The Digital Contrarian

TDC 071: How to Get Your Website to Show Up in ChatGPT…

• Ryan Levesque • Episode 71

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TDC 071: How to Get Your Website to Show Up in ChatGPT…

The 2025 version of ranking #1 on Google—master these AI concepts before your competition does.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Digital Contrarian, host Ryan Levesque dives into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and the advanced AI concepts determining which brands get recommended by ChatGPT.

You'll learn how to optimize for vector embeddings instead of keywords, discover entity graph gap analysis techniques, and master information gain rate principles that make AI systems choose your content over competitors'.

Question of the Day 🗣️

Have you tested whether ChatGPT recommends your brand when asked questions in your niche? Try it and share what you discover in the comments!

Key Take-aways

  • ChatGPT usage doubled to 16 min/day while Google search time declined to 18.2 min/day
  • Optimize content for concepts and semantic meaning, not just keywords
  • AI models often stop after reviewing just 100 lines of content
  • Vector embeddings measure semantic similarity using cosine angles between text
  • Entity graphs reveal how AI connects your brand to relevant concepts and competitors

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 – Cold open & hook
01:14 – The data proving ChatGPT is eating Google's lunch
02:09 – Why AEO is the new SEO
03:01 – Key Concept #1: Vector Embeddings explained
04:22 – The paradigm shift: Keywords → Concepts
04:53 – Key Concept #2: Entity Graphs
06:33 – How to do an Entity Graph Gap Analysis
07:00 – Key Concept #3: Information Gain Rate & Time to Answer
08:46 – How to optimize IGR and TTA for your content
09:30 – Final thoughts: The first mover advantage
10:22 – Building your strategic content ecosystem

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Credits

Host: Ryan Levesque
© 2025 RL & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.

How to get your website to show up in ChatGPT, three relatively advanced AI concepts you need to know. I'm just getting back to Vermont after spending most of the week in Hilton Head, South Carolina. There, I delivered a talk at the Baby Bathwater Institute's flagship annual event.

Now, the talk was one of about 20 sessions at the event, and it was voted best content award by the 150 plus attendees at the event, which was pretty cool. By the way, I have the brass bathtub and the certificate to prove it. But the best content that I personally attended, at least as an attendee, was actually a talk led by Dan Hinkley, co-founder of Go Fish Digital.

Now, Dan's session was a deep dive into what it really takes to get your brand to show up in AI-generated answers across platforms like Google AI mode, AI overviews, and most notably, ChatGPT. Now, I believe that in the next half decade, that this is going to be one of, if not, the most important marketing channel that we all need to understand. I also believe that the time to be acting is now for the following reasons.

First, average time spent in the ChatGPT app has doubled from 7.6 minutes per day in 2023 to 16 minutes per day in 2025, while at the same time, daily time spent inside Google search apps has decreased from 19.6 minutes to 18.2 minutes per day. In other words, people are spending more and more time searching for answers in ChatGPT and less and less time on Google. Second, Google AI overviews, those AI-generated snippets that you see when you do Google search nowadays, now appear on roughly 55%, more than half, of all Google searches.

And already over 2 billion people interact with these AI results every single month. In other words, we've reached a point where the new frontier of so-called AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is already more important, arguably, than traditional SEO. Now, the question is, of course, what do you need to do to show up in these AI answers? For instance, when someone searches Google AI mode or ChatGPT on topics relevant to your product, your service, your business, or your brand.

Well, Dan's talk led me to do a deep dive into some of the most important, relatively advanced AI concepts that I think are critical for us to become familiar with, in order to begin to understand how to show up both in ChatGPT and all large language models more generally. Now, in full disclosure, this is a pretty deep topic, and today's issue just begins to scratch the surface. So consider this an initial primer and an invitation to do a deeper dive into the topic yourself.

As always, be curious, ask questions, and seek truth. So let's begin by exploring key concept number one, vector embeddings. Now, when it comes to showing up in ChatGPT, the first AI concept that's really important to understand is vector embeddings, as illustrated in this diagram right here.

Now, ChatGPT does a decent job of explaining what vector embeddings are exactly in the following Explain It Like I'm 15 explanation, which begins as follows. Vector embeddings are numerical representations of text that place words, sentences, and ideas in a multidimensional space where semantic similarity is measured using trigonometry, bear with me now, a little bit of math. Specifically, the cosine of the angle between two vectors.

When two pieces of text point in nearly the same direction, a small angle between them, their cosine similarity is close to one, meaning that they express similar ideas. This is just a mathematical representation of this concept. AI systems like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews use this math to find which content most closely aligns with a user's question.

For marketers, optimizing for AI visibility now means creating content that semantically matches user intent. So your brand's vector sits at the smallest possible angle to the queries your audience is asking. In other words, as marketers, if we wanna show up in ChatGPT, we need to shift our mental paradigm from optimizing our websites for keywords to instead optimizing our content for concepts.

We need to craft content that aligns semantically with the meaning and intent behind what people ask, so our brand's ideas sit closest in the AI's vector space of understanding. Which brings us to key concept number two, entity graphs. If we wanna show up in ChatGPT, the next AI concept that's really important to understand is what is known as entity graphs, like the one here from Google's Natural Language API.

Now once again, to explain entity graphs in more detail, we have ChatGPT to help us out. Begins by saying, an entity graph is a web of connected concepts, people, brands, places, and ideas showing how they relate to one another in the eyes of AI. Systems like Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT use these graphs to understand who or what is being discussed, and how these entities connect to one another.

To make your brand show up in AI Answers, you need to analyze which entities appear in the AI's responses for your target queries, and compare them to the entities represented on your own website. If the AI highlights concepts or brands that your content doesn't clearly define or connect to, that's your cue to create or strengthen those relationships, adding structured data, clear descriptions, and authoritative context so that your brand becomes a recognized and well-linked node in the AI's knowledge graph. So for example, let's say that you sell specialty toothpaste.

If you want your brand to show up when someone asks ChatGPT a question like, what is the best toothpaste for children with sensitive teeth due to a palatal expander and which doesn't contain fluoride? It's a very specific question, right? Well, you need to make sure that your entity graph on your content closely matches the entity graph of the answer that comes back from ChatGPT, so that your brand shows up as a recommended option. How do you do this? Well, for starters, you can do what's known as an entity graph gap analysis by copy pasting what comes back from ChatGPT, plug that into Google's natural language API using a link that we'll make sure to include with this episode, and then compare the results with what shows up when you plug in the copy from your content that you've written on your website and across, say, social media, as well as what shows up in ChatGPT. Now, this in turn brings us to key concept number three, which is information gain rate and time to answer.

Like humans, AI large language models are inherently lazy. For instance, open source browsing tests show that AI models often stop after reviewing just 100 lines of content. Meaning if your key information sits lower than that in a given piece of content, it's likely that you will not show up in AI responses.

If you want to show up in ChatGPT, this is where the concept of information gain rate, also known as IGR, and time to answer, also known as TTA, are so important. Like this ChatGPT analysis of two different versions of my personal professional bio. Before we go any further, you might be asking, what is information gain rate, IGR, and what is time to answer, TTA, exactly? Well, once again, from ChatGPT, information gain rate measures how quickly and efficiently your content delivers new, valuable information to the reader.

In the context of AI and SEO, pages with a high information gain rate get rewarded because they reduce what's known as semantic redundancy. Instead, they teach or clarify something fast without filler. When AI systems can scan web pages to answer a question quickly, they prioritize sources that add unique insight per sentence, rather than just rephrasing what's already widely known.

Time to answer is how long it takes, in seconds or in sentences, for a reader or AI model to find the core answer to a question on your page. Once again, the faster you deliver that clarity, the more likely your content will be selected and cited by AI assistants and Google's AI overviews. So to optimize for this, you want to front load your pages with direct, well-structured answers near the top.

Also, using something like a table of contents on the page can be really helpful, and then expand with supporting details, examples, and context below. Again, if you wanna show up in ChatGPT, IGR and TTA are incredibly important considerations in each and every piece of content you create. Now, the good news here is that you can use tools like ChatGPT and or Clot or your favorite large language model tool of choice to help you analyze the IGR and TTA of any given piece of content that you create, along with asking suggestions on how to improve, just like I've done in the example I shared a moment ago.

Which brings us to a few final thoughts. Now, these three key concepts, number one, vector embeddings, number two, entity graphs, and number three, IGR slash TTA, together form an important foundation toward understanding how to get your content, your website, your brand, your product, your service to show up not only in ChatGPT, but in each of the large language models, as well as Google's AI overviews. I believe that this is one of the biggest marketing opportunities we have in front of us, and there is definitely a first mover advantage.

In fact, this is the 2025 version of having a Google first position search engine result page. Super high leverage with a short window of opportunity to be the first before your competition gets there before you. Want to know the most effective way to get there? Well, in my experience, it's been building a strategic content ecosystem so that you show up everywhere.

YouTube, LinkedIn, Substack, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, this is one of the reasons why I'm going all in on this strategy. In fact, you can see in this incognito browser on the screen how ChatGPT is not only pulling content from my website, but also pulling from Apple Podcasts and Medium.com, all sending a cohesive, consistent message.

So if you're interested in potentially working together with me and my agency team, this is what we do all day, every day, to build out your own strategic content ecosystem. You can join the wait list that we've created to be notified as soon as we open up more spots to work together, which will be really soon. We'll be sure to put a link to get on that wait list in the description of this episode.

Okay, with that being said, I'm going to leave you with that for now. I know this was a dense episode. We covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

I want to wish you a great rest of your weekend. Remember to hug the ones that you love, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Take care, and talk soon.