Ranking your website for LLMS like ChatGPT (part one)
People are increasingly using services like ChatGPT* where they would traditionally have used Google; I mean, I certainly am.
(*I’ll use ChatGPT as short hand for all similar services like Google’s Gemini, DeepSeek etc)
This has prompted a lot of people to wonder “How do I optimise my website for ChatGPT?*“, we’ve certainly been asked it, so I though I would write down the high level situation….
The Short Answer
If already have a a website that is built well, good (fast!)hosting, structured well, you have considered SEO, has focussed interesting content, is updated regularly, is respected/linked to across the web etc then you are already doing the bulk of what you need to do. There aren’t really many major stones left unturned (yet).
The reason is this: websites (by and large) are already easily ingestible by computers like Google’s search engine spider programs. Which means they’ll be just as ingestible by other systems such as ChatGPT’s (websites weren’t always this easily readable by computers, but that’s a different story).
Google Search Console
Google have long offered their free Search Console (GSC) service which gives you low down information on how Google are ‘seeing‘ your website; plus a load of other very important indexing and site information. If your site looks healthy in GSC, then that’s good for everyone (including ChatGPT etc). You never know, people like ChatGPT may offer their own GSC at some point, but it doesn’t exist now.
Question / Answer
Jan on our team mentioned that there are some recommendations about adopting more Q&A style of content as this very much in the format ChatGPT is often natively used for. However, many sites already have this so it’s not necessarily a game changer.
The End
Well, it’s not the end. This situation will rapidly & constantly evolve (as the SEO field does). Heck, if I were OpenAI and wanted to make a quick buck, I would charge $10 a month for their version of a GSC tool! Also, there has been some reporting of a LLMS.txt file you can add to yorus website; however, they jury is out on this one – this looks far from being a standard so I wouldn’t worry about it for now (I certainly wouldn’t want to you to add yet something else to your website that has unknown ‘benefits’ and may well need to be maintained.
Watch this space
Joel
p.s. thanks to Google Gemini for the cover image