If you’ve ever wondered why your website doesn’t show up in ChatGPT search results, you’re not alone. In a recent quarterly review, our co-founder asked a simple question: Why isn’t ChatGPT showing our website? As businesses increasingly rely on AI to help with research and decision-making, we know being visible in search results has become crucial. So, inspired by this prompt, we rolled up our sleeves and did a bit of investigation work.
In this article, we’ll share the 4 things we learned about why ChatGPT might be overlooking your site, and how you can improve your chances of showing up in future OpenAI searches.
1. ChatGPT Can Now Differentiate Between Good And Bad Data
Let’s start with the basics. ChatGPT is evolving to better identify good data (credible, reliable sources) and bad data (low-quality, unreliable content). This helps the AI tool provide more accurate and useful answers to its users.
You might be wondering – what would be classified as bad data?
- Opinions posted to social media
- Unverified content
- A lousy website
For example: We experienced an issue recently with our Beyond Strategy website not showing up in any free versions of ChatGPT. We worried that ChatGPT considered our website information unreliable. Keep reading to see if this was the case…
2. AI Is Evolving Fast: Older Versions Didn’t Search the Web, But New Versions Do
ChatGPT, like other OpenAI tools, has come a long way since its early versions. Initially, it relied on a data list called Common Crawl, which was a snapshot of the internet at a specific time. Meaning that if your website wasn’t live when Common Crawl gathered its data, it could be excluded from search results until ChatGPT’s next dataset update, which might take a few months.
Today’s version of ChatGPT, especially in its paid iterations, can actively search the web. It accesses a wider variety of sources, including:
- Web pages
- Academic articles
- YouTube video transcripts
- Books
- Public websites
3. The Reason Why ChatGPT Doesn’t Show Your Website
At Beyond, we ran a test to see why our software wasn’t appearing in ChatGPT’s search results. We searched for specific keywords related to our services – like ‘strategy software’ and ‘KPI tracker’ – but our website didn’t show up.
Here’s what we discovered:
- New Websites Aren’t Indexed Immediately: ChatGPT’s dataset is updated periodically, meaning newer websites like ours might not be included in the latest free version. However, this likely won’t be an issue for long, as all versions of ChatGPT are transitioning to real-time internet scanning instead of relying solely on fixed datasets. Luckily, our website was not marked as ‘bad data’ like we feared.
- Paid vs. Free Versions Matter: Paid versions of ChatGPT access more updated datasets, so our website finally appeared in a paid search. As of now, paid versions of ChatGPT will have the most reliable information over free versions.
4. There Are Easy Ways to Make Your Website AI-Friendly
Here are some practical steps you can take to improve your website’s chances of appearing in ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models:
Optimise for SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a term for activity used to get your website to appear on Google search (or other search engines like Bing). Following the best practices, including:
- Using targeted keywords that reflect your core offerings
- Building quality backlinks from reputable sources
- Relevant URL slug
- Conversational language
Depending on the platform your website is hosted on, you can do a lot of this optimisation by yourself. Don’t know where to start? Take a look at your Google Analytics to see where traffic to your website is coming from, and which queries your visitors are using. Forbes did a great guide to SEO specifically for artificial intelligence.
Improve User Experience (UX)
Websites with a clean design and easy navigation are often seen as more credible by gpt-4. Make sure your website is:
- Visually appealing
- Easy to navigate
- Mobile-friendly and fast-loading
- Free from spelling or grammatical errors
This online guide has some great tips on improving your website’s user experience.
Update Your Content Regularly
These sorts of tools favour websites that publish fresh content. Imagine someone is visiting your page frequently – you want there to be something new for them to browse each time. Regularly updating your blog, product pages, or case studies helps ensure your site stays relevant.
Engage with Social Proof
Including testimonials, customer reviews, and case studies on your site can enhance credibility and improve your site’s chances of ranking higher in browser and AI-based searches.
Let us know: Is ChatGPT showing your website now?
Hopefully our tips helped, and your website is now showing in ChatGPT results. We’d love to hear from you if you found this article helpful, or have any insights to share – get in touch!
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