SEO Case Study: How We Influenced The ChatGPT Search Results

In October 2024, ChatGPT announced that they would be releasing “ChatGPT Search” – an official search engine integration into the LLM model. This new functionality pulls in from the Bing search results. What’s interesting is that instead of utilizing ChatGPT’s internal training data, they utilize search results from the Web.

We decided to experiment with these results, to see if it was possible to adjust the output. After testing, we found that IT IS POSSIBLE to influence the ChatGPT Search results for your brand.

We’ve been doing some monitoring around how ChatGPT Search talks about Go Fish Digital, especially for certain queries that we know are important to the business. One of the queries that performs well for us is “digital PR agency”. Historically, we’ve performed well in Google for this query and have recently seen incoming business referencing ChatGPT as well. This was a query worth monitoring for us.

When looking at how ChatGPT Search listed our company compared to competitors, we found that there was a gap in how ChatGPT was producing results for us compared to competitors. For each competitor, ChatGPT Search would list a few “Notable Clients”, generally larger companies they’ve done digital PR work for. However, they weren’t listing this information for us.

This was a missed opportunity to build trust signals through ChatGPT Search.

Fortunately, we have an listicle article on our site that ChatGPT Search was frequently utilizing as a citation. We knew it would scrape content from this article, so we wanted to test if adjusting our content would influence the output.

We went to the article and added “Notable Clients” to the article. We utilized a bullet list to better structure this as key value pairs that an search engine/LLM would be more likely to view as a data source.

After waiting a week, we saw that ChatGPT Search started finally pulling in “Notable Clients” when listing Go Fish Digital in the output! This was a huge win and something that now helps enrich our own listing within ChatGPT Search.

So the takeaway here, is that when ChatGPT uses the Search function, right now you CAN have the ability to influence the output. The first thing you need is an article/piece of content that can feed into the citations. If you’re able to get that, you can start adjusting the content to better control the output of how ChatGPT Search talks about your brand.

We’re continuing to run other tests as well. Perhaps we can get ChatGPT to list other things such as Awards or Years Active directly in the output.

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