How Can I Rank My Website Higher on ChatGPT?

Here at Sherbet Donkey, we’re experts in helping our clients climb up the rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. But the way people search for information online is evolving fast, especially with the rise of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini, and we’ve started to receive questions regarding ranking inside the responses provided by these emerging ‘answer engines’.

It’s leading to an interesting new field in the SEO space known as AEO – Answer Engine Optimisation. So, in today’s blog post, we’re taking a closer look at the emerging field of AEO and how to rank in ChatGPT and similar tools.

How does ChatGPT rank content?

When traditional search engines like Google deliver results to your search query, the results shown will have been ‘ranked’ on several factors, including their relevance, trustworthiness and authority. This is important to understand because emerging AI services don’t rank their answers in the same way. For example, ChatGPT generates its answers based on a mix of trained data (which can be out of date) and live web information retrieved via Bing.

Why Bing and not Google? Well, Microsoft, which owns Bing, has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, and is likely to continue to invest more. The key point to consider here is that you’ll want your content to rank well with Bing as well as Google in order for it to be picked up as relevant by ChatGPT. For this to happen, services like Bing and Google will ‘crawl’ your site, scanning its content to understand what it’s about.

Another big consideration here is what a user will have to type into ChatGPT for it to provide your business as one of the top answers. Unlike search engines, answer engines deliver tailored, human-like responses to very specific prompts, rather than a ranked list of websites. If your content is trusted, up-to-date and aligned with the intent of a specific user, there’s a much higher chance it’ll be included in an AI answer.

How can my website perform better on ChatGPT?

Answer Engine Optimisation is an emerging and fast-developing field – but for now, many of the tactics that help boost your visibility across large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini are the same as traditional SEO. Get them right, and you’ll strengthen your online authority across both. Let’s take a closer look at some of the tactics around how to rank in ChatGPT:

Create human-written content

Tools like ChatGPT are trained to prioritise content that’s written with clarity, authenticity and intent – in other words, human-written content. AI content can be generated incredibly quickly, but it often lacks the nuance, credibility and emotional connection that really resonates with the reader – the kind of authenticity that search engines and LLMs alike crave. You can learn more about this topic in our full blog, Content Writing vs OpenAI: Who Does It Best?

Ensure content is helpful and relevant

Whether optimising for Google, Bing or ChatGPT, helpful and relevant content is the foundation of visibility. AI tools are designed to deliver helpful answers to real user queries – clearly, directly and accurately. Always keep your pages factually correct, focused on user intent and up to date – quality, relevant copy is an ongoing task, not a one-off expenditure. If your content genuinely helps the reader, it’s more likely to be used by AI search models.

Improve authority

Credibility is key to ranking on both LLMs and traditional search engines – and it starts with building authority across the web. If you’ve already invested heavily in SEO, you’ll already understand the power of strong backlinks from other trusted websites – and how this helps search engines recognise your site as reputable. Good news – it works for AI models too.

The same goes for any mentions of your brand in the media and across any digital PR campaigns. Publishing high-quality, relevant and consistently updated content helps to establish what’s called ‘topical authority’ and positions your business as an expert in its field.

This ties into the E-E-A-T principles of content creation – meaning Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness – four key principles around which every piece of content should be created when looking at how to rank in ChatGPT. When users, search engines and AI models can see who wrote a piece and why they’re qualified, it adds another vital layer of trust.

Clear header structure

As good as AI technology is, it still helps to present information in a structured, organised way to help AI models understand your content – and it benefits the reader too, so there’s really no excuse! Clean, consistent header formatting is essential. Use just one main heading (H1) per page – your main topic – followed by subheadings (H2s), with H3s underneath to break things down further.

As an example, the title above, ‘Clear header structure’, is a H3 that sits under the H2 ‘How can my website perform better on ChatGPT?’. This clear hierarchy makes your content easier to crawl, easier to read and more likely to appear as a relevant result.

Add structured data

Structured data is how you speak Bing’s (and Google’s) language. It’s a type of code that tells search engines what your content actually means, not just what it says. For example, adding schema markup to a blog post lets search engines know it’s an article, who wrote it, when it was published and what it covers. That helps them understand the context, not just the words.

Using the right schema – like article schema for blog posts – makes it easier to appear in the right results and boosts how AI tools interpret your content when choosing what to recommend.

Technical SEO optimisation

Behind every high-performing page is a solid technical setup. Search engines – and the AI tools built on them – rely on being able to access, read and understand your site. That means making sure all your pages are correctly indexed, your status codes are working as they should and your sitemap is up to date and referenced in your robots.txt file.

These are the foundational elements of SEO – and they’re just as important when learning how to rank in ChatGPT. We realise this edges into technical territory, but don’t worry if it’s not all making sense. Just get in touch with our experts to find out what we can do for your site.

Site speed and core web vitals

Speed matters – not just for users, but for AI too. Both ChatGPT (via Bing) and Gemini (via Google) consider how well your site performs when choosing what content to present. A slow-loading website or clunky mobile experience won’t just put people off – it’ll make it less likely your content appears in AI-generated answers. Focus on improving your core web vitals by reducing load times and making your site smooth to navigate. It’s good for rankings, good for users and essential if you want to know how to rank in ChatGPT.

Conclusion: Optimising for ChatGPT

There’s no secret formula for ranking on ChatGPT – but the good news is, standard SEO best practices still apply.

Improve your visibility on Google and Bing using traditional (and always evolving) SEO techniques, and you’ll naturally improve your chances of appearing in ChatGPT’s results too. Keep content helpful, human and technically sound, and you’re on the right path.

Need help getting more people to your site?

Whether you want to improve your visibility on Google, Bing or in ChatGPT, Sherbet Donkey’s complete SEO service offering can help you get seen.

From SEO and technical optimisation to content strategy and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), our team knows how to get results. Get in touch today and let’s boost your visibility across the board.

ChatGPT Website Optimisation FAQs

Here we’re answering some of the most common questions we hear from clients about how to rank in ChatGPT.

How do I optimise my content to rank higher on ChatGPT?

To boost your chances of your business appearing in ChatGPT responses, write clear, well-structured content that answers user intent directly. Include relevant keywords naturally, back up claims with authoritative info and format with headings, bullet points and short paragraphs to keep it easy to understand, for both your readers and AI tools. Be clear, be direct and be the expert.

What type of content performs best on ChatGPT?

FAQs, how-to guides and in-depth explainers tend to perform well. They match well with question-based prompts and give AI the structure it needs. Clear, up-to-date content that directly answers user queries is more likely to be picked up and included in ChatGPT’s responses, as well as in Google and Bing results.

How does internal linking help AI understand my content?

Not only does internal linking help users navigate your website – a key tenet of user experience (UX) – it also helps AI tools understand how the pages on your site relate to each other. By using clear, relevant anchor text (the text that actually links to a different page) and a logical site structure, you can significantly reinforce topical relevance across your site. By learning to make your content easier to interpret, rank and serve up in AI-generated answers, you’ll be well on your way to learning how to rank in ChatGPT.