How to Rank in ChatGPT in 100 Days (Without Spending $10K/Month on SEO)

I keep talking to founders who spend five figures a month on SEO and still don’t show up when someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best tool for X?”

Their dashboards look great. Rankings are climbing. Traffic is growing. But when buyers skip Google entirely and go straight to AI, those founders are invisible.

That’s the disconnect nobody wants to talk about.

The Shift Already Happened

Over 40% of AI users now say AI search is their preferred source of insight, even over Google. ChatGPT alone has hundreds of millions of active users and billions of monthly visits.

This isn’t a future trend. The buying process already changed:

Old flow: Search Google -> Click results -> Compare -> Decide

New flow: Ask AI -> Get shortlist -> Maybe search

If you’re not on that shortlist, you’re losing deals before you even knew they existed.

Why Your Current SEO Strategy Won’t Work

Here’s the thing most SEO agencies won’t tell you: LLMs don’t browse the whole internet when generating answers. They pull from a small set of trusted sources, extract patterns, and either mention brands directly or rephrase their advice.

If you’re not part of that source set, you don’t exist.

Rankings, backlinks, traffic – all still important. But none of that tells AI when to recommend you. What actually validates your solution to an AI model is proof that:

• You solve a specific problem
• For a specific type of buyer
• Consistently, across multiple sources

Generic “we do everything for everyone” pages get ignored entirely.

The 100-Day Framework

Days 1-30: Solution Validation

We saw this play out with a B2B EdTech client. They had solid SEO fundamentals – ranked for high-intent keywords, drove thousands of organic clicks. But when educators asked AI “what learning management system should we use?” they never showed up.

After rebuilding around solution validation, they appeared in 30+ AI-generated recommendations within a month. Organic traffic went from roughly 6,000 to over 60,000 monthly visits.

Days 31-70: Programmatic Coverage

Most SEO strategies focus on pillar pages and topical clusters. That approach still works for Google, but LLMs favor brands that appear repeatedly and consistently across many related prompts.

Here’s the key insight: if AI sees your brand associated with the same problem 50 different ways, it starts treating that association as fact.

This is how one B2B SaaS client broke into queries dominated by incumbents with 10x more backlinks. They went from fewer than 10 daily non-branded clicks to 250+ (7,500 clicks per month). With traditional SEO alone, that would have taken years.

To do this right, you need solid keyword research to identify every comparison buyers consider, every variation of their questions, and every decision stage they pass through.

Days 71-100: Entity Velocity

Traditional SEO builds authority slowly. But LLMs allow you to build it faster because they prioritize recency.

If your brand is consistently referenced across communities, comparison sites, industry content, and review platforms, AI treats it as relevant right now.

The focus here isn’t just backlinks. It’s strategic mentions:

• Appearing in discussions AI already trusts (Reddit, Stack Overflow, niche communities)
• Getting referenced in comparison articles on third-party sites
• Reinforcing the same positioning everywhere

AI reads active conversations. If you’re not in them, you never gain enough momentum to be included in answers.

What Happens If You Wait

Your rankings will hold. Traffic may even grow. According to the dashboard, everything looks fine.

But AI will keep recommending your competitors. And once those recommendations solidify, displacing them gets exponentially more expensive.

The good news: you don’t need to start from scratch. If you already have solid content, domain authority, and SEO fundamentals, you’re 80% there. The remaining 20% is restructuring that foundation so AI can actually use it.

Getting Started

The biggest mistake is treating this as a separate initiative from SEO. It’s not. It’s an evolution of what you’re already doing.

Start by auditing how your brand shows up (or doesn’t) in AI answers. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the questions your buyers would ask. If you’re not in the answers, now you know where you stand.

Then start building the pages that change that. Tools like Delulu9 can help you research the exact keywords and questions your buyers are using, so you can build coverage methodically instead of guessing.