Why SEO is Key to Getting Your Brand Mentioned by ChatGPT (and Other AI)

Imagine this: A potential customer asks ChatGPT for the best solution in your industry, and the AI’s answer includes your brand. That kind of mention is like digital gold – a sign that your brand has become part of the knowledge that AI tools share with users. How do you achieve this? The short answer: strong SEO. In this post, we’ll explore why SEO is highly important for getting your brand mentioned in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. We’ll look at how LLMs are trained on public web content, why high-ranking pages have a better chance to influence AI outputs, how backlinks and consistent content boost your visibility, and real examples of brands winning the AI mention game. Let’s dive in with a friendly, non-technical look at this new frontier.

LLMs Learn from the Web – And Your Site Can Be Their Textbook

Large language models such as ChatGPT don’t magically know things – they learn by reading the internet. In fact, models like GPT-4 are trained by “ingesting gigantic amounts of text from the Internet”circleid.com. Essentially, whatever content is publicly available on the web is potential training data. Blogs, articles, forums, wikis – if it’s out there and not behind a private wall, an AI might have gobbled it up during training.

This means the more your brand is talked about or publishes content on the web, the more likely an LLM has seen it. If your company has a well-optimised website, informative blog posts, and is mentioned on other high-authority sites, all that information becomes part of the soup of text the AI learns from. SEO plays a crucial role here: it helps ensure your content is visible and indexable on the open web, making it fodder for LLM training. If an AI’s knowledge is like a giant encyclopedia created from the web, good SEO helps make sure your brand isn’t left out of the book.

High Rankings = Higher Chance of AI Mentions

It turns out that doing well on Google can also translate to doing well with AI. High-ranking pages have a better chance of influencing model outputs. Why? Popular, authoritative content is more likely to be crawled, referenced, and learned by LLMs. A recent study by Seer Interactive analyzed thousands of queries and found a strong correlation between top Google rankings and brand mentions in ChatGPT’s answers stanventures.com. In fact, brands on Google’s first page showed about a 0.65 correlation with being mentioned by AI – a striking overlap stanventures.com. In another analysis, SEO experts saw that when their clients ranked on page one of Google for a topic, they appeared in ChatGPT or similar AI responses about 77% of the time for those topics growandconvert.com. The data is clear: if you rank well in search, you’re more likely to be “known” by the AI.

Why would ChatGPT mention page-one Google results? Consider that authoritative sites (the kind Google ranks highly) are often exactly the kind of quality content LLMs ingest. Plus, people tend to create content referencing top players, and the AI picks up on those associations. It’s a virtuous cycle: SEO helps you rank, ranking helps you get into the training data, and being in the training data helps the AI mention you. One SEO writer dubbed this synergy “LLM Optimization” (LLMO) – essentially the new art of optimizing your presence so AI tools are more likely to cite or mention you growandconvert.com.

Content & Backlinks: Building Authority for Both Google and AI

If you’re familiar with SEO, you know that two pillars of high visibility are relevant content (pages that answer users’ questions) and authoritative backlinks (other sites linking to you as a trusted source). Those same pillars can indirectly boost your presence in AI conversations.

• Consistent, Relevant Content: LLMs love content that answers questions and provides solutions. When training on web data, these models favor “solution-driven, authoritative content” and pay less attention to fluff or random social posts stanventures.com. By regularly publishing high-quality articles, guides, and FAQs in your niche, you increase the chances that the AI has seen your brand associated with key topics. For example, a company that maintains a blog with expert tips in its industry will have its name repeatedly appear alongside important keywords – teaching the AI that this brand is relevant in that context. Fresh, consistent content also means your information stays up-to-date for AI models as they periodically get new training data or use real-time search.
• Authoritative Backlinks: Every backlink is like a vote of confidence for your site. In SEO, quality backlinks boost your search rankings and credibility. But they also do something else: they spread your brand around the web. If dozens of reputable websites cite your brand or content, those mentions become part of the textual web that an LLM learns from. Think of backlinks as breadcrumbs that lead both humans and machines to recognize you. While one study noted that backlinks alone weren’t the strongest direct driver of AI mentions stanventures.com, they are still critical for ranking, which (as we saw) correlates with AI visibility. Plus, when an authoritative site talks about you, that context is embedded in text the AI consumes. Over time, widespread mentions and links act as signals that your brand is a trusted authority, both to Google’s algorithm and to AI models digesting the same info.

An example of an AI-generated overview emphasising the importance of a strong online presence for your brand (highlighted text).

It’s worth noting that unlike Google, ChatGPT isn’t using “links” to decide what to show – it’s not a search engine listing results. Instead, it’s generating an answer based on patterns in its training data. In the world of LLMs, “the currency ... is mentions” – the words and brands that frequently appear in relevant contexts sparktoro.com. So the more mentions of your brand (and related keywords) you earn through content and links, the richer you become in the AI’s eyes. In short, great SEO helps an AI “learn” your brand.

Real-World Examples: Brands Winning Thanks to SEO

To make this concrete, let’s look at a few scenarios. Think about the kinds of brands that AI assistants often mention when asked for recommendations or information. They tend to be the brands with a strong online footprint:

• Ask ChatGPT about project management tools, and you might hear names like Trello or Asana. These companies have invested heavily in SEO content (guides, use-cases, keywords) around project management, ensuring they dominate search rankings and appear in countless articles. It’s no surprise an AI trained on those articles will recall their names.
• Ask for a customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you’re likely to get big players like Salesforce or HubSpot in the answer. Yes, these are well-known companies – but they also have massive content libraries, high Google rankings, and tons of backlinks for CRM-related searches. That strong SEO presence means any AI has been virtually steeped in information about them. They’re unavoidable in the training data, and thus they pop up when the model chats about CRMs.
• Meanwhile, lesser-known brands can struggle. In one case study, a new company with a very low domain rating wasn’t mentioned at all by ChatGPT for its target keywords – likely because it wasn’t in ChatGPT’s training data yet growandconvert.com. The brand hadn’t built up much online content or authority by the time the AI was trained, so the AI simply didn’t know it. This is a prime example of SEO’s timeline effect: if you launch a site today and don’t start building your web presence, you might not show up in AI answers for a long time. On the flip side, an established blog that’s been answering common customer questions for years could be frequently quoted (in spirit) by an LLM.

These examples highlight a simple truth: brands that master SEO are effectively teaching the AI world who they are. When your site consistently appears at the top of search results and your content earns mentions across the web, your brand becomes part of the collective knowledge that models like ChatGPT draw upon.

The Indirect Value of AI Mentions (and How SEO Drives It)

You might be wondering, “So what if ChatGPT mentions my brand? How does that help me if there’s no direct click or traffic?” The value may not be a traditional click-through, but it’s enormous in terms of brand awareness and trust. Being mentioned in AI-driven conversations is like getting a word-of-mouth recommendation from the world’s most knowledgeable assistant. If a chatbot confidently cites your brand as an example or solution, users perceive your brand as credible and relevant. It’s a subtle form of endorsement.

Consider the customer journey: a user hears about your brand from ChatGPT, which might prompt them to look you up later or trust your company more when they see it elsewhere. It can shorten the trust-building process. In marketing terms, it’s top-of-funnel visibility on steroids – you’re reaching people even when they didn’t explicitly search for you. Over time, as AI tools become integrated in search engines and virtual assistants, having your brand in the AI’s “vocabulary” will be as important as having it on the first page of Google.

The good news is that SEO and AI visibility go hand in hand. All the effort you put into SEO – researching keywords, optimising on-page content, earning backlinks, building a fast and user-friendly site – feeds directly into how visible you are not just to Google, but to AI models that learn from the web. By aligning your content strategy with what people are asking (and optimising for those queries), you’re simultaneously aligning with what AI will learn. In short, SEO is now a long-term brand investment for both human searchers and AI algorithms.

Conclusion: Prioritise SEO as Part of Your Long-Term Brand Strategy

SEO has always been about making your brand more visible and authoritative online. Now, in the age of ChatGPT and other LLMs, good SEO does double duty – it not only wins you traffic from search, but also a place in the conversations AI is having with your audience. The landscape of digital marketing is evolving, but the foundational principle remains: if you want to be talked about, you need to be easy to find and worth talking about.

By focusing on consistent, high-quality content and SEO best practices, you’re ensuring that your brand’s voice is loud and clear on the web, for people and for AI. So, if you haven’t already, make SEO a priority in your long-term brand strategy. Optimise your site, answer your customers’ burning questions, and build those backlinks. Over time, you’ll not only climb the search rankings, but you’ll also earn a spot in the knowledge base of the world’s leading AI models. And when a future customer asks their virtual assistant for a recommendation, they just might hear your brand’s name as the answer.

Ready to boost your brand’s visibility in both Google and AI? It starts with solid SEO. Let’s get to work on it today – so your brand is on the tip of the tongue of the next ChatGPT conversation!