Do You Really Need a ChatGPT Ranking Strategy Right Now?

I’ve been fielding this question from clients for months now: “Should we be optimizing for ChatGPT?” The short answer? It depends on whether you understand what you’re actually getting into. After spending considerable time testing and analyzing LLM results, I can tell you that if you’re expecting the same stability and predictability we’ve had with Google for the past decade, you’re going to be disappointed.

The reality is more nuanced than the marketing hype suggests. Yes, ChatGPT represents a new channel. Yes, it’s exciting when you land a client or patient from an AI-sourced search. But here’s what nobody’s talking about: the fundamental mechanics of how LLMs work are radically different from traditional search engines, and that changes everything about how we should approach optimization.

The Technical Reality: LLMs Aren’t Search Engines

Here’s the biggest misconception I see marketing agencies making right now. They’re treating ChatGPT like it’s just another search engine with a 1-10 ranking position. We’ve been so indoctrinated by SEO and traditional rankings that we’re trying to force LLMs into a framework they simply don’t fit.

LLMs are not search engine algorithms. They act relatively erratically in perception, but it’s not erratic, it’s just an LLM producing the result based off of a query. You will see wild changes (i.e., a client website shows up number five for a basic SEO generic term like a short tail keyword but the next time doesn’t show up anywhere).

I’ve watched this variance happen repeatedly during testing. The inconsistency can depend on your profile, your IP, and the search query at that specific point in time. As we know with ChatGPT, it can learn your patterns and behaviors, so how would any of your keyword-related queries truly be measurable and relatable? When you have this kind of wild variance between results, you don’t have correlation. And when you don’t have correlation, you don’t have stable ranking factors or signals to optimize for.

This is fundamentally different from Google’s search engine results pages. When I check rankings for a keyword in Google, there’s not a lot of fluctuation from search to search using the same profile. A website’s position isn’t going to swing wildly from fourth to tenth to first in a matter of moments. That stability is what’s allowed us to build entire methodologies around SEO ranking factors over the past two decades.

The Bing and Yahoo Problem: Where to Actually Invest Your Resources

I keep thinking back to conversations I had with clients years ago. They’d ask, “Why don’t we rank higher on Bing or Yahoo?” And I’d have to explain that we’re talking about an insignificant market share compared to Google. You had a Google-first approach, and you’d say if you do things that are sound in Google—great content, being authoritative, and all of the other components that come with checking the boxes for technical SEO—there should be a good amount of overlap where it’s enough for you to not have to worry about specifically optimizing for Bing or Yahoo.

When Bing now holds between 4-8% global market share in 2026 (varying by device and region) and Yahoo sits at approximately 1.5-2.4%, you have peace of mind that you’re putting your efforts where they need to be. The same principle applies here with ChatGPT optimization.

Citation optimization and credibility signals aren’t unique to LLMs. They’re just naturally the way to go for you to be able to rank in traditional search too. What we really need to focus on is separating and compartmentalizing what specific efforts have to be intact for LLMs that really don’t happen in SEO. And honestly? That’s a pretty short list right now.

What Actually Matters for LLM Visibility

After all my testing and analysis, here’s what I’ve found moves the needle for LLM results. These are sensible things that overlap significantly with good SEO practices:

• Answer the question within the first 50 to 70 words.LLMs are scanning for immediate relevance and context. If you bury your answer three paragraphs down, you’re losing the opportunity.
• Demonstrate expertise throughout your content. This isn’t just about E-E-A-T principles from Google’s helpful content guidelines, it’s about showing that an expert wrote, edited, or reviewed the content. LLMs are trying to get context and validity from the sources they cite.
• Provide specific quotes and unique data. I’m doing that right now in this article. Exclusive data that’s specific to your page gives LLMs something concrete to reference. While these elements are good for time on site and humanizing content to make it convertible, they also help with LLM citation decisions.

If you look at how ChatGPT actually ranks things, it gives you its rationale. For personal injury examples, it’ll say a firm has been in business 40 years, they’re a mainstay, and they’re probably there for a reason. Or it’ll note they’ve collected an extraordinary number of settlements for clients. The thing we’re gravitating towards more than ever is really honing in on the directories that LLMs seem to think are credible. For legal, that could be Super Lawyers or Best Lawyers—anything that the LLM associates credibility with as a source.

The Flaws Nobody’s Talking About

Here’s something that should give you pause about investing heavily in LLM optimization right now. I’ve seen multiple times where ChatGPT says a law firm has five stars, but when you trace where it’s pulling from, it’s pulling from Yelp and they have one five-star review.

You can’t tell me that one five-star review from Yelp is more validation than 400 reviews averaging 4.7 on Google. It’s just sheer volume, and it’s not even about the source quality. This tells me the weighting mechanisms are still immature.

LLMs evolve and are influenced by people completely over time, just like Google’s algorithm. Algorithms are updated by people, and people make these changes periodically, which is why we have Google algorithm updates. Those are people tweaking the system. I’m sure it’s AI-dictated or AI-guided at this point, but that’s the nature of an algorithm. It’s periodic.

For LLMs, if they’re following the rationale of delivering a consistently relevant user experience, there will always be components they put on the forefront, like someone’s seniority in their organization or social validation. But right now, there are definitely flaws in this process.

The Attribution Challenge: Measuring Real ROI

Let’s reflect even briefly on the true viability of the LLM rankings push, apart from futureproofing your presence. Just because you get one case for one patient from ChatGPT (it’s exciting, don’t get me wrong, it’s a brand-new channel after all!), how does that measure against the effort it takes to set it up?

We don’t have clean attribution models for AI-sourced traffic yet. We’re still figuring out how to track it reliably, how to measure conversion rates, and how to calculate actual ROI. When a client comes through after interacting with ChatGPT, did they also Google you? Did they see your traditional ads? The customer journey is murkier than ever.

This is where the resource allocation question becomes critical. If you’re diverting budget from proven SEO tactics—things with established attribution and measurement—to chase ChatGPT visibility, you need to have realistic expectations about what you’re going to be able to prove.

According to data from StatCounter and multiple industry sources, Google maintains approximately 89-90% of the global search market as of 2025. That’s a massive audience with proven conversion paths and attribution models. ChatGPT usage is growing—with some studies showing 37% of consumers now starting searches with AI tools—but traditional search engines still dominate overall market share.

Alternative Perspectives: The Debate in Our Field

Not everyone in the SEO community agrees with my measured approach. There’s a growing contingent of practitioners who argue we need to be early adopters or risk falling behind. Some agencies are already selling “ChatGPT optimization packages” as standalone services. Hopefully, they’re not the same agencies that sell you on an “llm.txt” with no factual basis and documented support. Research from SE Ranking analyzing 300,000 domains found zero correlation between llm.txt files and AI citations, and Google’s John Mueller confirmed that AI services don’t even check for the file.

The argument goes like this: just as early investment in voice search optimization positioned some brands favorably when smart speakers took off, early LLM optimization could create a competitive moat. There’s merit to that thinking in that first-mover advantage is absolutely real in digital marketing.

Others point to the rapid adoption curve of AI tools and suggest that waiting for stable ranking factors means you’ll be playing catch-up. They’re not wrong that ChatGPT’s user base is growing exponentially faster than previous technologies.

Personally, I land somewhere in the middle. I think there’s value in understanding how LLMs work and making sure your content is technically compatible with how they parse and cite information. But I’m not convinced that creating a separate, resource-intensive strategy is justified yet, especially when the fundamentals of good SEO already cover most of what matters for LLM visibility.

What We Can and Can’t Prove Right Now

It’s up to SEOs to physically look at the signals off-site and on-site and find correlations between those that never show up in results versus those that often show up or seldom show up. We need to be able to map out these correlations scientifically.

If we see that there’s no strong correlation—no 0.8 or 0.9 correlation factors in this equation—then it’s going to be difficult to justify a separate unique strategy for LLMs. Instead, we should write it off to just best practices in general with SEO, with a nod towards E-E-A-T and exemplifying experience and expertise.

One thing people are looking into most is backlinks and brand mentions. I think intuitively there’s a good correlation there. Backlinks have been easy to monitor for well over a decade. Brand mentions are a little trickier, but they’re absolutely possible to track with the right tools.  We’re seeing good gains across all visibility with digital PR and valid, strong backlinking campaigns. But again, that’s correlative with the fundamental tenants of SEO as well.

You can’t say without a doubt that ‘40 years of experience’ is a ranking factor. If it were, you’d never be able to compete if you’re in business for 10 years or less. Maybe you can use language like “combined years of experience” and see if that works—kind of gaming the system. But isn’t that what SEO and all sects of SEO really are at the end of the day?

Plus, not every single result ranking was there because of tenure. It was different variations: higher ratings, years in business, and amounts settled. Those are the factors we saw, plus associations with reputable legal directories.

Conclusion: Strategy vs. Hype

The question isn’t whether ChatGPT optimization matters. It probably will, eventually. The question is whether it matters enough right now to justify significant resource reallocation away from channels with proven ROI.

Based on everything I’ve tested and analyzed, my answer is no, not yet. The technical infrastructure isn’t stable enough, the attribution models aren’t developed enough, and the overlap with good SEO practices is significant enough that a Google-first strategy still serves you well. People went all in on AI when ChatGPT was version 1.0 and couldn’t spell strawberry 3 years ago. Don’t be the person that gets pulled into getting all in again when there’s not enough sophistication and transparency to get anything meaningful accomplished. Make it a portion of what you do, on a small scale, until here are more proven tactics.

Keep an eye on LLM developments. Test thoughtfully. Document your results. But don’t let the hype convince you to abandon the fundamentals that have been working for years.

The companies that will win in the next phase of search aren’t those chasing every new trend. They’re those building authoritative, expertly-crafted content that serves users regardless of the interface they’re using to find it.

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