You have invested months in the creation of the product. The website is ready, articles are published, customers leave testimonials, and possibly some of the battles for Google ranking were won.
And then a user asks ChatGPT, “What are the best startups to help with that?”
Your startup isn’t mentioned.
This hurts.
Because the question is no longer about gaining another spot in search results. This is about whether artificial intelligence systems can discover your business, understand its purpose, believe the information about your company and consider it relevant enough to talk about.
This is the essence of ai search optimization.
And let’s clear things up from the start: there is no way to just hit some button and get “ChatGPT top position.” OpenAI openly admits that there is no guarantee of ChatGPT Search placement. However, websites can increase their chance of being discovered by enabling OAI-SearchBot to crawl the content.
But how does one make an AI-recommended startup?
Make Your Startup Extremely Easy to Understand
This sounds almost embarrassingly simple.
It’s also where many startup websites make things unnecessarily complicated.
Your homepage might say:
“Reimagining the future of intelligent business operations.”
Lovely.
But what do you actually sell?
AI systems need clear signals. Tell them plainly.
Use specific language throughout your website
Not “We change modern businesses with intelligent solutions”
But rather: “We offer AI-driven customer support software to SaaS businesses with 10-200 people.”
In the latter version, you give the AI much more valuable information.
Your landing page, About section, product page, case studies, FAQ, and author bios need to emphasize the same main point without seeming like carbon copies of each other.
And this is what llm optimization is all about giving the language models enough information about your business to connect your brand with users’ questions.
Build Content Around Questions People Actually Ask
This is where ai SEO begins intersecting with traditional SEO.
AI will rarely be queried with:
“CRM software.”
It is queried with:
“What CRM is right for my 20-person B2B sales team?”
Or:
“What are some budget CRM options other than Salesforce for startups?”
Or:
“What CRM works best with Slack and HubSpot?”
These are recommendation questions.
This is what your content needs to do.
Create pages that solve specific problems
Instead of writing 30 articles with titles like “The Importance of CRM,” write something useful, such as:
Top CRM for small B2B sales organizations
CRM alternatives for young startups
How to pick a CRM for a decentralized sales organization
CRM implementation guide for SaaS organizations
Salesforce alternatives for startups
Comparison of CRM pricing for small businesses
There is no need to include your company name in every paragraph.
In fact, there isn’t.
Provide useful comparisons, highlight pros and cons, admit limitations, and position your product.
This way, your content becomes more helpful both to people and to algorithms generating the answer.
Give AI More Than Your Own Website to Work With
A truth that startup founders should confront is that your site saying you are the best won’t make you an independent authority.
If all the claims made regarding your company can be found on your homepage alone, there is no external validation for AI.
Your startup needs to have a presence outside your domain.
This could come from the following channels:
- Industry blogs
- Directories
- Partner sites
- Case studies from customers
- Podcasts
- Interviews with experts
- Founder interviews
- Review websites
- Websites of conferences
- Independent comparison pieces
It’s not about creating lots of random backlinks.
It’s about having a credible presence online for your brand.
Having multiple reliable sources independently characterize your company as a certain kind of solution is far more valuable than having just one self-penned claim.
Also read our blog on ‘The Future of Business with Chatbots and Agentic AI’:
Treat ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude as Different Doors
Definitely use one overall strategy for ai search visibility, but do not believe that all the AI platforms are the same.
ChatGPT SEO
For chatgpt seo, begin with making your website accessible and crawlable. OpenAI says that public sites may show up in ChatGPT Search and suggests letting OAI-SearchBot crawl your website.
And, of course, pay attention to the informative, helpful, authoritative content.
Perplexity SEO
For perplexity seo, take into account technical accessibility as well. Perplexity says that its PerplexityBot complies with robots.txt instructions and will not index whole or partial page texts in case of disallowing crawling of sites.
In other words, your technical team should not close the front door and then be surprised that no one is entering.
Gemini SEO
For gemini seo, think not about just keywords. Google says that the unique, helpful content, good page experience, crawlable pages, and accurate structured data are essential. The same goes for AI search experiences provided by Google.
Claude SEO
For claude seo, once again, the general rule is clear – make your information clear, accessible, useful, and credible. Do not make a strategy based on trying to “hack” some particular model.
Models change.
Useful information tends to age much better.
Strengthen Your Brand’s Trust Signals
Consider that you’re asking an expert friend:
“Should I join this startup?”
Would you take their advice, knowing that they have never come across the name of this company before?
Most likely not.
It is quite the same with AI recommendation engines.
Your startup must maintain consistency on the Internet.
Check these signals
Make sure to include:
- Consistent company name
- Inconsistent product descriptions
- Correct founder and executive details
- Latest pricing information
- Validating customer examples
- Authentic customer reviews
- Real case studies with results
- Well-defined business categories
- Author pages with the background of experience
This will help you rank higher with machine learning based tools as you give the tools enough consistent data to associate with.
When you call yourself a business on your website but a startup on LinkedIn, and an app on the directories you are unnecessarily inconsistent.
Stop Writing Content Only for Search Engines
It can be one of the most significant shifts in the logic of thinking.
Instead of asking – “How many articles are we supposed to write next month?” – we should be asking, “What do we have to say so that our audience would trust us completely?”
As it has become evident from Google’s latest recommendations for AI-related search, the new approach should be about making valuable content that is important and meaningful, rather than about producing tons of web pages with a goal of attracting potential customers to the company’s web site.
That is the key idea.
Certain insights derived from an elaborate case study on how a concrete client was served can be more valuable than 15 common articles written by AI.
Test the Questions Your Customers Are Asking AI
Compile an assemblage of 20-30 inquiries that a prospective client could make to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity prior to acquiring an item. Examples of possible questions might include:
“What is deemed to be the most effective project management software for a new business of 50 employees?”
“What alternatives could be looked at in the place of [competitor]?”
“How budget-friendly can a marketing firm be?”
“What are essential characteristics that should be known while selecting an AI chatbot?”
Address those questions keeping the same format, avoiding focus on your product. Check which companies are spoken of, which publications are referred to, which aspects of the service are mentioned, and what could affect your recommendations.
In this period, you are provided with something like the initial information, namely gap analysis.
If the competitors are frequently referred to as having pages for comparison or having unique client success stories or testimonials, and you have only a website of five pages full of marketing jargons the issue becomes evident for you.
Build an AI Search Optimization Checklist
Here is a checklist to follow before declaring your strategy successful.
Technical
- Is your website easily crawlable?
- Are all the important pages indexed?
- Are important AI bots being blocked from crawling your website?
- Does everything load fine?
- Is your content in HTML format?
- Is structured data correct?
Content
- Is the purpose of important pages clear?
- Are you answering real customers’ questions?
- Are you providing new insights?
- Are your comparisons informative enough?
- Does your page show your authority?
Reputation
- Are there credible third-party sources mentioning your company?
- Are your reviews new and genuine?
- Can your founders or specialists be easily identified?
- Does external information match what you say about your company?
Measurement
- Don’t worry about a single made-up “AI rating.”
Monitor branded search terms, referral traffic, conversion rates, mentions, citations, and visibility on relevant topics. Google has recently started implementing new Search Console reports on visibility in generative AI tools, including AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Conclusion
The question “How to rank in ChatGPT?” isn’t quite correct.
There is not one specific rank that you can achieve.
The right question is whether you’ve provided enough relevant, truthful, and useful information that makes the virtual assistant understand that you belong there when your potential customer looks up some information in the AI assistant.
This is the core of generative engine optimization. And the good news is that you no longer have to deal with an unknown AI algorithm.
All you need is to become simpler and transparent, easier to use, and truly helpful for your potential customers.
Find out ten questions your customers may ask before making a purchase. Do research on major AI platforms. Find out who has been listed there and what they have done before.
1. How can I get my startup recommended by ChatGPT?
While there is no certain way to guarantee a favorable outcome for your business on ChatGPT, there are ways to improve your visibility. Making sure that your website has crawlable pages is a first step to take. Apart from that, providing clear information about what your business does, generating valuable content, and getting favorable independent mentions are all aspects you should pay attention to.
2. Does traditional SEO help with AI search visibility?
Traditional SEO is essential for AI search. Having crawlable pages with appropriate content, information, and structure will allow AI systems make discoveries and understand your startup better.
3. How important are third-party mentions for AI recommendations?
Mentions from individuals who are not connected to the startup can enhance the credibility of its products. Information from different publications, directories, customer stories, podcasts, interviews, reviews, market comparisons can help AI systems to learn and examine information about the startup.
4. Should I create different SEO strategies for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude?
Your main AI strategy might remain the same, but each platform has its own technical issues. It is essential to focus on such issues as availability of the content, usefulness, trustworthiness and correct information instead of trying to find a way to benefit from the particular method or algorithms.
5. How can I measure whether my startup is becoming more visible in AI search?
It is critical to analyze branded queries, the number of visitors routed to the startup’s website, number of conversions, mentions and citations of the startup and level of visibility of relevant topics. It is also useful to check what questions customers put to AI systems and compare the answers of several startups.
