Shoppers in Australia now ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode which protein or fat burner to buy. Each answer cites a few sites as its sources. At the start, ChatGPT cited Elite Supps 25 times.
The site is large. Earlier technical work hadn't been set up right. The robots.txt file had errors. Product review markup had errors. Product categories in GA4 were set up wrong.
ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode all read the same pages Google reads. If those pages are hard to crawl or hard to understand, they don't get cited.
The opportunity was clear:
Fix what stops AI tools and Google reading the site, then give them pages worth citing.
We audited the site and wrote an SEO and AI implementation brief. It covered ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. We walked their team through it on a call.
Their developer worked through it. The robots.txt file was fixed and we checked it. The review markup was changed to AggregateRating, so it no longer needed an author field. GA4 tracking and the GA4 product categories were fixed.
We rewrote the whey protein and fat burner collection pages. The fat burner page ranked below position 5 for a number of keywords. Their team put both pages live and asked Google to re-index them.
We also wrote product copy for Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard Whey. We picked it because Google showed several retailers for it, so there was room to win. We set out a structure for their new products page too.
We reviewed the backlink profile. We found 35 spam URLs pointing at Shopify image URLs. That's a common spam pattern on Shopify. Those were disavowed first.
We checked 79 domains from earlier link building. They weren't toxic, so we left them. We sent a separate list of toxic domains. Their team disavowed them in Search Console.
AI search starts with technical SEO. If a page can't be crawled or read, ChatGPT, AI Overviews and AI Mode can't cite it.
Track AI citations the same way you track rankings. Pick a start date and measure from there.
Pick pages where there's room to win. A product where the brand holds the top results is a harder win than one where Google shows several retailers.
Final word
Elite Supps came to us for a once-off audit and AI search work. In 4 months, ChatGPT was citing their site 32% more often, across more product types.
Here's how we run AI search as its own channel.
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