How do you make your company and content appear within ChatGPT?

We are getting asked a lot by our clients questions like “can we increase our ranking within ChatGPT?” and “How do we make our company appear when people search for services we offer?”. The question around how to “rank” within ChatGPT and how does one company appear in queries vs others is a fascinating topic, and whilst we don't have all the answers, we wanted to share what we do know.

Can your company appear within queries specific to the services you offer?

There are going to be very select prompts where ChatGPT is going to return actual companies. Queries need to be tailored to seeking out service providers / companies that offer these. ChatGPT will not return company names for a broad prompt around your industry, rather, it is just going to try to explain what it is and what it means.

To illustrate this idea, here is an example when you ask ChatGPT for the ‘best Umbraco agency in Chicago’ - and its important to note that it goes out and queries Bing for its results so what it brings back will be a close relation of the lists you would most likely see when you query Bing directly for this information:

There is then a significant difference in ChatGPT 4 (Paid Subscription) and 3.5 (Free Subscription):

• For paid subscriptions (ChatGPT 4) you optimize for SEO since these results are being scraped by Bing's search engine (see linked screenshot above).
• For free subscriptions (ChatGPT 3.5) this is nothing one can do at this moment to get your organization's results returned more frequently than they are. ChatGPT 3.5 is operating off of a database from January 2022, what's in there is in there. The goal here would be to get your company mentioned in more trusted industry resources for the next time ChatGPT scrapes the web to update its database.

How do you “measure” your visibility in ChatGPT?

From the virtual horse's mouth “I don't have the capability to track or analyze queries in real-time or access any data or usage statistics that have occurred after my last update.” So the short answer - you can’t. 

But we shouldn't be thinking about it like that in the first place, people do not use ChatGPT the same way they use search engines. There are so many longtail, in-depth prompts and those continue to evolve as you interact with Chat so the 'keywords' (prompts) you'd be looking to measure are going to include very specific, unique, long-tail inputs. The keyword overlap we see with search engines does not happen in Chat, it's much more conversational.

Measuring ChatGPT Referral Traffic on your Website

While measuring brand visibility in ChatGPT is not entirely possible, you are able to see referral traffic in Google Analytics when users follow links provided by ChatGPT in an output. 

To see this data, access the 'Traffic Acquisition report' in Google Analytics 4. From here you will want to apply the following filters:

- 'Session Default Channel Group' exactly matches "Referral"

- 'Session Source' contains "OpenAI"

You will then see traffic data from users accessing your website via links in ChatGPT.

This is a fast moving topic and the words above I am sure will be terribly out of date in just a few months (must set a reminder and see just how out of date they become) and we hope this gives you greater insight into what you can affect when it comes to ChatGPT and what you can not.

We love to talk about this stuff so if you want to have a further conversation, please get in touch!