When ChatGPT explains your industry — does it name you, or your competitor?

The work of getting ChatGPT to name your company in its answers and cite your site as a source. There is no sign-up and no ranking table: ChatGPT picks sources from training data and from live search. What you can influence is crawler access, the structure of your content, structured data, and what third-party sites say about you.

It overlaps, but the goal differs. Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten blue links. ChatGPT gives one answer and names a handful of sources inside it. A page sitting eighth on Google can be cited if its section answers the question cleanly — and a page in first place can be skipped if it is nothing but marketing language.

For live search, usually 2–6 weeks after the page is re-indexed. For training data, considerably longer, and that part cannot be steered. So we start with what moves fast: technical access, answer structure, schema markup.

Two of them. First: AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt, often unnoticed because the file was copied from an older template — then no amount of content helps. Second: marketing language with no substance. "Leading agency for your success" does not get cited; a concrete number with a source does.

Usually the existing site is enough as a base. Early on the bigger lever is structure and technique, not volume: self-contained answer blocks, an FAQ built from real customer questions, correct schema markup, visible authorship. New content comes after that, aimed at the specific questions you want to appear on.

Then ChatGPT Ads is the faster route: a paid, labelled placement next to the answer, working from day one. ChatGPT SEO is slower but carries no click price and lasts. Most companies run both.