Have you optimized your website for ChatGPT yet?

Written By Meri Harli

If you haven’t optimized for LLMs such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, etc., you’d better get a wriggle on. Seriously.

Google’s AI Overviews and LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are already reshaping how people find, summarize, and act when searching for products and services like yours. It’s no longer just about ranking #1 in Google — it’s about showing up in the AI answers your [ideal] customers trust because your competitors are about to outrank you where it counts.

Most B2B sites are still stuck in an SEO playbook written for 2019 — but the companies that adapt now will win mindshare and market share tomorrow. The good news is that now, more than ever before, you control the narrative of your business.

This short, three-part guide will walk you through the basics of optimizing your small-to-medium business website for the new era of AI-driven search.

Top LLMs Where Small Businesses Should Optimize Brand Visibility

While traditional SEO focused solely on Google, the new game includes LLM-driven AI assistants and AI search platforms. These tools are being trained on public web content, documentation, and user behavior, so visibility in these contexts is strategic. So, which platforms do you need to focus on? The following are the top 5 platforms, why they matter, and how to optimize for each platform*.

*Disclaimer: these AI platforms are evolving ridiculously fast, so please use what follows as a guide only, and reach out to me if you have any questions.

🧠 TL;DR Strategy Overview:

If you're a small B2B business or consultant, along with “old school” best practice traditional SEO:

  • Be crawlable and structured — let GPTBot, Perplexity, and Gemini index your content.

  • Write like you're answering questions — blog posts, FAQs, and schema help LLMs ingest and cite you.

  • Be present in ecosystems they reference — Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, YouTube, and industry sites.

1. The “OG Cool Professor”: ChatGPT (OpenAI)

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first AI bot to take the world by storm. Now, with over 180 million users, it’s used for a wide range of purposes, including research, recommendations, and summaries. ChatGPT plugins and browsing mode can surface your branded content, so write your content as if it’s going to appear in ChatGPT, because it will (but this is a good thing, because you’re now more in control of your brand narrative than ever before).

Optimization strategy:

  • Clear, structured content

  • Schema markup (FAQ, Product, Organization)

  • Publish expert content on high-authority domains (e.g., LinkedIn, Medium)

  • Consider integrating with OpenAI tools if API exposure fits your use case

  • OpenAI GPTBot documentation outlines how their crawler works, what it respects (robots.txt, meta tags), and how it sources training data from publicly available sites.

  • In summary, structured, publicly available content, along with citation-eligible content, performs best.

2. The “Old School Valedictorian” Google (AI Overviews and AI Mode)

If you’ve already optimized your website with best practice “traditional” SEO, your brand should be fine with Google’s new AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Their AI ‘bot’ Gemini powers Google’s AI Overviews and new AI Mode, which are heavily integrated into organic search.

Optimization strategy:

  • Traditional best-practice SEO, Emphasis on E-E-A-T, structured data, and human-readable answers.

  • Question & Answer-style content (e.g. FAQs)

  • High-authority backlinks

  • Publish on forums and platforms Gemini scrapes (Reddit, Quora)

  • In summary, your SEO strategy is based on old-school best practice SEO and Google’s official documentation: AI Overviews documentation and Helpful Content System.

3. Perplexity.ai - The Hyper-Efficient “Librarian”

Perplexity is the new kid on the block, a fast-growing AI search engine with citations.

Optimization strategy:

  • Ensure your site is crawlable

  • Create Q&A-type content

  • Get cited on already-indexed domains (e.g., Medium, Substack, GitHub) because public scraping behavior and citation method have been analyzed through reverse engineering and experiments, which confirm that it favors publicly crawlable, direct-answer content, and high-authority citations (e.g., blogs, docs, Reddit, Medium, Substack).

  • No official developer API, but analysis by SEO professionals, like Lily Ray and Kevin Indig, deliver cutting-edge insights (follow their updates on LinkedIn they are considered SEO rockstars.

4. Claude.ai (Anthropic) - The “Empathic Polymath”

Increasing use in enterprises and embedded into tools like Notion AI and Slack AI, Claude is known as “the writer’s tool” due to its excellence in adapting to your brand voice and helping you write so that your writing doesn’t sound like a bot produced it (which has been a frequent criticism of ChatGPT, for example).

Optimization strategy:

  • Syndicate branded expert content to platforms Claude is exposed to (e.g., public docs, blog articles with proper metadata)

  • No formal public crawler (yet), but Claude consumes training data from public web sources and platforms used in AI assistants like Notion AI and Slack AI.

  • In summary: Have content syndicated to high-authority, crawlable domains (like Substack, public GitHub repos, and Medium).

5. Microsoft Copilot / Bing Chat (GPT-4) - The “Buttoned-Up Analyst”

ChatGPT and Bing Chat (now often integrated as Microsoft Copilot) are not the same, although they share a common technological foundation in AI language models, such as OpenAI's GPT series. Additionally, Microsoft is a significant investor in OpenAI. While both are AI chatbots designed for conversational interactions, they differ in their integration, capabilities, and specific purposes.

Optimization strategy:

  • Use Bing Webmaster Tools SEO

  • Don’t forget the all-important schema & structured data

  • Use FAQ & How-To content relevant to your niche

  • Powered by GPT-4 + Bing index, which uses Bing’s web crawler.

  • Source: Microsoft documentation on Bing SEO recommends schema, structured HTML, and relevance for question-based content.

💡 Pro Tip: LLMs don't "index" in the same way Google does. You’re optimizing to increase your brand’s presence in the content they train on or retrieve from, including third-party platforms and trusted sources, making the text you write on your website (AKA “SEO copywriting) more critical than ever. Focus on the greatest “secret” weapon of SEO: the text on the page, to build out a compelling narrative for your brand.

Next up, stay tuned for part two of this series: “Brand Messaging in the Age of ChatGPT: How B2B Companies Can Shape What AI Says About Them”

Meri Harli
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