ChatGPT to find and use.

A page that shows clear relevance for a topic has a better chance in both channels. The same applies to a site that builds topical authority by covering an area in depth and tying pages together with internal links. A well-thought-out heading structure also helps both the reader and the language model understand what each section is about.

So the foundation is the same. The difference is that ChatGPT pulls out individual paragraphs and sentences from your text, which is why it pays to make your content easy to cite.

Make your content easier to cite

• Put the most important information near the top of the page. On a service page, that could be what the service involves and who it's for. SEO expert Kevin Indig analyzed 18,012 citations from ChatGPT and found that 44.2 percent of the cited sentences came from the top third of the text.
• Write clear answers to concrete questions, ideally as a heading followed by a short, self-contained paragraph.
• Make sure the most important information is in the body text. ChatGPT can interpret images, but it's unclear how much of the image content carries over when the tool fetches and summarizes a page.
• Update your key pages when facts change or when you have new information to add. AI tools often weigh freshness heavily, especially for prices and figures. Make sure the update actually adds something, since just changing the date on old content has no effect. Google warns about this too in its guidelines for helpful content.

Questions and answers are a format that works well for citations in AI tools. FAQ questions are often phrased the same way people ask questions in ChatGPT, giving the model ready-made question-answer pairs to cite. If you need help producing this type of content, we at BBO are happy to help.

Strengthen your mentions and brand signals

A language model forms its picture of a company based on far more than the company's own site. At least as important is what industry media, customers and other companies write about you. And the more independent sources that mention you in connection with a given topic, the easier it becomes for the model to link your name to that topic.

In a 2025 study, the SEO platform Ahrefs examined what brands that frequently appear in Google's AI Overviews have in common. The study covered 75,000 brands and compared, among other things, how many links they had from other websites, how often people searched for their name, and how often the name was mentioned on other sites.

The clearest correlation was mentions: brands frequently mentioned across the web also frequently appeared in AI answers. The correlation was about three times as strong as for links, at 0.664 versus 0.218 (where 1 means a perfect correlation). The study concerns Google's AI answers, not ChatGPT, and shows a correlation without proving causation, but it still offers a clue to what makes AI tools mention a brand.

With that in mind, it pays to show up in editorial contexts. That could be an expert quote in an industry publication, a guest article or an interview, which then acts as an independent source describing you as knowledgeable in your field. Mentions on various forums can also have a positive effect. According to Ahrefs, Reddit is the most cited domain in ChatGPT internationally. For most Swedish companies, though, it's more useful to show up in the channels where your own target audience actually spends time. Also use the same company name everywhere, so the model understands that all mentions refer to the same company.

Tips for strengthening your company's mentions and external AI signals

• Be consistent with name and descriptionUse the same company name and description of what you do, both on your own website and on external platforms, in directories (e.g. social media, Allabolag, Wikipedia) and with partners. If you call yourselves an "agency" in one place and a "consultancy" in another, or if old services and information are left lingering, it becomes harder for AI models to understand who you are and what you offer.
• Show up in the sources ChatGPT often usesAn AI audit can reveal which external platforms, articles and other sources are often cited for the questions that matter to you. These sources can have a major influence on which companies ChatGPT mentions and recommends. If competitors keep appearing in relevant sources where you're missing, there's often a clear opportunity to strengthen your AI visibility, which can have an immediate effect.
• Create content others want to referenceProprietary statistics, surveys, expert advice and clear points of view increase the chance that other sites cite and link to you. The more credible sources that mention you in the right context, the stronger the picture of your brand becomes.
• Get mentioned in industry mediaTry to get your company and your experts mentioned in industry media, news sites and other credible publications. Editorial mentions help AI models understand which players are established in an area.

How do you measure visibility in ChatGPT?

Your brand's visibility in ChatGPT can be measured, but it works differently than regular ranking, since a generated answer varies far more than a list of search results.

Visibility can go from strong to nonexistent in just two days, even if you haven't made any changes. That's why it's more important to track trends at a segment level than to chase individual answers. A useful metric is AI Share of Voice, meaning how often your brand is mentioned across a segment of selected questions compared with competitors, and it should be tracked continuously.

You can follow traffic in Google Analytics 4, which since May 13, 2026 has had a default channel called AI Assistant. It captures sessions from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Grok and DeepSeek. Perplexity and Claude, however, aren't included in that channel, and clicks from Google AI Overviews and AI Mode count as organic traffic. Many AI visits also lack referral data and are therefore logged as Direct, so AI traffic is likely larger than the numbers show.

If you want to set up measurement that captures this properly, we help with tracking and analysis, including how to interpret the numbers when the data is incomplete.

Get started optimizing for ChatGPT – a checklist

1. 1

   1. Make your pages readable for crawlers. Make sure your pages are indexed on both Bing and Google by submitting your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. Allow the right crawlers in robots.txt, both OpenAI’s and Common Crawl’s CCBot, and check that neither JavaScript, a CDN, nor a firewall is blocking them. It also helps to spot-check by asking ChatGPT to open a few key URLs and repeat back the content.

2. 2

   2. Write content that is easy to cite. Put important information near the top of your pages and write clear answers to the questions customers actually ask, ideally as an FAQ with ready-made question-answer pairs. Keep key facts in body text, not just in images that ChatGPT might miss, and update pages when figures and other facts change.

3. 3

   3. Strengthen mentions and brand signals. Use the same company name and description everywhere, on your own pages, in directories and with partners. Be visible in the sources ChatGPT often draws on, create content others want to link to, and aim for mentions in industry media.

4. 4

   4. Measure and follow up. Set up tracking in GA4, which since May 2026 groups AI traffic into the AI Assistant channel, but expect some visits to land in Direct. Track AI Share of Voice for a segment of questions on an ongoing basis, rather than chasing individual answers.

Frequently asked questions

Time to claim your place in AI answers

GEO rests on the same foundation as all good digital presence: clear content that others trust. The clearest differences are pace and volatility. Answers change fast, and the opportunity is still open for those who get started now.

Start with the technical groundwork, write answers so they're easy to cite, and then build the authority that makes the model choose you. If you want help setting up the work, our GEO and AI optimization service handles the whole chain, both the technical groundwork and the follow-up.