How To Show Up in ChatGPT: The 5-Step Roadmap
Charlie Marchant, CEO of Exposure Ninja, has heard the same opening line in nearly every sales conversation over the past few weeks: “My boss is asking why we don’t show up in ChatGPT, what do I do?”
Senior leadership teams are testing ChatGPT on their own phones and laptops, screenshotting the results, and asking why competitors are getting recommended instead of them.
The problem is that most marketing teams are already stretched across paid, organic, email, and offline channels. Rarely does anyone have “get the business showing up in ChatGPT answers” written into their job description.
Charlie breaks down how to show up in ChatGPT into five clear steps: aligning the business, benchmarking, roadmapping, implementing, and training the team to sustain it.
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Step 1: Align The Business On Positioning
Before anyone touches a piece of content, the whole business needs to agree on the story it’s telling.
“The first step is aligning the business, getting everyone together in a room, and that’s the senior leadership team, it’s everyone in the marketing department. So if you have a separate social, PR, technical, development and SEO team, all of those people also need to be in the room.”
That room needs one outcome: a brand positioning statement.
“The conversation you need to have is how do we want the business to be known? What’s our positioning statement? What’s the one to two sentences that describes exactly what our business does and who it does it for? Who is our target ICP?”
As Charlie Marchant puts it, this positioning “shouldn’t be changing” from year to year, unless the business is going through a major pivot.
For marketers, this is the step that’s easiest to skip and the most expensive to skip. If the website homepage, social bios, email marketing, PR pitches, and review responses are all describing the business slightly differently, AI Search platforms have no consistent signal to learn from. Every team needs to be working from the same one to two sentences, applied everywhere the business shows up publicly.
Step 2: Benchmark Where You Actually Stand
Once positioning is locked, the temptation is to grab a phone and start typing prompts into ChatGPT to see who shows up. Charlie Marchant argues: “This is a really unreliable way to measure where you’re actually showing up in LLMs.”
Instead, the starting point should be commercial value. “So what you actually want to start with is the categories that you want to show up in and the search journeys that you most care about. So what kinds of prompts are important to the business and what’s their commercial value?”
As Charlie Marchant puts it, “you can’t do everything,” so prioritising which categories matter most has to come before any tracking begins.
This is where marketers who already have SEO keyword research have a head start. That research doesn’t just serve getting to the top of Google; it maps directly onto the prompts customers are likely typing into AI platforms.
If you have keyword research from your SEO, this is the perfect place to use it. It gives you a really good way to benchmark the kinds of commercial terms that you want to show up for. If you don't have keyword research, now is the time to get it.
Charlie Marchant
CEO
Step 3: Build A One-Year Roadmap
With positioning agreed and priorities benchmarked, Charlie Marchant says it’s time to commit to a timeline, and a short one won’t cut it.
“Time to build your one-year roadmap. And one year is the minimum. If you can build a two-year or a three-year roadmap, that’s even better,” says Charlie Marchant.
The order matters as much as the timeline itself. Chase the highest value categories first, not every service line and location at once.
As Charlie Marchant puts it, “Use this roadmap to prioritise the highest value categories first, where the commercial impact is going to be greatest, before you think about expanding out to sub-services or other locations that you serve.”
For marketing managers reporting into a senior leadership team, this structure is also useful for managing expectations upward. A phased, prioritised roadmap is a far easier conversation to have with a board than a vague promise to improve AI visibility.
Step 4: Implement Across Technical, Content, And PR
This is where the roadmap turns into actual work, and Charlie Marchant splits the implementation into three connected strands:
- Technical SEO updates
- Content marketing
- Digital PR
“The first one is technical updates, so actual updates to the website. This is improving your schema, your page titles, your meta descriptions, and how your content is structured on the site, making sure that it’s technically sound,” says Charlie Marchant.
Alongside that sits content and PR, and Charlie Marchant is clear that these two should never be planned separately.
“I would say you want a minimum of a 6 to 12-month content and PR plan that goes across your on-site website content, your social content, and your review platforms. If you’re also on Reddit or other forums, it goes across those, and it goes across PR, the third-party publications you’re trying to get.”
For marketers, this means content and PR can no longer sit in separate spreadsheets with separate owners. The publications an AI platform is pulling from, whether that’s a trade title or a national newspaper, need to be part of the same plan as the on-site content and reviews.
Step 5: Train The Team Properly
The final step is the one Charlie Marchant sees skipped most often, and it’s arguably the most damaging to leave out.
“Invest in training for the team. It is assumed suddenly that everyone in marketing would know exactly how to get a business into ChatGPT or that it could be learned in 24 hours. This is not the case, as we in marketing know.”
If AI Search visibility is genuinely a board-level priority, the training budget needs to reflect that, across every discipline involved.
“If you are in the senior leadership team and this is a serious business priority, then investing in training for your people to make sure this can be implemented effectively is essential. And that should be across all of the categories that we’ve just spoken about. So SEO, content, PRs, social people within the team, all being trained.”
Without that investment, the work they execute risks having no real impact on the bottom line at all.
If this is way too much of an investment or there's not enough resource in the business for this training, this is when you might decide to hire an agency of specialists who have done this before. And if you're doing that, make sure that you're looking for case studies. Make sure that those case studies have clear results of visibility conversions, or improvements in leads coming from LLMs, as well as good results for SEO, as well as good results for their Google organic performance too.
Charlie Marchant
CEO
If your business needs help building a one-year roadmap, a content and PR plan, or implementing the technical updates required to start showing up in ChatGPT answers, our team can help. Book a Consultation call with our team to talk through your AI Search strategy.
