How to Rank in ChatGPT
9 Steps to Get Your Site Cited

Step 2

Get indexed and ranking in Bing

Most site owners check Google Search Console every week and have never opened Bing Webmaster Tools. For ChatGPT, that is backwards. A page Bing hasn’t indexed rarely shows up as a ChatGPT citation, however well it ranks in Google.

Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools (you can import it from Search Console in two clicks), submit your XML sitemap, and switch on IndexNow so new and updated URLs are pushed to Bing straight away. Then look at the indexing report. Bing is pickier than Google about thin pages and duplicates, so clean canonical tags matter here too.

Do this: search site:yourdomain.com on Bing and compare the count with your sitemap. A big gap is your first job.

Step 3

Research prompts, not only keywords

People type three words into Google and twenty into ChatGPT. “Google Ads agency Barcelona” becomes “I run an online shop in Spain selling to Germany, should I hire an agency or a freelancer for Google Ads, and what should it cost?” That prompt has a budget, a market, a decision and a comparison in it.

Start from your normal keyword research, then rewrite each target keyword as the full question a real customer would ask. Your sales calls, contact form messages and support emails are the best source, because customers already phrase questions that way. Group the prompts by stage. Comparison and “which one should I choose” prompts sit close to a purchase, the same way bottom-of-funnel content does in classic SEO.

Do this: write 20 prompts your customers would ask before buying. These become your test set in the tracking section.

Step 4

Put the answer in the first two sentences

The model reads passages, not whole pages. When a heading asks “How much does a Google Ads campaign cost in Spain?”, the two sentences under it should give the answer with a number, a range or a clear rule. The context, exceptions and stories can follow.

Write each section so it still makes sense if someone copies it out of the page alone. Name the subject again instead of writing “it” or “this tool”. Use headings that match how people ask, often as questions. Use tables for anything with more than two options or more than two attributes, because a table row is easy for a model to read correctly.

This is also good copywriting for humans on a phone. Nobody wants to scroll through three paragraphs of introduction to find the price.

Do this: take your five most important pages and check the first two sentences under every H2. If they don’t answer the heading, rewrite them.

Step 5

Cover the searches ChatGPT runs behind the scenes

Because the model splits one prompt into several searches, a page that answers only the headline question loses to a page that also covers the follow-ups. If someone asks about the best SEO approach for a multilingual site, ChatGPT may also search for hreflang setup, separate domains versus subfolders, and translation costs.

You can cover this in two ways. Add short sections for the obvious follow-up questions on the main page. And build a cluster of linked pages around the topic, so whichever sub-query runs, one of your pages fits it. This is the same silo structure that builds topical authority in Google.

Do this: for each main page, list the five questions a customer asks next, and make sure each one has an answer on your site.

Step 6

Add numbers and experience only you have

If ten pages say the same thing, ChatGPT can cite any of them. If your page has a figure nobody else published, the model has to cite you to use it. Original data is the strongest citation magnet I know of.

You don’t need a research department. Your own campaigns, projects and client results are data. On one of my Venice ticket sites, for example, I ran exact-match Google Ads campaigns on top of the organic traffic and reached a 2x return on ad spend. That one number makes a page about affiliate advertising more citable than a page of general advice. My travel blog case study works the same way: it describes what I built and what happened, which no competitor can copy.

Write numbers precisely, say where they come from, and keep them up to date. When a model has to choose between a page that says “costs vary” and a page that gives a real range and explains where it comes from, it picks the second.

Do this: list five numbers from your own work you could publish, and add them to the pages where they answer a question.

Step 7

Get mentioned where ChatGPT already looks

ChatGPT doesn’t only cite your site. For “best” and “which one” prompts, it often cites a review site, a Reddit thread or a listicle, then names the brands those pages mention. So part of ranking in ChatGPT happens on other people’s pages.

Run your 20 test prompts and write down every domain ChatGPT cites. Those are your target list. Pitch the authors of the roundups, answer questions honestly in the forums where your customers talk, and keep your profiles on directories and review platforms complete. Large analyses show Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s single most cited domain, which tells you the model favours sources that read as neutral and factual.

Classic backlinks still help, because they lift your Bing rankings and your domain authority. But an unlinked mention of your brand next to the right topic also counts here.

Do this: pick the three domains ChatGPT cites most for your prompts, and find one honest way to appear on each.

Step 8

Make it obvious who you are

Models connect facts to entities: a person, a company, a product. If your name appears in different forms across the web, with different descriptions on LinkedIn, your site and directories, the model has a harder time connecting the mentions to one business.

Use the same name and the same one-line description everywhere. Give every article a real author with a bio and a link to an About page that states what you do, where, and since when. Add Organization or Person schema with sameAs links to your main profiles. For a solo consultant, a consistent personal name is an advantage here, because one person with a clear specialty is easy for a model to describe.

Do this: ask ChatGPT “Who is [your name or brand]?” If the answer is wrong or vague, fix the sources it quotes.

Step 9

Keep key pages current

For questions about prices, tools and rules, ChatGPT prefers recent sources, and several studies of its citations found that recently updated pages are cited more often. That doesn’t mean changing a date in the template. It means checking that prices, screenshots, steps and numbers are still right, then updating the page and the dateModified in your schema.

Plan a short review of your top pages every quarter. For pages that should last for years, write in an evergreen way and keep the parts that change in one easy-to-update section, such as a pricing table.

Do this: put your ten most important pages in a calendar with a review date every three months.