THE WORLD OF GETTING SALES LEADS ON CHATGPT
Remember the “good ole days” of optimizing websites to rank on Google with its 93% share of search traffic, with tactics like keyword stuffing…and it actually worked! Well, those days are over. ChatGPT has changed all of that since its founding by OpenAI in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman as a non-profit research organization with the goal of developing artificial general intelligence. Here are some very important recent discoveries to add to your website sales lead strategy:
- CHATGPT IS THE RUNAWAY LEADER: There are several other LLMs that offer great value for your AI needs, but ChatGPT has over 800,000,000 subscribers and 75% of the market, so we are focusing on it.
- NOVEMBER 2022 WAS THE START: When Altman decided to go live with ChatGPT, the world changed. One of our most esteemed consultants said, “This changes civilization.” At the time, it seemed like a wild overstatement, but as AI has unfolded, maybe not.
- HOW HAS SEARCH CHANGED: Users are now asking questions…as detailed as they like…to accomplish their search; no longer just typing in a topic like “restaurants near me” but rather “what are the top 5 Chinese restaurants near me that serve alcohol at lunch”?
- “QUERY FAN-OUT”: To serve up the answer to the user’s question, Google has stated that they use a query fan-out algorithm to instantly assess as many as 50 websites to find the answer and then list it in their AI Overview. Presumably, ChatGPT does something similar.
- CONTENT THAT CHATGPT REFERENCES: In a new piece of research from Louise Linehan of Ahrefs, in her article published on October 28, 2025, she found Wikipedia to be the most visited website. Find a complete copy of the results here.
- BOTTOM LINE: As you will see from the chart, 67% of ChatGPT’s Top 1,000 citations are off-limits to marketers.
- SURPRISES: Reviews trump Blogs. “About Us” pages score the lowest.
As we have written repeatedly, your site must now be found in many, many different places on the Internet to be referenced in a search result on ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity, Grok or Claude. Contact your webmaster, consultant, or us for more insight.
Onward & Upward!
PREPARE FOR THE LLMs: LLM BOOSTER PACKAGE
CHECK OUT OUR MOST RECENT BLOG POSTS:
