Optimizing for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search engines

[CanSpace]

When you look at your Google Analytics, does ‘chatgpt.com / referral’ look familiar to you as well?

As of the beginning of this year, I am watching a steady growth in ChatGPT search traffic, as it has already become one of the most active sources of organic traffic this calendar year. I ran a few search queries of interest and we do indeed rank 2nd or 3rd for many of them. Even more impressive? The revenue share from ChatGPT-referred visitors is outperforming even some niche sources (domain and hosting related websites). Especially when you look at revenue proportion to the number of website sessions, it is currently staying on par with Google-driven organic traffic. Considering that GA tracking, in our case, misses about 35% of actual sales, those are pretty significant numbers. So if AI search traffic scales up, the revenue should follow.

This leaves a huge problem and an even bigger opportunity: how to optimize specifically for AI-based search tools. I haven’t seen much reliable information on that yet, but if you have, what does that optimization strategy come down to?

Additionally, if you do track sales through GA, are you numbers similar? How is your conversion of ChatGPT traffic in comparison to Google’s (consider organic traffic only)?

 

[SharedGrid]

I have seen referrals from ChatGPT coming to us over the last 2-3 months, and I can put a few keywords into the prompt which results in our company name/website appearing. I find that whatever keywords we rank first page, or first results for in Google and Bing are what ChatGPT is showing - with a summary of the content of the page.

Since Microsoft has a big stake in OpenAI I would have thought that ChatGPT would predominantly be using results from Bing but there seems to be a mixture (or does ChatGPT have it's own search engine?). A 3 word phrase we rank 4th for in Google, but it shows our managed VPS page rather than our unmanaged VPS page - another web host ranks first but not directly to their website, from another forum. Then we rank first in the same phrase for Bing, whereas the other web host does not rank at all. There definitely seems to be a mixture of search engine data going on, or ChatGPT has its own crawling and indexing functionality.

Sometimes it's way off the mark though, searching for a phrase that contains 'WordPress Hosting' and a few other keywords, actually shows our VPS offering rather than WordPress offering.

Although the traffic referred from ChatGPT is growing, we haven't seen any conversions from it though.

At the moment, my strategy is probably just to focus on SEO with Google & Bing because it seems to be working OK for us in terms of results from ChatGPT too; until more information is available.

 

[Mivocloud]

For some time now (6 months - a year), I have been noticing the arrival of customers from chat gpt and I will tell you that this is even more good, I cannot give you keywords as an example, but I can say that there are many factors here, for example, whether you have a blog with useful articles.

 

[Proxysolid]

Honestly, Im still learning about this topic (websites and programming), and what you guys are saying is very interesting. I have searched some websites through chatgpt myself, but I never really thought about people visiting my site that way.

It makes me wonder, why does the chatgpt send users to certain sites? where does it get that information from? maybe from blog? Comments or other pages that mention the website? Im not really sure, but it is something I want to understand better.

 

[SharedGrid]

Honestly, Im still learning about this topic (websites and programming), and what you guys are saying is very interesting. I have searched some websites through chatgpt myself, but I never really thought about people visiting my site that way.

It makes me wonder, why does the chatgpt send users to certain sites? where does it get that information from? maybe from blog? Comments or other pages that mention the website? Im not really sure, but it is something I want to understand better.

Not sure, there's not much information about it as far as I know. I just searched ChatGPT using a search term that we target, it brought up 3 companies, we were the first results and 2 other competitors. However, the links it provided weren't directly to our website or any of the competitor websites they were through discussion forums.

Over the last couple months we have seen a significant reduction in traffic from ChatGPT, we must have upset it.

 

[SenseiSteve]

I did read yesterday that ChatGPT was using Reddit as their primary sourcing provider.