@tjrobertson52

Let's talk about the differences between ranking in ChatGPT versus ranking in Google. A lot of SEOs are still saying that it's pretty much the same thing because when you ask a question to one of these large language models, they're still using a search engine to find the answer. However, profound, which is the leading AI optimization tool right now just put out a study that definitively shows this is not true.

They ran hundreds of searches on both ChatGPT and Google and they compared the top 20 ranking sites on Google to the most common citations on ChatGPT. And a citation is just a site that was referenced by a large language model. When comparing the results, they found there was only a 12% overlap, meaning only 12% of the sites that ranked in the top 20 on Google also showed up in the citations from ChatGPT for the same searches.

So no, your SEO playbook is not going to continue helping you rank in ChatGPT the same way it is in Google. Now that being said, there are plenty of SEO tactics that will help you rank in the large language models, but we're also starting to see a lot of new ones. We're also seeing that the tactics that help you rank in ChatGPT won't necessarily help you rank in other large language models like Google's Gemini.

In fact, right now, the tactics that work with ChatGPT are reminiscent of the early internet days and that there are some very spammy tactics that work really well. For example, press releases are back. You can just spam out press releases about how amazing your company is on low quality press release sites and ChatGPT will often cite those press releases as the reason that you're the best choice.

This does not seem to be working in Gemini or AI mode. Also, just calling yourself the best on your own website or spamming top 10 companies in industry lists to any website listing yourself as the best easily fools ChatGPT into recommending you. Now even though these tactics are annoyingly effective right now, I'm not recommending most of my clients do them.

It just feels unsustainable to me. These tactics continue to work. ChatGPT's recommendations are just gonna get worse and worse and Gemini is gonna look better and better by comparison.

This is one of many reasons why I think people are underestimating Google right now while ChatGPT is definitely beating Gemini and I do think all around it's a better model. Right now from my point of view, Gemini's trajectory looks better than ChatGPT's. My advice instead of focusing on spammy tactics that happen to work right now in the short term, focus on the things that we can safely assume will continue to work long term.

Make sure your website addresses every question a customer might have and everything there is to know about your business, create high quality content at scale and distribute it across the internet. The best version of this is video content with an actual human. You can then repurpose each video into 10 pieces of high quality content.

And finally, catalog all the websites that large language models are referencing when they make recommendations and make sure your business is included in as many as possible. If you're looking for someone to help you with this, leave a comment or DM me. I'm happy to do a free audit for anyone with a marketing budget.