The New SEO — How to Get Cited by ChatGPT
People ask ChatGPT and Perplexity before they Google now. Getting recommended by an AI runs on different rules than ranking a page — and the old SEO tricks actively fail. Here is what actually moves the needle.
- #geo
- #ai-search
- #visibility
Stop trying to rank a page. Start trying to be the sentence an AI quotes. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "best X for Y" or "is [person] any good," the model doesn't hand back ten blue links — it synthesizes one answer and cites a few sources. Your job in this new game is to be one of those cited sources. It is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and the surprising part is that the tactics that won at Google can do nothing here.
The old playbook is dead — measure this
Peer-reviewed work makes the break clean. In the GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024), the authors tested optimization methods on 10,000 queries and found keyword stuffing — the reflex of a decade of SEO — produced no improvement in how often a page got surfaced by a generative engine. What did work: adding statistics, direct quotations, and cited sources to your content lifted visibility by 30–40% on their word-count metric.
The three moves that actually work
Rewrite your key content so an AI can extract and trust it. In order of proven impact:
- Add real statistics. Turn "our approach is faster" into "cuts build time from 12 min to 3." Data-backed claims were the strongest lever in the study for opinion- and policy-type questions.
- Quote credible sources. Embedding a named quote or citation earned the biggest single visibility jump in the paper — models trust content that shows its work.
- Write self-contained, factual passages. Models pull passages, not pages. Each paragraph should make sense quoted alone.
Why this is a gift if you're unknown
Here is the non-obvious upside for a dev/EM without a big domain. Traditional SEO rewards incumbents — backlinks and domain age. GEO doesn't. The same study found the Cite Sources method gave a 115% visibility increase for content ranked #5 in normal search, versus a drop for what was already #1. Generative engines level the field: a precise, well-cited answer from nobody can outrank a vague one from a giant.
My rule of thumb: don't write for the crawler, write to be quoted by a skeptical colleague. If a sentence about your work, your product, or your profile can't stand alone as a fact someone would repeat, an AI won't repeat it either.
Today: pick the one page that matters most — your product, your portfolio, your GitHub README — and rewrite its opening paragraph with one hard number and one cited source. That is your first citation.
Sources
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