There’s a question I’ve been getting a lot lately:
“How do I rank in ChatGPT?”
The answer hasn’t changed since people started asking the question.
And 2 conversations I had recently continued to prove it.
The first one was a client, on the phone.
“What did you do to get us into ChatGPT?”
A patient had typed their symptoms into the chat. ChatGPT told them to see a specialist in that specific field, then given them my client’s name.
“Nothing new,” I said. “We’ve been writing good content for you for 7 years.”
The second came by email. Someone had found me on ChatGPT and wanted to know what I’d done to appear there.
“What did you do specifically to be on AI search?”
“SEO.”
“Yeah, but you must have done something differently.”
“Yeah, no, literally the same kinda SEO stuff I do for all my clients.”
“I think I’m going with someone who says they offer AEO and GEO as well as SEO. They cost three times as much.”
“OK, bye.”
(Maybe I didn’t say “OK, bye.” Maybe I should have.)
Same work, shinier acronyms
Listen, here’s what gets you into ChatGPT:
- Good content.
- Properly structured.
- Written by people who understand the subject and know how to write.
- Built to last, so it’s still accurate in 3 years.
And here’s what gets you into Google: the exact same list. Always has been.
AI models pull their answers from the same places that good SEO has always targeted. The pages that rank. The sites that get cited. The content that’s clear enough for a machine to summarise without mangling it.
The principle is 25 years old, but the new acronyms are maybe 25 days old.
So if someone’s charging you 3 times the rate for AEO and GEO, ask them what those letters actually mean. In plain language. Without the brochure.
Then decide.
The bit that cuts the other way
AI models draw from whatever’s out there about you. And for a lot of businesses, what’s out there is a website from 2005.
I wrote about this a few months ago. A client wanted a chatbot to replace their customer service team, trained on their website. That website had phone numbers ringing empty desks and products discontinued in 2011.
The chatbot would have repeated all of it, confidently, to every customer who asked.
ChatGPT will do exactly the same thing. So will Google.
- That 2014 blog post about a service you dropped years ago?
- The team page with people who left before COVID?
- The prices in Maltese lira? (I’ve seen it.)
All of it gets crawled. All of it gets summarised. And a potential client reads it as a description of your business today.
Old, bad content actively works against you.
So fix it. Update whatever’s still relevant, and delete and redirect whatever isn’t. If you really must keep something, mark it noindex and let the crawlers walk past it.
My client got that ChatGPT referral because of 7 years of content that was accurate, useful, and still true.
That’s the entire trick.
The shortcut is 7 years. Sorry.
