Last updated: January 8, 2025
The advent of generative AI has changed the internet in an exceptionally short period of time. While Google Search remains the dominant place people do their research, some business decision makers have started looking to ChatGPT to supplement Google’s search results.
Before mid-2024, however, ChatGPT had been limited to a static, curated knowledgebase, limiting its utility when it came to up-to-date information. Things changed when OpenAI launched the SearchGPT beta making their platform significantly more useful for commercial research. Both general industry polling and our internal data on leads has shown that more and more people consider ChatGPT’s recommendations when making a purchase, underlining the need to optimize business websites for ChatGPT Search.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
- What are SearchGPT and SearchGPT Optimization
- SearchGPTs Recommendation Algorithm
- SearchGPT Optimization Strategy
Note that while we’ll be referring to ChatGPT’s search-connected platform as SearchGPT for simplicity, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Search in October 2024. These are essentially the same product, and ChatGPT Search and SearchGPT can be used interchangeably for the purposes of this guide.
What are SearchGPT and SearchGPT Optimization
SearchGPT is OpenAI’s answer to Google’s own AI integrations within Google Search. One of the primary drawbacks of ChatGPT as a search tool has been its limited knowledgebase. While ChatGPT’s ability to summarize information more effectively than Google, the fact that it could only crawl a static database of knowledge that was slow (at least relative to the internet) to be updated left some people hesitant to use it as their primary search tool.
With SearchGPT, OpenAI seeks to fix this problem by allowing users access to ChatGPT-like AI functionality on an internet search platform. As a result, people who were already interested in ChatGPT for more limited use cases may begin to lean on SearchGPT to perform searches for which they’d have otherwise gone to Google Search.
SearchGPT optimization is the practice of optimizing your online presence—both on your own website and on 3rd-party websites—so that your company is more likely to be recommended by SearchGPT when users make commercial searches. This includes search engine optimization (SEO), as SearchGPT factors in the top Google results into its recommendations, but also requires managing reviews and references on 3rd party websites. Effective SearchGPT optimization requires understanding SearchGPT’s recommendation algorithm, which we explain below.
SearchGPT’s Recommendation Algorithm
For those familiar with the ChatGPT recommendation algorithm, the SearchGPT algorithm will look extremely familiar—because it is essentially the same. The only difference is SearchGPT’s access to more up-to-date information, but the actual ranking criteria that a given piece of content is subject to doesn’t change.
Authoritative List Mentions
SearchGPT (as well as most other AI search models) takes advantage of other aggregators to form their idea of what searchers will value most. Authoritative lists take priority for a few reasons:
| 1 | They are structured in a way that is easy for AI to consume and understand |
| 2 | They provide a comparative reference that makes it clear what pages are “better” than others |
| 3 | They receive a lot of traffic, signaling that searchers find them valuable |
| 4 | They are easy for AI models to copy and summarize, combining results from a few authoritative lists to give a summary of what most aggregators think about pages on a given subject |
All of these features make creating high-ranking authoritative lists the best way to appear in AI search results, as they not only demonstrate the value of your content to searchers but also present it in an easy way for large language models (LLM) to summarize and relay.
Awards, Credits, and Affiliations
Another easy way for SearchGPT to identify that a page or company is valuable to searchers is to determine whether they have received notable awards or accreditations, or have received endorsements or partnerships with authoritative organizations.
There are a couple of award types that seem to have the strongest correlation to high SearchGPT rankings:
- Popular 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.
- Industry Awards: 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.
As mentioned, awards aren’t the only part of this criteria. It is also valuable for your company or product to be accredited by, or affiliated with an authoritative organization.
Online Reviews
Online review sites, aggregators, and forums play a large role in informing SearchGPT recommendations. They are attractive to automated models like these for similar reasons that authoritative lists are: They clearly present a hierarchy by which a computer can easily separate the good from the bad.
The review sites that tend to influence SearchGPT’s recommendations most are:
- G2
- Clutch
- CNet
- Capterra
- TrustPilot
- Better Business Bureau
Note that while the Authoritative List Mentions above include lists such as Clutch and G2, the focus of that factor is that ChatGPT will also consider customer reviews when answering consumer queries.
Customer Examples & Usage Data
SearchGPT’s training data includes factors such as product usage, market share, size of customer base, and other data points that represent that a company or their product/service has been well-received by the market. This allows them to give some credit to businesses that may not have been around long enough to establish a strong foothold on lists or review sites, or to give a small bump to companies that have.
Social Sentiment
A company’s social sentiment refers to how a company is discussed online. Social sentiment is largely comprised of three broad categories:
- Discussion Forums such as Quora, Substack, and Reddit
- Publicly Viewable Social Media
- News Articles and Op-Eds discussing a company or product
Social sentiment is the least weighted factor in the algorithm, but it often can be the difference-maker in whether ChatGPT recommends one company over another in competitive spaces where there is 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 SearchGPT’s recommendation algorithm in future updates.
SearchGPT Optimization Strategy
Based on our understanding of SearchGPT’s recommendation algorithm, we’ve distilled the process of SearchGPT optimization into 6 main activities. They are:
SearchGPT Optimization Strategy
| 1 | Secure Placement in Authoritative List Articles | Getting your company or product placed in an authoritative comparison list article is the best way to improve your SearchGPT ranking, as it essentially hand-feeds their algorithm your company as a top competitor. You can do this by reaching out to list creators or writing your own comparison lists on your company website that follow SEO best practices. |
| 2 | Pursue Inclusion in Popular Directories and Databases | Submit your company’s information to authoritative databases like Wikipedia, Hoovers, and Bloomberg to get your company listed on even more highly-ranked resources that SearchGPT will crawl. |
| 3 | Publicize Company Achievements | Publish accomplishments like industry awards, positive news coverage, inclusion on industry features and lists, and any articles that cite your business’s content or successes on your company’s social media accounts to increase SearchGPT’s awareness of your company’s authority. |
| 4 | Facilitate Positive Reviews | Encourage your customers and clients to leave positive reviews by implementing systems that present the opportunity to leave a review at multiple stages post-sale, and proactively reaching out to satisfied clients. |
| 5 | Monitor Social Media, Forums, and Media Publications | Monitor online discussions of your company and product on social media, popular forum sites like Reddit and Quora, and media outlets that cover your industry. You can also hire experts to improve your social sentiment by analyzing, making recommendations, and intervening when opportunities arise. |
| 6 | Increase Your Google Domain Authority | Optimize your website and consistently publish high-quality, SEO-optimized thought leadership content to improve your Google Search domain rating, determining how likely your company’s content is to land high in Google Searches (which SearchGPT will be crawling to determine its recommendations). |
Implementing SearchGPT Optimization
Optimizing for emerging search tools like SearchGPT, and whatever AI tools are coming next, requires experienced marketers who are dedicated to analyzing and adapting to new technologies and search algorithms. These experts must understand each of the different strategies necessary to optimize and perform them all simultaneously, and many in-house teams find that they lack the necessary SEO and marketing experience to succeed in improving rankings across every search platform.
As a result, many companies choose to contract with an authoritative third-party marketing agency who can handle SearchGPT optimization for them. If you’d like to learn more about our GEO services, you can contact us here.
