How I Started Getting Traffic From ChatGPT and Perplexity
Gary WhittakerPart 1 · The first signal
I did not begin with an “AI SEO strategy.” I began by publishing useful answers about problems I was already solving. Then I noticed that AI assistants were sending people to those pages.
AI Search Visibility for Creators · 6-Part Series
This series began with a real 2025 discovery experiment and has been updated for 2026. The lesson is not a secret ranking formula. It is how to build useful, crawlable, connected content over time and measure what happens.
The original surprise still matters
Back in 2025, I saw identifiable referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity reaching JackRighteous.com. That was enough to prove something important to me: AI assistants were no longer only places where people asked questions. They were becoming discovery surfaces that could send people to independent websites.
I originally wrote this as a “look what happened” story with exact traffic and order counts. I am keeping the observation, but I no longer treat a small batch of attribution data as a ranking formula or a universal conversion benchmark.
October 2026 update · discovery is becoming representation
The question is no longer only “Can AI send me traffic?”
By late September 2026, independent search datasets were showing Google AI Overviews on a large share of branded searches. Ahrefs reported AI Overviews on 82.91% of the US desktop branded queries in its dataset on September 29, with a September monthly average of 73.3%.
That changes the creator problem. Someone can search your name, project or product and encounter an AI-generated explanation before they click your site. So the work is no longer only about earning a referral. It is also about making sure your owned pages clearly explain who you are, what the current offer is, what version or date applies, and where the authoritative source lives.
Important: this does not prove that every creator or every market sees the same rate, and Google does not expose an AI Overview flag per query inside Search Console. Treat the research as a reason to test your own branded search experience, not as a universal benchmark.
Research: Ahrefs — AI Overviews on branded searches · DemandSphere — September branded-query shift
What I was doing before I knew to call it AI visibility
Solving real questions
I wrote about problems I had actually encountered instead of inventing pages around keywords alone.
Naming things clearly
Pages, guides and products had specific names instead of vague “resources” language.
Publishing consistently
The site slowly accumulated useful related pages rather than depending on one viral article.
Building an owned destination
The useful answer lived on a site where the reader could continue into another guide, a free resource, a product or support.
What I would tell a creator now
Do not begin by asking how to “rank in ChatGPT.” Start with a question your audience genuinely has. Publish the strongest answer you can support. Make sure the page is crawlable. Link it to the next relevant resource. Then measure whether search engines or AI assistants actually send useful visitors.
OpenAI currently says public websites can appear in ChatGPT search and that allowing OAI-SearchBot helps content become eligible to be surfaced; placement is not guaranteed. Google’s 2026 guidance similarly says the fundamentals of useful SEO still apply to generative search experiences.
Primary references: OpenAI publisher FAQ · Google AI search optimization guidance
Next: understand the discovery layer
Part 2 separates useful AI-search practices from the myths that grew around “GEO,” “AEO” and “AI SEO.”
Continue to Part 2 — AI SEO & GEO for Creators →
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