AI assistants · 2026
ChatGPT SEO: getting named in the answer
ChatGPT SEO is the work that makes an assistant retrieve your pages and name you when someone asks a question in your category. There is no results page to climb here — the assistant pulls a short set of sources and writes from them, so you are either in that set or invisible. What decides it is whether your page can be fetched, whether your answer stands alone well enough to quote, and whether anyone else independently says the same thing about you.
How to rank on ChatGPT, practically
- 1. Be fetchable. If the assistant cannot load your page, nothing else matters. Check that your content renders without JavaScript and that you are not blocking AI crawlers you actually want.
- 2. Answer one question per passage. Claim first, support after. A paragraph that depends on the two above it cannot be lifted into an answer.
- 3. State who you are in machine-readable form. Organisation and service schema, one consistent name and set of claims sitewide.
- 4. Get the same facts said elsewhere. Independent corroboration is what turns an unattributed summary into a named citation.
- 5. Measure by asking. Record what the assistants say about you now, change one thing at a time, and re-ask. It is the only feedback loop available.
Perplexity SEO and AI Overview optimization: what differs
The underlying work is mostly shared. Where the engines diverge is how independently they retrieve.
ChatGPT
Browses live for current questions and names sources it can fetch and corroborate. Rewards pages that answer one question cleanly and state their facts plainly.
Perplexity
Citation-first by design — it shows its sources inline, so being fetchable and clearly attributable matters more here than anywhere else.
Google AI Overviews
Sits on the results page and leans on what Google already indexes and trusts, so classic crawlability and search signals carry more weight than in the other two.
Worth saying plainly: the exact selection mechanics are not published by any of the three, and they change. Everything above is what is observable from the outside, which is the honest limit of what anyone can tell you.
Where to start
Start here
AI Visibility Audit
What ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews say about you today, which buyer questions you are missing from, and who gets named instead.
See the audit →The ongoing work
Generative Engine Optimization
Entity schema, answer-shaped rewrites and citation building, run continuously — the work that moves all three engines at once.
See GEO →Related reading: LLM optimization (how retrieval works), answer engine optimization (every answer surface), and AI SEO services (the umbrella).
ChatGPT SEO, answered honestly
What is ChatGPT SEO?
ChatGPT SEO is the practice of making your brand and pages likely to be retrieved and named when ChatGPT answers a question in your category. It is not a ranking system you can climb — there is no results page — so the work targets what the assistant can actually use: pages it can fetch and read, self-contained answers it can quote without editing, machine-readable facts about who you are, and the same facts corroborated on independent sources it already trusts.
Does ChatGPT use Google rankings?
Not directly, and assuming it does leads people to work on the wrong things. When ChatGPT browses for a current question it fetches and reads live pages, and what it names is shaped by what it can retrieve and verify rather than by a position in Google's list. A page ranking fifth can be the one it quotes if that page answers the question more cleanly. Classic SEO still helps — it makes you findable and fetchable — but it is not the mechanism.
How do I know if ChatGPT mentions my brand?
Ask it the questions your buyers ask, in a fresh conversation, and record what it says and who it names. Repeat across the engines you care about. That baseline is the only reliable way to tell whether later work changed anything, and it is exactly what the AI Visibility Audit produces in a written form you can compare against later.
Is this the same as Google's AI Overviews?
Related but not identical. AI Overviews sit on the Google results page and lean heavily on what Google already indexes and trusts, so classic search signals matter more there. ChatGPT and Perplexity retrieve more independently and weight a page's own clarity and corroboration more. The underlying work overlaps a lot — clear entities, quotable passages, third-party corroboration — which is why it is worth doing once rather than per engine.
Can you promise ChatGPT will recommend me?
No. Nobody controls what a model outputs, the mechanisms are not public, and they change without notice. Any vendor promising a citation is guessing. What we commit to is the work that improves the odds and a documented before-and-after so you can judge whether it moved.