SEO used to mean ranking on Google. What does it mean now that buyers ask ChatGPT instead?
The unit of visibility moved from a ranking to a citation, and the levers moved off your website. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found branded web mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.664 while backlinks manage 0.218, so being talked about elsewhere now beats link building. Practically that means landing pages that answer one question cleanly, YouTube videos, honest participation in Reddit and communities, and help-center content, which is the most underrated asset most companies already own. The upside for a small company is real: unlike Google SEO, where you wait eighteen months behind incumbents, AI answers can pick you up quickly. Do not generate the content with AI, though, because that is precisely what gets skipped.
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Graphite's Ethan Smith has run this for real clients, so the advice is specific: landing pages, YouTube and genuine Reddit participation move the needle, help-center content is the underused asset, and AI-written pages underperform. Also the source of the claim that ChatGPT traffic converts around six times better than Google.
The evidence behind the strategy shift, at a sample size nobody else has published: branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 against backlinks at 0.218, and the top quartile by mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions versus 14 for the next quartile.
The good news for a small company, quantified: brand size correlates strongly with Google AI Overviews (0.65) but weakly with Perplexity (0.30) and barely at all with ChatGPT (0.15). That gap is the opening a young Indian brand can actually walk through.
Two former Freshworks leaders discovered their content was fine and their distribution was missing, and built Highperformr off that lesson. A good corrective if you are about to publish more instead of distributing what you already wrote.
