How To Rank Your Business On ChatGPT | GEO MasterClass

This is an interview with Emily Richardson. She's a GEO expert who helps businesses rank on Chat GPT. In this episode, Emily gave us a whole bunch of suggestions how to rank on ChatGpt and she made some bold predictions. I got a lot of out of this episode. I hope you guys will too. Comment the word GEO below so I can send you a free guide on how to rank on Chat GPT. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you in the next one. Emily, what will people get in this episode?

Great. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on. By the end of this podcast, ideally the viewer will understand what the differences are between GEO and SEO and how to help their business show up on AI search.

Awesome. Can we talk can we start with what GEO and AEO is?

Great question. So, just to preface with those two acronyms, GEO is generative engine optimization. AEO is answer engine optimization. They have other ones, LLM, EO, all of these different acronyms that are being used. Personally, I like to stick with either GEO or AEO. Generative engine optimization or answer engine optimization is basically the practice of helping optimize your brand's properties on owned and earned content in order to show up better on AI search. It's different than SEO specifically because search engine optimization is primarily a product of Google's search engine. So, that helps you show up on Google. Answer engine optimization helps you show up on AI search.

Can you explain a little bit more on what sources Chad GBT was trained on because that's that has evolved a lot, right? Cuz multiple models have been trained on different um sources. Can you touch a little bit about uh what sources were they trained on initially?

Good question. I I would say the training in general for a lot of these models is the entirety of the internet. So their training is different. So there's there's two elements which is training the model which they're looking at the the entire internet in general and they're digesting as much of that content as possible and then we have their searching capabilities and AI search came out in around January when chatbt released a live search function um and that specifically is they they look at different sources the top ones are Reddit, Wikipedia, industry news sources like Forbes, video content providers like YouTube and those specifically you can use the top ranked and most used sources in order to help show up better on AI search.

And how does this GEO differ from traditional SEO or is it very similar?

So we like to say that traditional SEO is the foundation for good GEO. So having strong SEO is going to set you up for success. At their core, you need to understand for both SEO and AEO or GEO, you need to understand what your audience is asking and answer those questions directly. I would say the biggest differences are the format in which these answers are presented. For Google, you want to rank as the number one in the list or number two in the list of the search engine results page. For answer engines, you want to be a part of the answer, whether that be is your brand being mentioned directly or being cited as a source for that specific answer. So the format of the answer is very different for Google and for AI search. And so the the priorities are different too in terms of for Google you want to rank in the list for AI search you want to show up in the answer in the summary to rank specifically on Google. Google primarily looks at keywords. So it is a keyword-driven search as well as using backlinks. Google's bots travel through backlinks. So they're looking for a keyword. They're breaking your query down into a keyword. Google search queries are often four words whereas AI search queries are around 23 to 28 words. You're breaking the Google search into keywords. It's searching it within the Google index and it's finding that specific link and bringing it back. For AI search specifically, you're asking like a 23word question. It's breaking that down into multiple other queries. And for chatbt, it searches Bing and other non- Googlele indexes. For Gemini, it of course searches Google because it is a Google property. And for other AIs, they're searching other non- Googlele indexes as well. So, it's taking those queries, creating a Google search or a Bing search, and it's looking for that answer specifically. I like to say that AI bots read with math, whereas Google bots like to read specifically for keywords. So, when you're optimizing for an AI bot specifically, you want to make sure that you're optimizing for those queries that may be asked in AI search so that it's finding that specifically and bringing that back to inform the answer.

Okay. So, if I'm a business owner who's relied on traditional SEO for driving traffic to my restaurant or for any kind of service, um what are some simple like very simple steps I can take today to move one inch towards GEO?

Good question. So, I would say the first thing that you can do is understand the questions your audience might be asking and those are the longer tailed queries. So, let's say that you are um a wala water bottle or something and you want to start showing up in AI search. Make sure you're not just looking at keywords like water bottle or travel water bottle. Those specifically are for Google. You want to make sure that you're answering longer tailed queries on your website. So, what is the best water bottle for traveling? What is the best water bottle for school? All of these different questions people might ask AI search. You want to make sure you're answering very clearly on your website. So that's a great first place to start.

Okay. So essentially whatever blogs they've already written on their website, are they supposed to rewrite them or they need to start creating new blogs?

Good question. So for the blogs that they currently have um they ideally can can stay as is. Um you might want to update the date. AI loves recency. So it's not looking to site things that are too old. So, you want to make sure that all of your your um blogs are updated and you want to check to see if they're being indexed in places like Google, indexed in places like Bing, because if they're not, they're not going to show up in AI search anyway. So, just go through and scrub that within your website and your blog content. As you're creating net new blog content, here's a few things that you can focus on. Um, first, you want to make sure that your title is in the format of a longer question or a very, very clear answer. So that example of what are the best travel water bottles or why a wala is the best travel water bottle might be a title. You then under that want to have a summary of everything that's on the page. AI bots are very lazy. They don't like to read. They do not like skyscraper content at all. They actually will leave a page if it doesn't have the answer for them in a short enough time frame. So you want to make sure directly under that title you have a summary. Under that you want to have some bullets. um AI search really likes small snippets that it can pull and parse very quickly. So as much as many small quotable um sections of that content is ideal. And then finally you want to end it with an FAQ section as well. So again this is optimizing for queries instead of keywords. Google you need to optimize for keywords. AI search you need to optimize for queries. So having that question answer format and an FAQ for every blog post, every page is going to be helpful to show up.

And what about the word count and can they have like M dashes on their blogs?

M dashes is fine. Sam Alman did just come out actually with the release of Chachebt51. You can finally instruct it to say no M dashes and it will in fact listen. So you can take that hint and remove them. But in general, go ahead. I I actually have that in my instructions on settings on Chad GPC to never put m dashes and it it works.

It it works. Okay. It has to work for me, but Sam Alman did just say literally yesterday that it finally works for the an instruction um cuz 51 is apparently better at taking instructions now um with so I'm excited.

Awesome. So apart from blogs, what else can people do? Like I I also noticed um in the last year I've seen Tik Tok and Instagram videos also are ranking like for any kind of businesses now it ranks on Google before it didn't didn't used to rank. Um how can people incorporate videos and some other kind of content to rank?

Yes. So that is a very good point. Instagram's now is being indexed on Google and Tik Toks are able to be surfaced on AI search content as well. I would say if you are looking to do video content, YouTube is going to be the number one source that you want to start getting on. And this is primarily because Gemini and even AI overviews really likes multimodal formats of content. And so if you have a YouTube video, that is actually the first place that I tell people to start posting video content on. Um, and make sure that you are for even if you're a B2B SAS company, you're not going for views, you're going for AI bot scrapes. And so you want to put up demo videos. You want to put up videos answering user questions. And it could be extremely dull, extremely boring. But again, the point is not to have human viewers, it's to have AI bot visitors. Um, so you want to have that video content and it's going to be a lead magnet for AI.

Okay. Can you talk a little bit about backlinks and how to be a trusted source on chat GPT and keep that ranking going for a longer time?

Cit. So Okay. So basically the back links are very very popular in SEO. Um like I mentioned before it is how Google searches the web. They travel through these links. Specifically for backlinks for SEO if you are linked in something like a Forbes or a large industry news source that is going to gain you more authority and trust in the eyes of Google. Understandably it's kind of like a a sign off for hey this is a like a viable option for Google search. For AI search, there's no such thing as a backlink. AI bots are not crawling the web using links. They are crawling the web using mentions and mathematical patterns. And so it's no longer just about link quality. It's about kind of citation and mention quality. So you don't even have to be linked in something like Forbes. I'll just continue using that as an example. But if your brand is mentioned, even if the name is mentioned, that is going to count for something in AI search. So this is speaking a lot to um digital PR starting to emerge as a very strong source for AI search. Um and so AI systems are treating mentions similarly to backlinks. So you want to make sure that you as a brand are being mentioned across trusted industry news sources within whatever industry you're in. And you want to make sure that you're being mentioned on as many um Reddit threads, as many even if you have a Wikipedia page, that's a great start. As many places on the internet that you can be mentioned, the better. And again, it does not have to be a link, which is actually advantageous, especially if you're looking at that PR angle. If you're looking at that just, hey, being being slightly mentioned within different um news sources is great. Yeah, with traditional SEO it was really easy to track how the keywords were ranking and you could like uh pay for that, right? Additionally, rank rank for those keywords. But with GEO, OpenAI doesn't really have an infrastructure for that, right? To track.

Correct.

So, how do you test if it's working or not?

Great question. So, this speaks to the core difference between Google and AI search, which is Google is deterministic and AI search is probabilistic. So, Google being deterministic means that you can look at specific keywords and where you rank for them. And that ranking doesn't often change. You're going to be fourth. If you put in work, you could be fifth, whatever that might be. And that does not change where you where you're ranking. Even search by search, day by day, possibly month by month, it'll change depending on the effort. For probabilistic answers, which is AI search, that's because they are working on probability. They're not working on one's binary elements. And so that means that the answers are not going to be the same over time. There was just a study that ah refs did that actually did show that the um the an the answer itself, so the semantics in the answer do not change. So what the answer is doesn't change. However, the citations change. So where it's pulling that answer from changes and what it's mentioning within that answer changes. Um and that changes quite quickly. And so when we're looking at something like measuring over time, we're going to be looking at, as you mentioned, OpenAI does not have like a a dashboard like Google does. And I know that it's not in the plans to create one. So how can you peak behind the curtain? That is where portals and and brand tracking capabilities that we have on known and other other companies have as well. Peak profound other companies have these capabilities as well where we are calling open AI's API complexities API and we are gathering and scraping the answers from key queries constantly and that is allowing us to understand the changes over time and it's allowing us to understand where your brand is sitting over time as well. So, we're running queries constantly and we're comparing them to kind of that base of where your where the answer was originally and taking into account those possible changes, but we are able to pull the answers from that API and we're able to track that over time to understand if where you're sitting in that answer. So, are you no longer showing up? Are you showing up in a different query as the answer? Um, and we're able to track where you're mentioned. So instead of being ranking, it's where in the position of the answer you are. So let's say I'm asking for a listical of best water bottles for traveling. I'm going to say, oh, Aala is is 10th or it's not even showing up. 10 queries I ran. I'm going to run this 10 to 20 times and see where Aala is showing up and then see how it's changing and I'm going to take the average.

I think OpenAI will release a dashboard. That's what I that is my prediction. Uh let me before we talk about known and do I I want to know I want to put you in the spot and get your hot take on uh the future of this market. Um where is this going? And also because we have Gro, we have Deepc, we have Chbt, we have Gemini. Of course the Chbt is winning the race with 7 800 million active weekly users. Yes. And growing more. What's your prediction on where this is going? Let's say early 2026. Okay, early 2026, I I think it's going to be a race for monetization. Um, all of these companies are trying to figure out how they can monetize search. Uh, OpenAI is starting to bring in they're collapsing is collapsing the marketing funnel. So, their goal right now is to bring a consumer from awareness all the way to purchase all within their property. And they're doing this by integrating with Shopify, Etsy, and Stripe. and they're bringing the ability for you to check out within chatbt so that that is a seamless process. Um, companies like Google are also set up and and Gemini are set up very well to do this. Google has really focused on shop for quite a long time. Um, and I know they're looking even at ads. So, Google might take the ads route while OpenAI takes a cut of any purchases. Um, and then for in terms of of perplexity, Grock, I think that's just going to continue to play out. Um, Perplexity is they're all getting into the browser game. And I think right now browsers are go they're if they own the browser space, they're going to own that purchase, they're going to own that search engine element. So similar to how Chrome is is the browser and that's Google. Perplexity now has Comet um and actually have it open. Catchb now has Atlas as well. And so that's moving quite quickly. The next step alongside search is phase one of AI. Um, chatbots have been kind of that that main element of how we interface with artificial intelligence as a society for the past 2 years. I think beyond just early 2026, as we go in further into 2026, it's going to be agents. So, that agentic browser element is going to become more popular. people giving agents their credit card, any of their information and having it do tasks for them, I believe is going to be that next step um that in which we're going to be interfacing with artificial intelligence.

I've played around with the browsers a lot, Atlas and Comet. Comet is especially much better than Atlas uh from what I experienced and pretty bullish on browsers, pretty bearish on apps overall. I think apps are going to see a decline more and more and companies with databases like Zillow, they will win because they have that kind of a data powerhouse in the back. Um, let's do a short video real quick. So, I will start the video by saying like, um, Emily, what are the five tips for a business owner? And you can give like five,

like a 60-second video. Okay, great.

Um, Emily, what are five steps to rank on chat GPT today? So number one, make sure that you are formatting any on-site content for readability. AI search reads with math. So make sure that you have short paragraphs, clear section headers, and make sure that you are showing AI that your content is readable. Number two, make sure that you have Q&A blocks, comparison tables, summaries, things that are easily skimable and readable by AI search. This is for your on-site content. Um, number three, make sure that you create citationworthy content. So, publish original research, benchmarks, data on your site that is unique. Um, things like market research can help with this. Desk research that you're doing yourself. Unique content is going to be very valuable. AI can create a lot of generic content itself. Make sure that it's looking to you for any unique content. In terms of off-site, the two things that you want to be able to do are make sure you are appearing on high authority domains that from which AI search is pulling. So, industry news sources, um, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, all of these things are really important to be mentioned on. You don't have to be linked, just mentioned. And then finally, make sure that you are studying where your consumers are are hanging out, which userenerated content they are engaging in, whether that be Reddit, social, forums, and make sure that you are getting on that those forums, and making your brand heard. Did you know that the average visitor from an AI search is worth 4.4 times more than a visitor from Google search?

What? No, I did not know that.

It is.

Seriously, it's a crazy statistic. Um, we're seeing that people who come in from places like Chat GBT and Perplexity, they are more qualified leads. They've already done research on the business and actually they trust ChateBT to recommend more so than Google. And so the answer that they get from Chachebt once they click on it, they're more likely or 4.4 times more likely to convert to a purchase or a salesqualified lead than somebody coming in from Google.

And why do you think that's that's the reason? Yeah, the the trust people are trusting AI search more than they're trusting Google search. I think Google devalued their search when they really brought in ads. They brought in a lot of Google properties and that lessened the value of a Google search for to a lot of people. And so what we're seeing with ChachiBT is it's personalized directly to them and people are trusting the answers that are coming out of ChachiBT and they feel that they're guided and personalized just for them. And so when they finally do make that purchase decision, they feel really good about it. All their questions have been answered. And so when they do come to your website from Chad GBT, we found that conversion rate is a lot stronger, 4.4 times stronger.

Emily, what was the inception of the idea for known app? And what exactly is the service you're providing right now?

So chatbt came out with that live search in January of 2025. And ever since then, brands have started cluing into wanting to show up in AI search. They want to figure out how to manipulate that answer in some way. And that's where known app came. My my background is in marketing. I was working for as a marketing startup for a while before doing known. And a lot of our clients were asking how can we show up in AI search because we were like the AI authority for those for those marketers. And so we came up with um known as a way for them to track their visibility. Basically as a way for us to show them that the efforts we were making to help them show up in AI search were in fact working. So what you can do on known is you get an AI visibility score. Shows you how well you're showing up. You get to understand the citations which I think is extremely important for off-site content. So you get to understand when your brand is mentioned in AI search, where is it pulling that content from? Is it from your website? Is it from a blog? There some brands we've known have been extremely surprised of where AI search is pulling from. Some have been disappointed. Some have been excited. But they've been able to have that window into what's being cited in AI search. We also show them trending queries. So though we don't have a direct view into exactly what people are asking in AI search, we found a way to simulate queries that people are most likely asking. And this is because AI search funnels these queries, these longtailed queries through Google and it funnels them through Bing and we're able to catch them there and show you a clear list of the queries that are most popular for your industry to show you what questions you might be able to answer on your website to show up more in AI search. We also show you your gaps in comparison to competitor competitors. AI search is a extremely competitive space and that's meaning that I don't if you've if you've done a chatbt search you notice that it doesn't often give you one answer. It gives you multiple options from which to choose. So your versus your competitor much more than I think many people know. And so you really want to understand how you can get ahead of specifically other competitors in your industry. And we have something a clear like opportunity opportunities map that shows you how you can get ahead in specific queries. than your competitors. We also allow you to track visitors. You want to understand which pieces of content are being clicked on most when people are coming through Chat GBT. And though it's a low click-through rate, I think it does signal, hey, this page is doing really well or this page I thought would have a lot of visitors. It does not. And that shows you that conversion as well. So with that that entire package, you're able to understand your on-site and off-site visibility and work to improve it. We're also coming out in December with even more features and I'm very very excited about that specifically focused on that competitor comparison because it is a competitor it's a competitor focused space so you want to be getting ahead.

Awesome. U a lot of people watching might be wondering is this like a SAS service? Uh can you talk a little bit about the pricing model and um how does it how much does it cost for like businesses? So, known app costs $20 per month for one website. If you want to add other websites or you're an agency or if you want to add your competitors, you can also really have a peak into what your competitors and how they're performing on AI search. So, three websites is $49 a month as well and it continues to go up about $20 per website from there. So, it's a it's a B2B SAS model, monthly subscription model that we hope is pretty reasonable and approachable for many businesses to get an understanding of how they're appearing on AI search.

Wow, that's really affordable. I I I I don't know why I thought it was going to be a lot more expensive than

dual web is more expensive.

Okay, so let's talk about dual web now. What's the service there? So for dual web, we are the first company who has figured out a way to bifrocate web traffic to send humans and Google to your original version of your website and send AI bots to an AI optimized version of your website. So we bifurcate web traffic and we're able to send humans in Google to your normal website and AI bots are seeing a mathematically optimized version in clear semantic HTML that they can parse and site a lot easier. um that version loads in 10 milliseconds. It has 33% greater accuracy than um your regular version. And when it comes to AI search understanding it and you're going to be mentioned within the answer 2.3 times more than if AI was parsing and summarizing your traditional website.

And how does that work? Is that a different link altogether or it's in the same link but it's a different ro like txt or robot file whatever. So it is a different link. We we redirect to a a secondary domain, but that domain is not indexed on Google and humans cannot enter it. So there's no duplication risk in terms of it hurting your SEO. It does not touch your SEO in any way, which is actually a positive because a lot of people are reformatting their blogs or changing things in their content for AI search optimization and it's ultimately hurting their SEO. And so if you want to make sure your SEO maintains stable while you're optimizing for AI search as well, dual web is a great option.

Oh yeah, this might be a strange question, but how does it know if it's a human or a bot?

So OpenAI and Perplexity and Claude have to announce when their bots enter. I'm not sure if it's a law, but they do have a name, uh, OAI bot, Claudebot, so on so forth. And so we're able to track when that when that is is is the case and we redirect it from there.

Interesting. Yeah. I think that's why they were getting sued by a lot of Wall Street Journal and like big publications.

Yes, that's exactly it.

Because they they they scrape those services without permission.

Yes. Uh Perplexity specifically is known for um doing things in a very shady way.

Interesting. Good to good to know. Awesome. So, uh, how can people use your service and how can people ask you more questions if they want to learn more?

So, for known app, it's a simple self-service sign up. So, you can go ahead and sign up on our website, known.kn.ap. There's no O. Um, and then from there, you can also see a link to dual web. Dual web, if you Google it, we will also show up there as well. For dual web, you can book a meeting with us. Specifically, we're working with companies who have strong SEO already, have about a 100 pages on their website and want to make sure that it is entirely optimized for AI search, too. So, if you fit that criteria, feel free to book a u a meeting with us on the dual web website. And to get analytics, it's on known.app.

Um, and everyone, if you have more questions, go hit up Emily Richardson on LinkedIn. Is that correct?

Emily Richardson. Yes.

Awesome. Thank you Emily for coming on the show and giving us a lot of good tips about GE and VO and this has been a pleasure. Thank you.