For the first time in 20 years, people have started turning away from Google to conduct research in other places. While the search engine certainly remains dominant, we’ve seen a growing number of incoming leads cite ChatGPT recommendations as their initial touchpoint in both our internal and client marketing work. As a result, ChatGPT optimization—the process of improving your chance of being recommended by ChatGPT, through changes made both on and off your website—while still nascent, is starting to play a growing role in businesses’ lead generation and marketing efforts.
In this guide, we’ll first explain how ChatGPT’s recommendation algorithm works, and discuss each factor that leads it to rank one company more highly than another when asked to provide a list of options. We then turn to ChatGPT optimization strategy, and share how to position your company so that it will be at the top of that list.
ChatGPT’s Recommendation Algorithm
ChatGPT’s algorithm, while complex, can be broken down into five broad factors. The graphic below, taken from our survey of generative engine recommendation algorithms, provides a simple overview:
Authoritative List Mentions
At its core, ChatGPT is designed to generate text by determining the most likely sequence of words, sentences, or paragraphs so that the output reads naturally. It achieves this by analyzing information from multiple reliable sources and processing and transforming it, combining them into a single output for the user.
When it comes to product and service recommendations, ChatGPT relies most on expert insights taken from industry rankings of top products, services, or companies. Google’s thorough evaluation and ranking of websites significantly influences this process, as well, as ChatGPT will often use the top-ranked search results to inform its suggestions.
Awards, Accreditations, Affiliations
Companies whose products or services have won awards in their fields often represent the best options in those fields. As a result, ChatGPT is more likely to recommend companies who have won special recognition in their search results. Typically, ChatGPT looks at two kinds of awards:
| Popular Awards | Industry Awards |
| “Best of” type awards typically granted by a non-industry association or company for popular use of a service. These awards are more likely to be prioritized in consumer queries. | More specialized awards recognizing excellence in an industry by an industry association. Although industry awards factor into both B2B and B2C queries, they are much more significant in the B2B realm. |
In addition to explicit awards, ChatGPT is also likely to look for accreditations from and affiliations with trustworthy, authoritative organizations.
Online Reviews
Online forums play a large role in informing ChatGPT’s decisions and have played an increasingly large role in affecting search results over the last several years. The review sites that most influence ChatGPT’s recommendations most are:
- G2
- Clutch
- CNet
- Capterra
- TrustPilot
- Better Business Bureau
Note that while Authoritative List Mentions above includes lists such as Clutch and G2, the focus of that factor is in that ChatGPT will also take customer reviews into account when answering consumer queries.
Customer Examples & Usage Data
ChatGPT is one of the few generative engines that takes customer examples and usage data into account. Broadly, this category refers to third-party data pertaining to product usage, customer base size, or other usage-based information that can point to the authority or credibility of a given business.
Social Sentiment
Social sentiment is a qualitative measure of how a company is discussed online. Social sentiment falls into three broad categories:
- Discussion Forums such as Quora, Substack, and Reddit
- Publicly Viewable Social Media such as X
- News Articles and Op-Eds discussing a company or product
While a company’s social sentiment is the least important factor in the algorithm, it often acts as kingmaker when in whether ChatGPT recommends one company over another, especially in highly competitive spaces with no clear leader.
Worth noting as well is that just as we’ve seen Google’s algorithm take an increasingly more qualitative approach to its own recommendations, we can also expect to see social sentiment grow in prominence in ChatGPT’s recommendation algorithm in future updates.
ChatGPT Optimization Strategy
Based on the factors above, we have determined that effective ChatGPT optimization consists of 6 core practices:
- Secure placement in highly-ranked list articles
- Seek inclusion in well-known directories and databases
- Publicize your company’s achievements
- Seek out positive online reviews
- Monitor social sentiment
- Increase Google authority
Secure Placement in Highly-Ranked List Articles
ChatGPT’s recommendations very often mirror the top results of Google searches. We’ve found that in almost all cases, if a company can secure placement on the latter, the former will follow. There are two ways to secure placements on these lists.
The first is to pay directory businesses such as Clutch for high placements, though this can quickly become expensive, particularly in higher competition industries. The second is to create and publish your own lists and invest in SEO to secure high rankings for them. Both approaches have lead generation benefits in their own right, and can be combined for greater effect.
Seek Inclusion in Well-Known Directories and Databases
There are two tiers of databases that ChatGPT uses in its recommendation algorithm:
- Primary: Authoritative sources of knowledge like the Encyclopedia Britannica and the existing literary canon.
- Secondary: Less authoritative but still widely accepted sources such as Wikipedia, Hoovers, and Bloomberg.
Getting listed in either of these sources makes it more likely that ChatGPT will recommend your company. Requisition inclusion is simple: submit your company’s information to these sources and other online sources when appropriate.
Publicize Your Company’s Achievements
In addition to inclusion on authoritative sources of information, ChatGPT also trains on the overall positive or negative reputation of a company online. Publicizing any positive information about your company increases the likelihood that ChatGPT will use that information when making a recommendation. Examples of such information include:
- Winning industry awards
- Positive Op-Eds
- Inclusion on industry reviews and lists
- Articles citing YoY or quarterly growth of the company
Seek Out Positive Online Reviews
As ChatGPT uses online reviews in its algorithm, having positive online reviews is something of a requirement. On average, our teams have found that companies with review scores lower than 70% are significantly less likely to be referred by ChatGPT.
In order to increase the likelihood of positive reviews, the most active stance that a company can take is creating an easy-to-use system to ensure that satisfied customers can leave a review. This only works for proprietary review platforms; 3rd party sites will have their own systems in place, but companies can refer satisfied customers to them to increase their score.
Monitor Social Sentiment
Although ChatGPT monitors social sentiment to only a minor degree, our team strongly believes that this trend is likely to increase in the future. Social sentiment in this case refers to any and all instances where a company is discussed or mentioned online.
Companies have several options to measure social sentiment, but the most common are referred to as sentiment analysis tools. The most popular are Talkwalker, Brand24, Critical Mention, and Social Searcher.
Finally, we recommend hiring an expert to improve social sentiment. Customer success teams, in particular, are specially trained to identify and manage instances of social sentiment, making them especially well-suited to the task.
Increase Google Website Authority
Website authority refers to Google’s calculated authority score for each website. A higher score makes it more likely that a website’s pages will show up at the top of search results, and increasing authority score increases the impact of publishing your own list pieces. While Google’s authority score isn’t public, 3rd party tools such as Ahrefs and Moz allow you to look up an estimate. In Ahref’s case, they refer to it as Domain Rating, and some examples of high domain rating websites are given below:
Domain Rating: Common Examples
| Website | Domain Rating |
| google.com | 100 |
| youtube.com | 100 |
| linkedin.com | 98 |
| wikipedia.org | 97 |
| netflix.com | 94 |
| reddit.com | 89 |
| spotify.com | 88 |
| adobe.com | 87 |
| bbc.com | 85 |
| cnn.com | 84 |
| paypal.com | 83 |
| nytimes.com | 82 |
Publishing high quality content regularly is the best way to increase Domain Authority, with our data showing that website’s publishing twice weekly for a minimum of three months experience a modest to moderate bump in their online traffic, resulting in a higher score. Content that attracts backlinks, such as metrics articles, is particularly effective.
Implementing ChatGPT Optimization
Effectively implementing ChatGPT optimization requires that marketers engage in many disparate activities, and many in-house teams find that they lack the necessary SEO and content experience to fully commit to create high-ranking list articles.
As a result, many companies have started working with external agencies who can handle ChatGPT optimization for them. If you’d like to learn more about our GEO services, you can contact us here.
