Can You Optimise Your Site for ChatGPT?

Katie Mckelvie

September 24, 2024

Navigating the Future of Paid Search

Can you Optimise Your Website For ChatGPT, and If So, Should You?

 

ChatGPT is a chatbot that provides conversational responses to any query you pose, but its point of difference is its extremely large knowledge base. Originally launching in November 2022, the tool is now being used by approximately 180 million users. ChatGPT has quickly become synonymous with AI technology and its potential to generate content at speed and scale and remain high quality.

With so many users and so many answers it provides, businesses are keen to understand if there is a way to appear and rank for queries relevant to them.

As ChatGPT can provide links in its answers, it would be useful to know if any brands were benefitting from ChatGPT sending traffic their way. Traffic from links within ChatGPT may appear as Referral traffic (chatgpt.com / referral) in your GA4. So, it’s worth monitoring this over time if it starts to pick up.

However, there is a significant focus on improving tracking and sentiment from AI tools with organisations looking at building a ‘Share of Model’ metric in a similar vein as Share of Voice in SEO. Share of Model is defined as the number of mentions of a brand by one or multiple LLMs as a proportion of total mentions of brands in the same category. Providing a rough level of overall ‘visibility’ within AI models. While this isn’t available yet, it could be a meaningful metric in the future.

 

ChatGPT Can Link and Cite Its Sources

In the paid version, ChatGPT has also begun to explicitly cite its sources, showing in the example below how it combines data from the search engine, Bing.com, as well as specific sites – what is interesting to note though, testing the search on Bing itself, ChatGPT is not just sourcing its answers directly from Bing search results, as only two of the four searched sites were in the top five Bing search results.

Chat gpt Image e1720771864788

 

With the potential ‘Share of Model’ metrics being developed, ideally, they would not just track mentions but also if a site has contributed to an answer or been searched. However, this may only be possible if ChatGPT provided the analytics itself.

As Bing’s Index contributes to the content and context Chat GPT runs on it, brands should be dusting off their Bing webmaster profiles and monitoring their visibility in Bing.

Should You Block GPT Crawlers?

It’s also worth mentioning the anti-ChatGPT movement, with guides and articles recently published showing how to prevent your site from being crawled by language models in the fear that ChatGPT or your competitors could benefit from the content on your site, reusing it and potentially monetising it.

From an SEO perspective, this risk is overstated. By blocking ChatGPT from crawling your site, you would likely be limiting it to what has already been crawled and preventing the AI from recommending any updated information. 

There are always exceptions though. Publishers, for example, that have content hidden behind subscriptions or paywalls would likely want to limit crawlers. The New York Times has disallowed the GPTBot and ChatGPT-User crawlers from crawling their site. Despite this, ChatGPT is still able to recommend NYT articles in its answers- though not the entire article. 

Chatgpt Disallow e1720996814834

The New York Times Robots.txt example

 

Managing OpenAI Crawlers with Robots.txt

As AI tools like OpenAI’s crawlers play a growing role in content discovery and usage, especially across AI Overviews, controlling how these bots interact with your site is essential. OpenAI allows webmasters to manage access to different bots through the `robots.txt` file.

OAI-SearchBot

Boosting Search Visibility OAI-SearchBot surfaces your content in OpenAI’s search products, such as SearchGPT, without using it for AI model training. By allowing OAI-SearchBot access, your site can appear in AI-powered search results. To enable this, add the following to your `robots.txt` file:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot

Allow: /

Why Optimise For ChatGPT?

Trying to optimise for ChatGPT feels very similar to people trying to optimise for voice search when virtual assistants first took off 10 years ago. This mainly focused on creating content that answers people’s questions and using more natural phrases that people would use when searching.

Optimising for the AI chatbot is the natural next step in maximising your brand or service reach and amplifying content to attract more customers and brand awareness. 

 

How to Optimise Your Website For ChatGPT?

Ultimately, it comes down to following SEO best practice and if you are doing that you will already be giving as much context to ChatGPT and other language models as to what your site is about. Given you can’t measure the impact, changes or improvements you may have on ChatGPT visibility, it is better to focus on your visibility in the places you can measure, such as organic search results.

1. High-Quality Content

  • Relevant and Valuable Content: Ensure your content is informative, well-researched, and valuable to your audience.
  • Regular Updates: Keep your content fresh and up-to-date to maintain relevance, providing republishes to legacy content when required.
  • Conversational Keywords: Optimise for phrases and questions that users might ask AI tools, like long-tail queries relating to your niche
  • FAQ Pages: Develop comprehensive FAQ pages to answer common questions directly.

2. Keyword Optimisation

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): Use keywords and phrases that align with how people naturally ask questions. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help identify these.
  • Semantic SEO: Focus on topics and entities rather than just keywords to provide comprehensive coverage of a subject.

3. Structured Data

  • Schema Markup: Implement structured data to help search engines better understand the content and context of your pages. This can improve visibility in rich snippets and knowledge panels.

4. User Experience (UX)

  • Mobile Optimisation: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
  • Fast Loading Times: Optimise your website’s speed, as slow sites can negatively impact user experience and rankings.
  • Clear Navigation: Make sure your site is easy to navigate, with pages that are simple to find.

5. Technical SEO

  • Crawlability: Ensure your site is easily crawlable by search engines. This includes having a proper sitemap and a robots.txt file.
  • Secure Website: Use HTTPS to secure your site, which is a confirmed Google ranking factor.

6. Content Accessibility

  • Readable Content: Use clear headings, short paragraphs, and bullet points to make your content easy to read.
  • Multimedia: Incorporate images, videos, and infographics to enhance content engagement.
  • Image Alt Text: Add comprehensive names to all images onsite to better inform image readers and search engines of what the image is about.

7. Social Proof and Engagement

  • Social Media Integration: Promote your content through social media channels to drive traffic and engagement.
  • User Interaction: Encourage comments, reviews, and shares to increase user engagement.

8. Authority and Backlinks

  • High-Quality Backlinks: Aim to get backlinks from reputable sites in your industry.

9. Local SEO (if applicable)

  • Local Listings: Ensure your business is listed in local directories like Google Business Profile.
  • Localised Content: Create content relevant to your local audience.

Optimising your website for AI is an important next step in ensuring your site remains relevant across search engines and chatbots like ChatGPT, giving you a better chance of appearing in answers to questions related to your brand. 

If you’re interested in understanding how Pattern can successfully optimise your site for AI and future-proof your SEO strategy, contact us now.

 

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