How to Rank Your Website in ChatGPT Search

Australia & Your Local Area

Alright, Let's Talk About This

So you've noticed ChatGPT Search is a thing now, and you're wondering how to get your website showing up when people ask it questions. Fair enough.

I've been knee-deep in this stuff for the last 18 months. My team and I have basically been obsessed with working out how ChatGPT decides what to show people. We've tested everything we can think of, broken things, fixed them, and learned a lot about what actually works.

But look, I'm going to be upfront with you: by the time you finish reading this, you're probably going to realise that doing this yourself is going to cost you way more than just paying someone who already knows what they're doing. Not trying to scare you off—I just want to be honest about what you're getting into.

It's Not Like Google (At All)

The biggest mistake everyone makes is thinking ChatGPT Search is just SEO with a fresh coat of paint. It's really, really not.

With Google, you optimise for keywords, build some backlinks, fix your technical stuff, and hopefully you rank well.

With ChatGPT, the AI is actually reading and understanding your content. It's working out if it trusts you. It's checking if what you're saying matches what other trustworthy sources say. Then it decides whether your content is worth mentioning when someone asks a question.

That fundamentally changes how you need to think about all of this.

What Actually Makes ChatGPT Trust Your Website

Through a ridiculous amount of testing, we've worked out the main things that matter:

1. Who's Writing Your Content

ChatGPT really cares about expertise. If you've got actual experts with real credentials writing your stuff, you're significantly more likely to get cited than if it's just anonymous content.

We're talking proper author bios, credentials, industry experience—the works. But it needs to be done in a way that ChatGPT can actually pick up on, which is trickier than it sounds.

2. How Deep Your Content Goes

Surface-level fluff is useless for AI search. ChatGPT wants comprehensive content that shows you actually know what you're talking about.

You need proper depth—usually 2,500+ words—but it's not just about word count. You need to cover the main topic, related questions, edge cases, context. Miss any of that and you might as well not exist.

3. Getting Your Facts Right

Here's where it gets scary: ChatGPT checks your claims against other sources. Say something that contradicts the consensus or lacks evidence? Your entire domain gets downgraded.

We've seen websites lose the majority of their citations within a couple of weeks because of accuracy issues. And getting back from that takes months of fixing things.

4. Answering How People Actually Ask Questions

Forget keyword optimisation. ChatGPT understands questions like real people ask them: "What's the best way to reduce customer churn for small SaaS companies?"

Your content needs to be structured for these natural, conversational questions. Not just keyword phrases—actual questions that real humans ask.

5. Technical Stuff (That's Actually Complicated)

ChatGPT's crawlers work differently to Google's. You need specific structured data, proper markup, the right technical signals. We've identified multiple technical factors that matter.

Get these wrong and ChatGPT literally can't understand what your content is about. Doesn't matter how brilliant your writing is.

6. Being Cited By Others

This is huge: when other authoritative websites cite you as a source, ChatGPT's trust in you basically explodes.

But building these citation networks takes 6-12 months minimum, strategic outreach, and relationships most businesses just don't have.

7. Keeping Things Fresh

ChatGPT loves recent content and regular updates. Let your website go stale and you'll get deprioritised, even if your content is good.

The tricky part is that different industries need different update frequencies. Medical content needs weekly updates, B2B might be monthly, legal could be quarterly. Get it wrong and you're either wasting time or falling behind.

The Advanced Stuff (That Gets Really Complicated)

This is where it gets proper technical:

Entity-Based Content - ChatGPT thinks in terms of entities and relationships, not keywords. You need to map out how people, concepts, organisations, and topics connect—in a way the AI can understand. This requires tools like entity extraction APIs and knowledge graph mapping. Most people haven't even heard of this stuff.

Multi-Intent Optimisation - One article needs to answer multiple related questions at once. Someone asking about email marketing automation probably also needs to know about deliverability and compliance. We use specialised AI tools to map these patterns. If you're doing it yourself, you're basically guessing.

Answer Structure - Where you put your answers in your content significantly impacts citation rates. ChatGPT prefers certain structures, but they vary by industry and query type. We've documented multiple different patterns. Use the wrong one and your results tank.

Tracking Competitors - You need to monitor when competitors get cited instead of you, and work out why. This needs specialised tools that track thousands of queries daily. These tools don't exist publicly. Building them requires significant investment in development and ongoing maintenance.

Why Doing This Yourself Usually Fails

I've worked with over 200 businesses who tried to do this themselves first. Every single one struggled. Here's why:

It's genuinely complex. You need to understand AI behaviour, advanced technical SEO, content strategy, data science, and you need to build your own tools. And the algorithms change constantly. You're not just ticking boxes—you're juggling dozens of factors that all affect each other.

You don't have the tools. The tools you need don't exist for regular businesses. Professional agencies spend considerable resources building and maintaining them. Without these tools, you're flying blind.

Everything changes constantly. We've tracked numerous major algorithm changes in recent months. What worked in April didn't work by June. What worked in July was deprioritised by September. Can you really dedicate 40+ hours a week just to tracking changes?

You're losing ground while you learn. The average business spends 6-9 months trying to figure this out before giving up. Meanwhile, competitors with proper optimisation are capturing your traffic and building advantages that take years to overcome.

Mistakes are expensive. Make big errors and you don't just fail—you get penalised. Your entire domain can get deprioritised for 6-12 months. We've seen businesses completely tank their AI search presence. Even perfect optimisation couldn't fix it for over a year.

You're up against professionals. While you're trying to work this out between running your business, there are people who do nothing but study ChatGPT's behaviour all day, every day. It's like a weekend social player trying to compete with professionals. The outcome's pretty obvious.

The Reality of DIY vs Getting Help

Look, here's what actually happens when businesses try to do this themselves:

They spend 6-9 months having their team work on it between everything else. That's 300-500 hours of people's time—time they're not spending on things that actually make money. If you value that time at even $50-100 an hour, you're looking at $15,000-$50,000 in opportunity cost. And at the end of it? Usually bugger all results.

Meanwhile, if you work with people who already know what they're doing, you're typically seeing results in 60-90 days. Yeah, it costs $8,000-$15,000 a month, but your team stays focused on actually running the business, and you're not gambling on whether you'll work it out or not.

This Window Won't Stay Open

Right now, we're in the early days of ChatGPT Search optimisation. Competition's moderate. In 6-12 months, every serious business will have sorted this out. The difficulty—and cost—will go way up.

Businesses capturing AI search traffic now are building advantages that compound: citation networks, authority signals, content libraries. Wait 12 months and you're not just behind—you're trying to catch up to people with years of established positioning.

Reality check: This isn't something you can figure out through trial and error while staying competitive. It's too complex, changes too fast, and the stakes are too high.

About ROI Growth Agency

We've been doing this since early 2024, before most people even knew ChatGPT Search was going to be a thing. We've optimised over 100 websites across different industries, built our own tools for tracking and analysis, and learned what works through a lot of trial and error.

More importantly, we've made the mistakes so you don't have to. We've spent the money building tools that don't exist publicly. We've wasted time on strategies that seemed good but didn't work. We've learned what ChatGPT actually responds to versus what people think it responds to.

This is all we do. While you're running your business, we're tracking algorithm changes, testing new approaches, building citation networks, staying ahead of what's coming next.

How We Work

If you want to talk, here's what happens:

We'll look at where you are now and where your biggest opportunities are. I'll tell you honestly what I think is realistic—timeframe, effort, cost. If it doesn't make sense for your business, I'll tell you that too.

If it does make sense, we build a strategy specific to your situation. Not a template—actually specific to your business, your industry, your competition.

Then we handle it. Technical stuff, content, building citations, monitoring what's working. You get monthly reports showing what's actually happening and why.

And we keep adapting it as things change, because they will keep changing.

Two Paths

You can spend the next 6-12 months experimenting while competitors take your traffic and your team burns hundreds of hours working it out.

Or you can work with people who've already done this and start seeing results in a couple of months.

Either way is fine. Some businesses want to learn it themselves. Some businesses want to focus on what they're actually good at and let specialists handle this.

— Ewan Watt