Why businesses are optimizing web for ChatGPT instead of potential clients

For a quarter of a century, Google has served as the de facto front door to the web. Over that time, businesses have tried to push their pages to the top of search results through search-engine optimization (SEO). Now, as chatbots increasingly cannibalize traditional search—with more people asking questions directly of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude—the focus is shifting toward influencing AI systems themselves.

A recent article published by The Atlantic breaks down the tactics used by companies to gain an edge in online visibility in this new environment. It highlights how most internet users have likely already been shaped by SEO without realizing it.

One example it gives is recipe websites, where users often scroll past long personal anecdotes before reaching instructions. According to the magazine, this reflects SEO practices that became common years ago, when bloggers learned that Google’s rankings tended to favour longer, more distinctive articles.

Last month, Google announced what it described as the biggest change to search in 25 years: the search box now expands as users type and can sometimes transform into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is now adapting to what is sometimes called “GEO,” or generative-engine optimization—efforts to influence what AI systems recommend rather than what search engines rank.

This shift matters because AI tools increasingly provide answers directly instead of sending users to websites. When a Google search triggers an AI-generated response, external sites receive about half the traffic they would from a traditional search result, according to Tom Critchlow, a former executive vice president at the online ad network Raptive.

For publishers, the impact is already visible. Links from ChatGPT account for less than 0.5 percent of traffic across Raptive’s network of 6,500 independent publishers. Sites that depend on search traffic, such as blogs and news outlets, are particularly affected.

Yet while AI users may click fewer links, they are still making purchasing decisions. Platforms like Shopify benefit if AI systems recommend their services, even if users never browse comparison sites directly.

This has created a new competitive frontier, especially in business-to-business markets, where AI-driven recommendations can strongly influence purchasing decisions.

"That might be because some of AI’s most enthusiastic adopters are executives and tech entrepreneurs—the sort of people who make big-budget buying decisions on companies’ behalf," the article notes.

“Everyone in our industry right now is poking it and pushing it and saying, ‘If I do this over here, what happens over there?’” said Andrew Shotland, who runs the SEO consulting firm Local SEO Guide. He added that some tactics are becoming clearer, including self-promotional listicles hosted on sites not previously known for product reviews.

Winning over AI bots rather than humans

Shopify is one such example. According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including “10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026.” In these posts, competitors change position, but Shopify consistently ranks itself number one.

At first glance, such rankings may not seem persuasive to humans. But that is not necessarily the target audience. Increasingly, the audience is AI systems.

When users ask ChatGPT for the “best way to set up an online storefront,” the model often recommends Shopify first. It is not always clear how the system arrives at that answer, but cited sources often include Shopify’s own ranking pages.

As more companies adopt this approach, AI systems can struggle to distinguish between independent reviews and self-published promotional content, allowing brand-driven rankings to shape recommendations.

Buying your success

The popular forum Reddit has become another key battleground for attempts to influence AI outputs. The platform often appears in search results for highly specific queries and is among the most frequently cited domains by AI systems, second only to Wikipedia in some studies.

SEO experts told the outlet that people are now advertising services that create large networks of accounts designed to generate promotional posts across Reddit at scale.

While Reddit’s upvote and downvote system is meant to surface useful content and bury spam, AI systems process information differently. Instead of relying on popularity signals, they often extract text that appears semantically relevant. As a result, they can surface Reddit posts with very low engagement. Semrush found that most Reddit posts cited by chatbots have fewer than 20 upvotes, making it easier for manipulation to slip through.

While Google is already responding to overt self-promotion in search results, the article argues that these developments reflect a broader shift in how the internet functions. Increasingly, content is being produced not just for human readers, but for machines that interpret and recombine it.

As the article puts it, this reflects “a symptom of an internet that was built to connect humans but now more often connects machines. Much of the text online is already AI-written, and now people are generating content that is primarily created for bots to read.”

By Nazrin Sadigova