5 SEO Tricks That Don't Work for AI Search (We Tested Them)

We tested five things that SEO consultants commonly recommend for "AI optimisation" against our dataset of 1,000 businesses. None of them worked.

Schema markup. Less than 5% correlation with ChatGPT visibility across all categories. We checked every business in our dataset for structured data. The businesses ChatGPT recommends and the businesses it ignores have nearly identical schema adoption rates. For accountants, ChatGPT's picks actually had less schema than the businesses it skipped.

robots.txt. Negative correlation. -7%. Businesses that specifically configured their robots.txt to allow AI crawlers were slightly less likely to appear in ChatGPT results. This makes sense once you understand how ChatGPT works -- it finds businesses through Bing web search, not by crawling sites directly. Your robots.txt is irrelevant to that process.

Blog content. Also negative. Businesses ChatGPT ignores had more blog content (47%) than businesses it recommends (39%). Blogging doesn't hurt your Google rankings, but it's not what makes ChatGPT pick you.

Content freshness. Negative correlation. We checked Last-Modified headers and content dates. Fresher content didn't help. ChatGPT doesn't care when you last updated your homepage.

FAQ pages. Inconsistent across categories, sometimes negative. The idea that FAQ content feeds AI answers sounds logical. Our data says otherwise.

So what does work?

Having a website. This is the single biggest factor and it's binary. 95.4% of businesses ChatGPT recommends have a website. Zero percent of businesses without a website appeared. Not low. Zero. This is the gate. If you don't have a website, nothing else matters. And 47% of local service businesses in our dataset don't have one.

Social profiles linked on your site. Businesses ChatGPT recommends average 2.3 social platforms linked on their website. Businesses it ignores average 1.4. Facebook presence showed the largest gap at +42 percentage points.

Being on multiple review platforms. Not just Google. Yelp showed +14 percentage points for plumbers specifically. Checkatrade, Trustpilot, Bark -- each platform you're listed on is another page that Bing can find when ChatGPT goes looking.

That's the honest list. The things that predict ChatGPT visibility are boring. Have a website. Put your social links on it. Get listed on a few directories beyond Google. The fancy technical stuff -- the schema tweaks, the robots.txt configurations, the AI-specific content strategies -- showed no meaningful signal in our data.