ChatGPT controls 85% of the AI chat market, forcing marketers to rethink SEO around questions instead of keywords. The new strategy: identify what users ask, track visibility in chat results, match your content to the answers AI models give, and build citations from other authoritative sites to appear in those summaries.
Chapters
And when it comes to some of the new services, so for instance, you know, Perplexity and ChatGPT, how are you seeing this impact SEO? And what do you think some of the implications, you know, will it have moving forward?
Yeah, so 2 short things. Thing one is I think these services will be huge and it'll be a new channel and it's going to be very large. The second thing is that it's basically an evolution of SEO. It's not a completely different thing to optimize for them. So we, I posted some stuff on my LinkedIn about some stats around the growth of usage of these new AI services. And it looks like ChatGPT is, I think, about 85% market share or something, you know, almost essentially you could just optimize for ChatGPT today and you'd be fine to ignore the rest of them. I think that might change over time. Like Google was not the biggest search engine at the beginning. It was Excite or AOL and, you know, then that stuff changed. So we don't know if ChatGPT is gonna be the biggest surface and have 85% 5 years from now, but right now they have 85%. So if you're optimizing today, just optimize for ChatGPT. Second one is Perplexity, which I think is like 8% market share and then the rest are really tiny. So there's definitely growth there and we're seeing conversions from there and most of the impact from Chat search and AI chat and search is hard to measure because if you ask ChatGPT what's the best credit card, you're probably not going to click on the citation. You're probably just gonna, and it says, let's say it says, you know, brand new card like Mercury Bank. Okay, great. I'm gonna go open a new tab and type in Mercury or I'm gonna search for Mercury in Google and I'm not gonna know that that came from ChatGPT. So you just look at referral traffic, it's undercounting the effect. So I would ask if you can ask post-purchase questions like, how did you hear about us? You'll probably see much higher percentage coming from ChatGPT and Perplexity. And then the third is how to optimize for these new surfaces. And the short answer is it's SEO version 4, or, you know, it's like an evolution of SEO. Most of the questions that you ask start with a search. So you want to optimize for showing up in the search like you would for Google. And then the chat summarizes the search results. So each of these surfaces will have their own search engine. They're going to be maybe 80% similar to Google, but there's gonna be another 20% that's different. But you optimize for all these different search engines for the chat, number one, and I can go into detail if you'd like. And then the second thing is that Citation optimization. So the chat is looking for consensus. And so even if you show up all the time with one result in the search results, you also need the other citations to mention you. So if I want to be the best credit card for businesses, I want my page to show up and I want the 10 other citations to all mention me. So it's kind of like a backlink, but a new form of a chat backlink. So for ChatGPT, let's say, The first thing is we need to know the questions that actually matter. If we optimize for a question that no one asks, it doesn't matter. Just like if we rank number 1 for a search that no one ever searches for, it doesn't matter. So we need to figure out which questions are actually being asked a lot. And in SEO, you can get this information of keyword volume from the Ads API, but there is no truth set API for any of the chat chat services. So there's no data, there's no actual data, first-party data that we can get. So you need to guess what the questions are. And we're building a bunch of tools to do this. This doesn't really exist yet, but essentially what you can do is you can take the keywords that people are, this Google search keywords, and you can transform those into questions. So, you know, an easy way that people on this call can do this is go into Ahrefs, whatever keywords you want to rank for, try to transform them, try to manually transform them into a question. This is probably going to be pretty similar, the relative search volume for questions as for keywords. Okay. So step 1 is selecting the popular questions. Step 2 is tracking. So who's showing up for these questions? We built a question tracking tool that's not too expensive. So SERP So question tracking is the new SERP tracking rather than your position 3 for this keyword. Instead, you are, you are not showing up for this question. So we have a tool for that if anyone wants that. But then you want to look at your, how frequently you're showing up for a given question. It's like how, and when you ask ChatGPT best credit cards for business travel, it'll give you different answers each time you ask it. So you need to ask it multiple times. You need to ask variations of the question. You need to check perplexity. And so it's sort of a share of voice versus you rank position 3. So question tracking. Then you want to look for the patterns of what's in the answers. So if you ask best credit card for business travel, there are specific themes like the signup bonus and the APR and something else. So whatever themes of the content and the answers, you should have that on your page so that the chat is easily finding these things. And then 4 is citation optimization. So again, it's great if we show up all the time with our page, but we need all the other citations to mention us. So we need to know who the citations are and not just Forbes, but Forbes specific URL that is the citation, and then try to be on those pages somehow.
