If you’re trying to “rank” in ChatGPT the same way you rank in Google, you’re going to have a bad quarter.
That’s not my take. It’s the pattern a lot of marketers are bumping into right now, and it’s one a top marketing agency, Relevance, has been flagging in its recent research and client-facing visibility audits: AI answers don’t behave like search results. They behave like compiled briefs. ChatGPT pulls from what it already “knows,” plus whatever it can verify quickly when it browses, then it assembles a response that feels authoritative. So brand visibility isn’t about chasing a mythical #1 spot. It’s about becoming the source that’s referenced, cited, and repeated when your category comes up.
Here are six strategies we’ve used (and seen work) to get brands mentioned, recommended and cited more often in ChatGPT answers without turning your content program into a science project.
Strategy 1: Create “citation-ready” pages, not blog posts
Most brand content is written for humans who will skim and bounce. ChatGPT needs content that’s easy to extract, quote and attribute.
In practice, that looks like pages built around a single question with a clean, direct answer in the first 60 to 90 words, followed by supporting details, definitions and examples. When we rebuild content into this format, we usually see two downstream benefits: more featured snippets in Google and more consistent AI citations across tools that browse the web.
What to publish first (pick one):
A glossary page for your core category term
A “how it works” explainer with a simple process breakdown
A benchmarks page with real numbers and a methodology section
If you do nothing else, do this: add a “short answer” paragraph at the top of your highest-intent pages. Make it so clean you’d feel comfortable pasting it into an investor update.
Strategy 2: Win the sources ChatGPT already trusts
When ChatGPT browses, it tends to favor sources with strong authority signals and clean information architecture. In the wild, that often means Wikipedia, major publications, reputable industry sites, standards bodies, well-linked documentation hubs and widely referenced datasets.
You don’t need to become The New York Times. You do need to show up in places that already have gravity.
A practical PR angle that works right now: stop pitching “thought leadership,” start pitching “explainers with receipts.” Journalists and editors are hungry for clear definitions, fast stats and original mini-datasets they can cite. When they cite you, AI tools often inherit that trust chain.
One example we’ve used in B2B: publish a small benchmark study (even 150 to 300 responses), write a tight methodology, then pitch the “most surprising finding” to three industry publications. The goal is not a single spike of referral traffic. The goal is creating a few durable pages on durable domains that keep getting referenced.
Strategy 3: Treat your brand like an entity, not a logo
ChatGPT is better at entities than it is at brands with fuzzy edges. If your company name, category, product names and positioning are inconsistent across your site and the wider web, you’re making the model work harder than it has to.
This is the boring work that pays off:
Use one canonical description of what you do everywhere
Keep your About page current and specific
Make sure your brand shows up consistently across major profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase and industry directories)
Tie product names to category terms directly (“X is a B2B AP automation platform,” not “X is a modern finance experience”)
Think of it like technical SEO for your identity. When your “entity graph” is coherent, you’ll show up more cleanly in answers that start with “What is…,” “Best tools for…” and “Alternatives to…”
Strategy 4: Make your content accessible to the crawlers that matter
This part gets weird fast, but you can keep it simple.
OpenAI documents multiple crawlers and user agents, including GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, and explains how site owners can manage access via robots.txt.
Two realities to keep in mind:
If you block everything, you’re opting out of a chunk of AI discovery.
If your best content sits behind heavy scripts, paywalls or odd navigation, you’re also “blocked,” even if you didn’t mean to be.
Quick checks we run before we expect AI visibility:
Your key pages render cleanly without requiring user interaction
PDFs are real text, not image scans
You’re not accidentally noindexing your best explainers
Your robots.txt reflects your actual business goal (visibility vs. restriction)
Also, OpenAI’s ecosystem is expanding beyond classic web browsing into “apps” and connectors that pull from tools like Google Drive or SharePoint for business users. That’s not public brand marketing, but it does change how often prospects may encounter your docs, decks and internal enablement assets inside ChatGPT at work.
Strategy 5: Engineer your pages for the prompts people actually use
Most companies still write for keywords. Your buyers are writing prompts.
Instead of “best invoicing software,” they ask:
“What should I look for in invoicing software for a 20-person agency?”
“Give me a shortlist and the tradeoffs.”
“What’s the difference between X and Y?”
Build pages that answer the second-order questions. For example, constraints, tradeoffs, implementation steps and who a tool is not for. That last part is underrated. When you use clear exclusions (“Not a fit if you need . . .”), you make your content feel more trustworthy, which increases the odds it gets pulled into an answer.
A simple way to operationalize this: take your top five sales objections and turn each into a standalone page. If Sales keeps hearing “We’re worried implementation will take six months,” publish “Typical implementation timelines for [category]” with real ranges and the variables that change them.
Strategy 6: Measure “share of answer,” then iterate like it’s paid media
Teams publish one “GEO” page, search ChatGPT twice, don’t see themselves, then give up.
Don’t fall into this trap. You need a monitoring loop, just as you’d manage creative testing in Meta.
We run a lightweight cadence that looks like this:
Pick 20 prompts that map to your pipeline, not your ego
Run them weekly in ChatGPT search and two other AI tools your buyers use
Track whether you’re mentioned, whether you’re cited and what the model says about you
Update the one page that should have been the source
If you want a benchmark that feels real: for a mid-market B2B brand, we typically aim for movement within 30 days. Not “own the category,” just measurable improvement like going from zero mentions across 20 prompts to three to five mentions and one to two citations. Once you have that foothold, you scale the same playbook across adjacent topics.
One more thing: don’t obsess over a single model behavior. ChatGPT’s search and browsing experience has been evolving quickly, including broader access to search without sign-in and more search-engine-like results. That volatility is exactly why the fundamentals above matter. Durable sources beat gimmicks.
What to do this week if you’re starting from zero
Start small and ship:
Rewrite two high-intent pages with a citation-ready intro.
Publish one original data point with a clear methodology.
Earn one third-party mention on a trusted industry site.
Set up a weekly prompt audit and track share of answer.
Do that for a month and you’ll have something most teams still don’t: a repeatable system for earning visibility in the answers prospects actually read.
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