To optimize your brand for ChatGPT, you have to shape two different things: what the model absorbed during training, and what it pulls in live when someone asks a question today. In practice that means seeding consistent, credible signals across the third-party sources ChatGPT trusts — reviews, Reddit, Wikipedia, respected press — structuring your own pages so a clean answer is easy to lift, and feeding accurate product data into ChatGPT shopping. The goal isn't to rank a page. It's to become the answer.
That distinction is why optimizing for ChatGPT sits closer to answer engine optimization than classic SEO. With roughly 900 million weekly users in 2026, ChatGPT now behaves like a research assistant, a shortlist-builder and a checkout in one — and when your brand is missing from the reply, most users never see a second opinion. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the discipline for earning that spot.
Key takeaways
ChatGPT draws on two things: what it learned in pretraining (the internet's rough consensus about you) and what it retrieves live at query time. You have to influence both.
Third-party credibility outranks backlinks. Reviews on G2, Capterra and Trustpilot, positive Reddit and Quora threads, Tier-1 press, and an accurate Wikidata or Wikipedia entity move the needle more than your own marketing copy.
Write answer capsules — a one-sentence definition, a "best for" line, a clean comparison — so the model can quote a precise statement about you instead of guessing.
ChatGPT shopping runs on a structured product feed and the Agentic Commerce Protocol; a clean feed plus Product schema decides whether you appear in shopping cards and Instant Checkout.
You can't tune a black box blind. Measure prompt coverage, position, sentiment, Share of Model and your AIGVR score before and after every change.
How ChatGPT decides which brands to recommend
ChatGPT assembles an answer from two layers, and each one needs a different play.
What the model already knows
Pretraining is the model's long-term memory: the enormous corpus of books, articles, forums and reference sites it learned from. If your brand shows up frequently, positively and consistently in high-quality sources inside that corpus, the model treats you as a genuine entity in your category and can recommend you with no browsing at all. This layer moves slowly and is hard to game, which is exactly why it is valuable.
For anything current — "best CRM 2026", "cheapest way to ship pallets" — ChatGPT's built-in search (the retrieval capability that absorbed the old SearchGPT experience) fetches live pages, synthesizes them and answers with citations. Here, ranking well in traditional and Bing-powered search still matters, because those indexes feed what ChatGPT reads.
The rule that ties both layers together: ChatGPT weights brand mentions and sentiment more heavily than raw backlinks. It recommends whatever the collective internet seems to agree is good.
ChatGPT ads intelligence: tracking which brands run ad placements in ChatGPT via the Criteo network — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
A step-by-step ChatGPT optimization playbook
1. Map the prompts that decide your category
Start with the questions real buyers ask — not keywords, full prompts. "Best project management tool for a small creative agency", "eco-friendly running shoes under $120", "alternatives to [competitor]". Group them by buying stage and by whether they trigger browsing. This list becomes your scoreboard: every prompt is a position you either hold or don't.
Query fan-out tracking: how ChatGPT expands buyer questions into web search queries, with popular searches and demand themes — Source: GEOly AI (app.geoly.ai)
2. Build entity authority where the model learns
ChatGPT trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself, so invest where its understanding actually forms.
Review platforms — G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Yelp. ChatGPT routinely synthesizes review consensus to decide which option is "best".
Discussion forums — Reddit and Quora are heavily represented in training data; earned, non-spammy mentions in the right subreddits read as community trust.
Authoritative media — coverage in TechCrunch, Forbes or respected trade press cements market-leader status.
Wikidata and Wikipedia — an accurate, well-sourced entity helps the knowledge graph define who you are and what you sell.
3. Engineer answer-ready pages
When ChatGPT browses your site, it needs to lift a clean statement fast. Structure your key pages as answer capsules.
A definition capsule: "Brand X is cloud accounting software built for freelancers and sole traders."
A "best for" capsule: "Brand X is best for small teams that need inventory tracking baked into invoicing."
Plain comparisons: clear, well-labeled feature and pricing comparisons the model can parse into pros and cons.
The test is simple — could a model quote one sentence from the page and be accurate? If not, tighten it.
4. Keep every fact consistent
Models hate ambiguity. If one source calls you "free" and another "enterprise-priced", ChatGPT may hedge, hallucinate or drop you. Keep your name, core positioning, pricing model and category description identical across your site, social profiles and third-party directories. Consistency is what lets the model state a fact about you confidently.
5. Get product data ready for ChatGPT shopping
ChatGPT is now a shopping surface, not just an answer box. Products surface through a structured feed that OpenAI ingests (current spec version 2026-01-30) and in-chat buying runs on the Agentic Commerce Protocol with PSPs like Stripe behind Instant Checkout. To be eligible:
Publish a clean product feed with the required fields — id, title, description, price, availability, url, image — plus identifiers like GTIN, UPC or MPN and trust signals such as ratings and review counts.
Mark up product pages with Product schema exposing price, availability and review data.
Keep feed and page in sync; stale prices or stock get you filtered out, and OpenAI's feed supports refreshes as often as every 15 minutes.
This is where agentic commerce readiness turns into revenue, and where the Share of Card metric — how often your products win the shopping card — starts to matter as much as mentions.
6. Measure, then close the loop
Everything above is a hypothesis until you watch the answers change. Track which prompts you appear in, at what position, with what sentiment, and how that compares to competitors — then feed the gaps back into steps 2 through 5.
Tracking ChatGPT visibility with GEOly
Optimizing ChatGPT blind is guesswork; the whole point of a GEO platform is to make the black box legible. Here is how we approach it at GEOly.
Prompt monitoring: run thousands of category prompts across ChatGPT and six other engines and see whether you appear, where you rank, and exactly what the model says about you.
Sentiment: it matters whether ChatGPT recommends you outright or with a caveat ("good, but support is slow"). GEOly flags the caveat so you can fix the root cause and refresh the reviews that feed it.
Share of Model: the percentage of category answers that mention you versus rivals, scored per engine, so you can read ChatGPT specifically.
AIGVR: a single 0-100 visibility score that rolls up mention rate, citation rate and position, tracked over time. See AI search KPIs for how the metrics fit together.
A 29-point GEO audit and citation analysis: which sources ChatGPT actually cites for your category, and where your entity data or product feed is holding you back — the raw material for a GEO audit.
For teams running this at scale, GEOly also exposes the same data through an MCP server, CLI and Skills, so an agent can pull your ChatGPT standings straight into a workflow. You can try it on a free 3-day trial at app.geoly.ai; plans are on the pricing page.
FAQ
Is optimizing for ChatGPT the same as SEO?
They overlap but are not identical. Ranking in Bing and Google still helps, because ChatGPT's live search reads those indexes. But ChatGPT also leans on pretraining and on sentiment across reviews and forums, so brand reputation and consistency matter more than link volume. Think of it as SEO plus AEO.
How long until changes show up in ChatGPT answers?
Live-retrieval prompts can shift within days once your pages and reviews improve. Pretraining-driven recommendations move slowly — often across model releases — so sustained presence in trusted sources is what compounds. Track both so you know which lever moved the answer.
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT?
Not for organic recommendations. There is no "buy your way into the answer" for the standard reply, which is why entity authority and clean data matter. Product visibility in ChatGPT shopping does depend on submitting a compliant feed, but that is eligibility, not paid ranking.
Which metric best shows ChatGPT progress?
Share of Model per engine and your AIGVR score are the clearest signals, because they combine whether you appear, how often, and in what position relative to competitors. Pair them with sentiment so you catch cases where you are mentioned but framed negatively. Start from your prompt list under AI search.
