How to Rank on ChatGPT: A Practical Guide for Businesses

More and more buyers are skipping Google and asking ChatGPT instead: “Who’s the best accountant in Perth?” or “What’s a good CRM for a small team?”. If your business isn’t in those answers, you are invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to choose. Fixing that is what our AEO services for Australian businesses are built for.

There is no secret formula, and anyone promising a guaranteed spot is guessing. But there are clear, practical steps that make you far more likely to be mentioned. Here they are.

How ChatGPT decides who to mention

ChatGPT draws on two sources:

• What it learned in training. A huge snapshot of the web, books and other text. Brands that were widely discussed online are more likely to be “known”.
• What it finds with live search. For current questions, recommendations and local searches, ChatGPT searches the web in real time and summarises what it finds, with links to its sources.

You can influence both. The live search side is where you can make the fastest difference.

Step 1: Let ChatGPT’s crawlers in

OpenAI uses different crawlers for different jobs. Check your robots.txt file and make sure you aren’t blocking them by accident:

• OAI-SearchBot finds pages to show in ChatGPT search results. Block this and you can’t appear.
• ChatGPT-User visits pages when a user asks ChatGPT to look something up.
• GPTBot collects content for training future models. You can choose to allow or block it.

Some security plugins and firewalls block these bots without telling you, so it’s worth checking your server settings too.

Step 2: Get properly indexed in Bing

ChatGPT’s search draws heavily on Bing’s index, so if Bing can’t find your pages, ChatGPT probably can’t either. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and fix any crawl errors. It takes about ten minutes and it’s free.

Step 3: Write answer-first content

AI tools pull out clear, quotable answers. Help them:

• Start each page with a direct answer to the main question, then add detail.
• Use headings that match the questions buyers actually ask.
• State facts plainly: who you help, where, what it costs and what makes you different.
• Add FAQs, comparisons and “how it works” sections.
• Keep pages current. Outdated prices and details get skipped or, worse, repeated wrongly.

Step 4: Make your business easy to understand

ChatGPT needs to be confident who you are. Make sure your business name, address, phone number and description match everywhere: your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and review sites. Add Organization and LocalBusiness schema to your site, with links to your official profiles. A clear About page, named experts and real credentials all help.

Step 5: Earn mentions on sites ChatGPT trusts

This is the big one. When ChatGPT recommends businesses, it leans on what other people say about them. Aim to be mentioned in:

• Industry directories and “best of” lists in your niche and city
• Local news, trade publications and association websites
• Review platforms such as Google, Trustpilot and industry-specific sites
• Relevant online communities and forums, where real customers talk about you
• Podcasts, webinars and partner websites

One genuine mention on a respected site is worth more than a pile of low-quality links.

Step 6: Build a steady flow of reviews

Reviews tell AI tools that real customers rate you. Ask every happy customer, make it easy with a direct link, and reply to every review, good or bad. Specific reviews that mention your service and location are the most useful.

Step 7: Publish the content buyers ask AI about

Think about the questions your customers type into ChatGPT, then create the best answer on the web: pricing guides, comparisons, “how to choose” pages and honest pros and cons. If you’re the most helpful source on a topic, you’re far more likely to be cited.

Step 8: Track your AI visibility

• Ask ChatGPT yourself. Run your key buyer questions every month and note who gets mentioned.
• Check your analytics. In GA4, look for referral traffic from chatgpt.com. Links from ChatGPT often carry a utm_source=chatgpt.com tag.
• Watch branded search. More people searching your business name is often a sign that AI tools are recommending you.

What doesn’t work

Stuffing pages with keywords, spamming forums or publishing hundreds of AI-written pages won’t help, and Google now treats attempts to manipulate AI answers as spam. The businesses that show up in AI answers are the ones that are genuinely well known and well reviewed in their space.

Want help getting into the answers?

This is exactly what our AI search optimisation service does. For the bigger picture, read SEO vs AEO vs GEO and why ChatGPT is becoming a customer acquisition channel. Or start with a free audit and we’ll check how AI tools describe your business today.

About the author

John Conigliaro

Director and Lead Consultant, Anahaw Media

John Conigliaro is the Director and Lead Consultant at Anahaw Media, a Perth digital marketing agency focused on performance. A Filipino-Australian digital marketer now based in Perth, WA, with more than 15 years’ experience across Singapore and Australia, he has led agencies in Australia on technical execution and growth strategy, founded a globally recognised eCommerce brand, and managed almost 300 campaigns, from small businesses to multinational brands, including Canon, Uniqlo, Benefit Cosmetics, Asiana Airlines, Changi Recommends, APM and Golfbox. He completed an MBA and a dissertation on Digital Transformation, holds a specialisation in Computer Applications from De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLSU-CSB), and is also a consumer tech critic and publisher. His mission is to use his talent and passion for digital marketing to change businesses for the better, in how they win customers and how they build their brand.

View John’s full profile and articles →

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