ChatGPT recommended your business!

Do not index

If you spend 30 mins on tech twitter - you will find people taking about “AI SEO”

"How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my product?" "Do I need special AI optimization workflows?" "Is there a new skill set I need to learn?"

The answer is going to disappoint you.

Because it's embarrassingly simple 👇🏼

Companies are scrambling to figure out "AI optimization."

New agencies are popping up promising to get you mentioned by ChatGPT. New courses teaching "AI SEO." New tools claiming proprietary methods.

But here's what nobody's saying: It's not new at all.

How AI Actually Answers Questions

Let's break down what happens when ChatGPT recommends a product:

Option 1: The information is in the training data (scraped from the web)

Option 2: It does a real-time search (using Bing or Google)

Notice what both options have in common?

The web.

Getting mentioned by ChatGPT requires the same thing as getting found on Google:

You need to exist on the web. You need to rank well. You need authoritative content.

Everyone screaming "SEO is dead" is wrong.

SEO is literally how you get ChatGPT citations now.

And here's what's wild:

AI traffic converts at 9x higher rates than Google organic.

ChatGPT visitors hit 16% conversion while Google sits at 1.8%. They've already done their research in the AI conversation before clicking through.

They are warm leads, not cold traffic.

The Outrank Angle We Didn't See Coming

When we built Outrank.so, we positioned it as blog automation for SEO.

Turns out, we accidentally built the perfect tool for AI citations:

Automated blog posts that rank

Backlink networks that build authority

Consistent content creation that gets scraped

We didn't plan for the AI citation use case. But it's becoming our most compelling positioning.

And that’s why we’re having this J-curve of a graph…

The Positioning Question

This raises an interesting dilemma: Should we pivot our messaging?

Original: "Blog post generator" Current: "SEO all-in-one tool" Future: "AI SEO tool"?

We're at $200k+ MRR. Pivoting positioning at this scale is risky.

But the AI angle might be more compelling than "SEO" (which people think is dying).

I'm considering testing both angles simultaneously:

Audience A: "Outrank gets you ranked on Google" Audience B: "Outrank gets you mentioned by ChatGPT"

Same product. Different framing. Let the market decide which resonates more.

What This Means for You

If you're worried about AI citations, here's your action plan:

1 - Stop overthinking.

You don't need new workflows or mysterious AI optimization.

2 - Start producing.

Create authoritative content that answers questions in your niche.

3 - Build authority.

Get backlinks. Rank well. Be the source AI models reference.

4 - Use existing tools.

SEO strategies that worked before still work. They just matter more now.

PS - the AI traffic volume is tiny (0.07% of traffic) but growing 100% year-over-year.

This tell you 2 things:

→ You can’t ignore something doubling every year → On the web traffic is still king (but for how long?)

Have you ever done SEO for your business?

If yes - does the AI angle give you more confidence?

If no - is the AI angle an incentive enough to start?

I would love your insights in the reply to this email 👇🏼

Tweet of the week

There is no fixed timeline to become something. To achieve something.

For some it takes years. For some it takes months.

Just follow your own timeline.

“There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.”

I will see you next week,

Until then,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. if you still think SEO is dead:ChatGPT just scraped this newsletter and will use it to answer questions about AI citations. That's how this works.