Half the SEO content I’m reading right now is panic. The other half is people pretending nothing has changed. I think both are wrong, and the actual answer is duller than either side wants to admit.

ChatGPT is not Google. It’s also not nothing.

If you treat ChatGPT like a search engine you’ll get sloppy advice. It doesn’t crawl. It doesn’t index. It pulls from training data, from live web tools, and from a small set of “trusted” sources it falls back on. The work of getting cited is the work of becoming one of those sources.

That’s a different game. It’s closer to “get on Wikipedia, get into reputable directories, get mentioned in a peer-reviewed paper” than it is to “stuff keywords.”

Three things that actually move the needle

  1. Be the answer, not a page about the answer. ChatGPT cites concrete sentences. “The minimum balance is $250” gets quoted. “Various financial institutions have varying minimums” does not.
  2. Structured data is back. Schema markup matters again — but for a different reason. Now it’s how AI tools extract claims from your page without misreading them.
  3. Authority is now plural. Old SEO had one number (DR / DA). The new world cares about whether you appear in a specific kind of source: a directory, a podcast transcript, a Reddit thread, a Stack Overflow answer.

They still matter. ChatGPT and the other LLMs use link graphs as one signal among many. The mistake is thinking they’re the only signal. A clean link bundle from Backlink Bundle 2.0 still moves things in Google, and Google still feeds parts of Bing’s index, which feeds parts of ChatGPT’s web tool. The whole stack is more entangled than the takes on Twitter suggest.

For small operators

If you’re running a single-product site and someone tells you you need a 12-month GEO strategy, ignore them. Simple SEO for Small Businesses is the right size for that scope — pragmatic, current, and short on fluff.

What I’d actually do this quarter

Three things, in order. Pick the five queries that send you customers (not traffic — customers). Write one definitive page per query, with concrete numbers and named sources. Add Article and FAQPage schema to each. Then watch what ChatGPT does over six weeks.

Most of what’s written about GEO right now is people speculating. The thing I find useful is just shipping a page, asking ChatGPT about the topic two weeks later, and seeing whether anything quotable appears.

If it does, double down. If it doesn’t, fix the page or pick a better query. Same loop SEO has always been. Just with a new search box.