An Ahrefs study of 5.5 million ChatGPT answers found it leans on product reviews, buying guides and best of lists far more than news, even from publishers OpenAI has deals with.
Dominic Coutts
If you want AI tools to recommend you, press coverage is the wrong lever. Comparison and review content is the right one.
What happened
Ahrefs looked at which of OpenAI's publishing partners ChatGPT actually cites, across 5.5 million US answers. Vogue, Car and Driver and Tom's Guide each appeared in 36,000 to 42,000 answers. The Atlantic appeared in 724 and Politico in 10.
A separate study from Otterly found buying guides, best of lists and reviews made up 59% of the publisher pages ChatGPT cited.
What it means for you
A licensing deal doesn't get a publisher cited on its own, and neither does being in the news. ChatGPT reaches for content that helps someone choose. That's useful to know, because it's the kind of content you can make yourself.
What to do
- Write honest comparison pages on your own site: you against the alternatives, and which suits whom.
- Find the review and best of articles already appearing in AI answers for your category, and work on getting into them.
- Treat this as a direction rather than a rule for now. The data is US only and UK patterns haven't been tested.
Ahrefs
Worth doing something about this week.
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