Search is changing, and fast. Users are no longer limited just to traditional SERPs, they have access to zero-click search, like ChatGPT.
Instead of users now clicking on a website to read content, content is being supplied to them on AI search engines. They’re getting quicker, better, and more concise results.
Because of this, website owners need to focus on ChatGPT browsing SEO. This is a form of optimisation to appear in the answers of ChatGPT’s browsing feature.
How ChatGPT Browsing Works
ChatGPT’s browsing mode bridges the gap between its static training data and real-time web data. When someone asks a niche or time-sensitive question, ChatGPT can activate its browsing tool to search the live web to return up-to-date answers.
The browsing functionality for ChatGPT is actually powered by Bing’s web index. Therefore, when someone asks a timely question to ChatGPT, the data comes from Bing search. How it’s worded, however, is produced by ChatGPT itself.
Like with traditional search, ChatGPT browsing feature retrieves and evaluates content based on credibility, trustworthiness, intent, and structure. This process is known as OpenAI content sourcing, and it prioritises pages that are structured clearly, written with intent in mind, and updated regularly.
The type of content ChatGPT extracts from can vary. It can be cited from blog posts, documentation pages, news articles, and more. What it extracts depends on the user’s query and intent.
What Types of Content Get Cited by ChatGPT
The browsing tools from ChatGPT are designed to retrieve clear, reliable, and easy-to-parse information. Because of this, there are a few different content types that tend to get cited more than others. These include:
- Answer Blocks: These come in the form of FAQ and summary sections. They include direct questions and short answers, something AI’s consider an “easy” parse.
- List and How-To Instructions: Ordered steps, bullet points, and tip-based formats mirror the response formatting from ChatGPT, making it easier to cite.
Alongside these content types, ChatGPT also prefers content that is structurally sound. For example, users should use semantic HTML (heading tags, etc.) and schema in appropriate places.
Plus, similar to traditional search, AI prefers extracting data from domains with strong E-E-A-T and up-to-date information.
Structuring Content for ChatGPT SEO
When performing ChatGPT browsing SEO, you need to develop ready-to-quote passage-level answers that satisfy conversational queries.
Use Q&A or Summary Blocks
AI search results provide clear, direct answers to users’ queries. You need to mimic this. Therefore, ensure your content has direct questions and clear answers. This makes it easy for the AI to understand, interpret, and cite.
Summary locks can be used at the beginning or end of a section. Q&As can be mentioned at the end of a piece of content or as a standalone page. For example, “Top questions about [industry]” or something similar.
Front-Load Key Answers
Never bury any of your insights. Start each section with a concise, high-quality answer before you get into the details.
This is important due to passage-level retrieval. ChatGPT, instead of retrieving large pieces of text, looks at small, focused areas. Therefore, you need to create content in this preferred way.
Add FAQ, HowTo, or Article Schema
Schema markup, like FAQPage, HowTo, and Article, improves the machine readability of your content. It helps ChatGPT understand the content’s structure and its intent.
For example, let’s say you write a how-to guide on “How to make coffee”. Without a HowTo schema, ChatGPT will just look at it like any old content. By adding the HowTo schema, it indicates to ChatGPT this is, without question, a how-to guide.
Write Query-Based H2s
When using ChatGPT with its browsing feature, users will type in questions. Naturally, these will be conversion-based, long-tail questions.
Your H2 headings should be as close as possible to the questions your target audience might ask the AI model. The closer you are, the more relevant your H2 and content, resulting in a chance to become an AI citation.
Technical SEO to Ensure Crawlability by Bing
Since ChatGPT relies on Bing-powered citation for browsing, your site must be technically sound to be crawled, indexed, and served in AI answers.
Optimise Titles, Slugs, and Links
Titles and slugs can tell Bing’s search database what the content is about. Because of this, when writing titles and slugs, make sure they’re keyword-rich, descriptive, and conversion-based.
Alongside this, use internal links where natural. Doing this will help bots understand content relationships, boosting topical authority. It’ll also ensure that deeper pages are more discoverable, improving the chances of being cited.
Validate Schema and Metadata
When it comes to ChatGPT browsing SEO, schema is incredibly important. It helps AI machines understand the context of the content. For example, the FAQ schema indicates that the section is an FAQ block, the HowTo schema indicates its instructional content, etc.
Applying schema and metadata is simple. However, once it’s added, always validate it using a schema validator tool. This will ensure that your schema is set up correctly.
Improve Renderability and JS Control
If your content relies heavily on JavaScript, ensure that important text, links, and schema are rendered on page load. The longer it takes for the content to load, the less likely Bingbot is to crawl it.
Because of this, use clean, server-side rendered HTML. This will improve the load speed of key content pieces, meaning it’s more likely to get parsed and cited.
Submit Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools
Always submit your XML sitemap to Bing via Bing Webmaster Tools. This will ensure that Bing has an updated version of your sitemap in its database, making it easier for them to discover new or updated content.
Monitoring and Leveraging ChatGPT Citations
While AI search results don’t follow the same measurable patterns as standard SERPs, there are still some practical ways to monitor visibility for AI citations.
Test Prompts to Check ChatGPT Visibility
One of the most direct and commonly used ways to gauge whether your content is getting cited by AI is to run a prompt test.
A prompt test is when you go into ChatGPT and type in questions related to your content. You can then see the output from ChatGPT and see whether your content is being cited.
For example, let’s say you have a how-to guide on “How can I groom a puppy?”. You’d type in this question as well as other conversational-based questions related to this content, “How can I groom a one-month-old puppy?”, etc.
Track GPT Referral Traffic
When you’re cited on ChatGPT and someone clicks on the link, you’ll see referral traffic from source=chatgpt.com. When you get real-time web data with these parameters, it indicates that referral traffic is coming from these platforms. You’ll be able to see this referral traffic on Google Analytics.
Monitor Brand Mentions in AI Content
A few tools, like BuzzSumo, Brand24, or Mention, can help track when your website, brand, or URL is publicly shared in ChatGPT outputs.
This will only happen, however, if the user shares the ChatGPT response on social media, forums, blogs, etc., that include a source directed to you.
Use Citations as Credibility Proof
Being monitored by ChatGPT (or any other AI engines) means that your content is credible and trustworthy. That’s why you sometimes see brands and websites using phrases like “as seen in ChatGPT”.
Simply, being referenced by an AI model reinforces your authority within a space. It’s more of a vanity metric, so to speak, however, it’s one way you can leverage being mentioned in an AI-powered search.
Final Word
ChatGPT browsing SEO is much different from traditional SEO. “Traditional” SEO is more page-level optimisation; however, with ChatGPT SEO, it’s more passage-level optimisation.
Because of this, we need to change how we approach and structure content. It needs to be conversational, more concise and direct, and more structured through things such as semantic HTML and schema.
If you’re serious about increasing your ChatGPT visibility, start with a content audit. See how you can restructure your content to be more AI-friendly by following the best practices explained above.
