This is how you get ChatGPT to send you leads
Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) is an entirely different beast than SEO.
Joe Lazer is the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and the fractional head of content & comms at A.Team.
Over the past few weeks at A.Team, I’ve noticed an interesting trend: Prospects are starting to tell us that they found us via ChatGPT.
This leads to one of the most common questions I get from marketers lately: How do you get ChatGPT to recommend your company, anyway? We all see the writing on the wall: People are increasingly going to use AI tools like ChatGPT to get recommendations for restaurants, products, and services. But while we’ve spent two decades mastering SEO, Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) can feel dizzying — like going to a new school with corridors that shift around like a funhouse of horrors. ChatGPT and Claude, after all, are black boxes that return different answers every time.
But we do have some clues on how to win at LLMO. Tools like ChatGPT are based on a corpus of training data, and like SEO, they rank certain sites in their training as more authoritative for particular topics. (Vanity Fair for fashion, ESPN for sports, Wired for tech, etc.)
The game in SEO was getting backlinks from those sites; with LLMO, winning means being mentioned on those sites in the right context. For example, one lead found A.Team by asking ChatGPT for “Toptal Competitors” — because we were mentioned as such in the press over the past few years, ChatGPT surfaced us accordingly.
For this reason, LLMO and PR are tightly intertwined; you need to get mentioned in the right way in authoritative publications for your industry, and links don’t matter.
That means smart marketers will:
Invest in original research that wins press mentions
Pitch lots of op-eds, and try to get into contributor programs at sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur
Pull off press-worthy stunts
Make sure they’re ranking on competitors’ lists at sites like G2
Build a reputation for their execs as thought leaders on social, so that reporters are more eager to quote them
The big question: How do you find the right publications to get mentioned in? Rand Fishkin has an amazing overview here.
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For OpenAI, the roll-outs and rumors keep coming, with SearchGPT now officially available to paid subscribers. And now that “Project Strawberry” has come to light, AI enthusiasts are eagerly awaiting the company’s next secretive initiative, reportedly called Orion (apparently “Milky Way” was taken).
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The most wonderful prompt of the year
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Suggested prompt text:
"Create a year-long calendar of innovative seasonal marketing ideas for [your brand], avoiding cliches and including at least one unexpected twist for each major holiday."