As you’re racking up your miles on your under-the-desk treadmill, a question may pop into your head. Why do competitors’ pages keep showing up in ChatGPT and ours don’t, even though we’ve spent all this effort trying to outrank them? Well, isn’t that some heavy, Dostoevsky type of stuff?
Maybe not. But if you're not thinking about getting organically mentioned by AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or whatever new one has spawned by the time you're reading this, you probably should be. It’s a new frontier of sub-SEO engineering, aka AEO.
So, let’s see how the thing works, who it pays attention to, and how to get you to rank, baby!
TL;DR When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, it reads live third-party pages (Reddit, G2, listicles, and similar posting) and writes an answer based on those. If you want to get named, you need to get people there talking about you. Earn placements and reviews, publish stuff worth quoting. It may be slow, but it pays off, for both AEO and SEO.
Hey, ChatGPT. What Happens Under the Hood?
A search-enabled AI model doesn’t pull an answer from memory. That would be America-debt-level expensive, and not really feasible at the scale of the internet.
Such AI models run a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine to fetch and parse information from other sources. A RAG splits your question into smaller pieces, grabs a handful of live pages, skims them, and drafts a reply.
You’re competing for that window in the RAG sequence, and two aspects determine what happens.
First, retrieval and citation are two different things. A page can be read by GPT without ever being cited, or your brand can get named, just for someone else’s blog to get the actual link.
Second, for anything with buying intent, ChatGPT reaches for third-party sources, not your own copy.
This leaves us with a fun little split:
| What it decides | Your own site | Everyone else's pages |
|---|---|---|
| Whether you get named | Rarely | Almost always |
| Whether you get described correctly | Mostly | Partly |
| How fast it shifts | Slowly | Fast |
Your site basically tells ChatGPT who you are and how to spell your name. The rest of the internet determines whether it will talk about you in the first place.
Who ChatGPT Is Actually Listening to
If your fate lives in the hands of other people's pages, the obvious question is which pages are those? A few source types keep popping up across independent tracking studies. The exact percentages jump around from week to week, so don’t take these numbers as gospel.
| Source | Why it counts | Volatility |
|---|---|---|
| Community threads and posts (Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn) | The internet's group chat, and the single biggest citation bucket | Very high |
| Review sites (G2, Capterra) | Retrieved on loop for "best X" and "X alternatives"; listicle writers take the ratings from there, too (yours truly included) | Medium |
| Listicles and comparison posts | The raw material for "top tools" answers | Medium |
| Reference (Wikipedia) | Roughly 12% to 13% of ChatGPT's citations by most 2026 estimates | Low |
| Climbing fast, and cited far more by ChatGPT than by Claude or Perplexity; lopsided value for business-to-business (B2B) | High |
Spread the Word
So, the mission starts, agent 47 GPT. There’s no form to fill out in order to magically appear in the search. You earn your rank by nudging the pages read by ChatGPT, roughly in this order:
- Land on the "best of" and comparison pages.
- Stack up honest reviews on G2 and Capterra.
- Be a real person in the threads.
- Hand the models numbers worth stealing.
- Make your own pages easy for AI to parse.
Vibe-ish Tactics
There are a few beloved moves that are oversold:
- The one big spike. Man, a front-page moment feels great, but it doesn’t really do anything on its own. ChatGPT takes its sweet time forming its opinion of you, and it uses many sources.
- Manufacturing Reddit buzz. Fake accounts and paid shilling are so see-through, they get nuked on sight. Developers smell 💩️ a light-year away.
So, when is your own content actually good? When a reader has already seen your name and clicks through for more detail, for one. Or, when your category is so new that the listicles don’t even exist yet, so your blog and docs are the only thing in the room to retrieve.
Not Measured = Not Fixable
You can’t improve a number you’ve never written down, and AI answers wobble too much to check once and forget.
Here’s what you can do. Write a fixed set of buyer-style prompts (the exact things your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) would type), and sort them out with How to Find the Right Developer Audience for Your Product. Run them across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, then run them again next week. Watch three numbers:
- Share of voice, or how often you get named at all
- Average position, or where you land in the shortlist (when you’re even there)
- Citation rate, or how often the linked source is actually you
But, doing all that manually? Yeah, no. And how do you even keep track of numbers?
Ahhh, aren’t you a lucky cowboy (cowgirl, whatever)? Literally.dev has just the tools for that. 😉
Let Someone Else Run the Show
Every bit of this works. With enough time, effort, and a little love you will get ✨mentioned✨️ by ChatGPT.
Now, you can add as much love as you want, but your time and effort should probably not be going toward AEO. There are more important things to take care of, like converting the leads that came from ChatGPT. 😁
Literally.dev handles the part you won’t: AEO, SEO, and superb content. All in-house, by our beloved writers and editors who actually get to know your product so well that you can forget about us and just pay the invoice every month. 😄
So, sailor, book a 30-minute call, and let’s see where your product stands today.
FAQ
How long until ChatGPT starts recommending my product?
Roughly 4 to 8 weeks for appearance on browsing-first tools like Perplexity, and 2 to 4 months on ChatGPT, assuming you’re actively winning third-party sources. Once you start showing up, it builds on itself after that.
Can I pay to be included in ChatGPT's answers?
ChatGPT has ads nowadays, but organic is the way to go. Plus, you’re targeting multiple engines at once and can’t afford to be shamed for having “Sponsored” next to your name.
Is AEO just SEO wearing a hat?
Though there is some overlapping, they are not identical. SEO helps you get retrieved in the first place, but getting recommended rides more on outside mentions, reviews, and community consensus than on ranking a single URL. You want both.
How can I accomplish this?
You can spend months and $$$ learning everything and sharpening your writing skills, or you can give Literally.dev a try.
