Breaking into GTM

SEO used to mean ranking on Google. What does it mean now that buyers ask ChatGPT instead?

The short answer

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.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it 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 ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product

On Lenny's Newsletter by Ethan Smith with Lenny Rachitsky 80 min listen

Open lennysnewsletter.com →

The same ground, at another level

How inbound, content and demand gen reads from a different seat.

How do I decide what to write about so it brings in buyers and not just traffic? Sort every topic idea by how close it sits to a purchase. Comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages and "how do I do X with Y" pages ... Doing the work 3 resources → How much of my pipeline should come from inbound versus outbound, and when do I add the second channel? Early on almost every B2B company grows through one dominant channel, so the wrong move is to run four at half strength. Name your primary channel,... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → What do the companies with genuinely great inbound do differently? They pick one content strategy and commit to it for years instead of sampling five. Lenny's breakdown of content-driven growth is a useful map: edi... How the best do it 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Search Engine Optimization

People also ask

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