ChatGPT for SEO: what it does well, what it invents

All of these have one thing in common: you supply the material and it does the shaping. None of them asks the model to know something about the world that you did not give it.

• A brief from a results page you paste in: the titles that rank, the questions under them, what every page covers and what none of them covers.
• An outline for a page, once you have told it the query and the reader.
• A first draft of a section whose facts you supply in the prompt.
• Rewriting: shorter, plainer, second person, no marketing register.
• Twenty title variants for one page, from which you keep one.
• The questions a buyer asks about a product you describe, which become the FAQ and the headings.
• Checking a finished page against a checklist you wrote.
• A translation you then have reviewed by someone who speaks the language.

The assistants with search can also fetch a page you name and summarise it, which is useful for reading a rival's guide quickly. Treat the summary as a summary, not as a quote.

A model answers from patterns in language. Asked for a figure it was never given, it produces a figure shaped like the right answer. This is not a bug you can prompt away, and it is worst exactly where it matters.

The single highest-value thing you can paste into a chat is the results page for the query you want. It contains the brief: what Google has decided the searcher wants, and what the pages that satisfied it look like.

1. 1

   Search the query in a clean browser

   Use a private window in the country you sell to. Your own history and location change the page otherwise.

2. 2

   Copy the first ten titles and their sites

   Also copy the People also ask questions and, if one opens, the pages the AI overview cites.

3. 3

   Paste the lot with one instruction

   Ask for the intent behind the query, the sections every ranking page covers, and the ones only one page covers.

4. 4

   Ask what is missing

   The gap in the ten results is the reason your page has a chance. It is usually a worked example, a table of real numbers, or a straight answer nobody gives.

That is a brief, built from evidence, in five minutes. Everything the model said about the results is checkable against the page you pasted.

A prompt is a brief: the audience, the facts, the constraints, and an example of the shape you want. These four cover most of the work.

Here are the top ten results for the query “how to import a CSV”:
[paste titles and domains]
And the People also ask questions:
[paste questions]

Tell me: 1) what the searcher wants, in one sentence; 2) the sections that
appear on most of these pages; 3) the questions none of them answers.
Do not suggest anything that is not visible in what I pasted.

What it is for: turning a results page into an outline. What it cannot do: tell you the volume of the query, or whether you can rank for it.

Draft the section “Where the import can fail” for a guide aimed at a solo
founder who writes their own code. Use only these facts:
- the file must be UTF-8; Excel exports Latin-1 by default
- rows over 50,000 are processed in the background
- a missing email column is the only fatal error
Second person, British spelling, no em-dashes, no exclamation marks,
sentences under twenty-five words. About 150 words.

What it is for: a first draft whose facts are yours. What it cannot do: add the fifth fact you forgot, which is why you check the draft against your own list.

Rewrite this paragraph in plain second person. Cut every adjective that
carries no information. No marketing register. Keep every figure exactly
as written. Return three versions, shortest first.

[paste paragraph]

What it is for: killing the register of a draft that reads like a brochure. What it cannot do: decide which version is true, since it will happily keep a wrong number exactly as written.

Give me twenty title options for a page that answers “how to import a CSV”.
Rules: under sixty characters, the words people search near the front, a
promise not a tease, no year, no colon-and-clickbait pattern, sentence case.

What it is for: options you would not have thought of. What it cannot do: know which one matches the page, so read the page again before you choose.

The pattern that works is the same whoever writes the draft. It has four parts and the model touches only one of them.

1. A brief that carries the facts and where each came from. Anything not in the brief may not appear in the page.
2. A draft, by you or by the model, from that brief.
3. A human pass: every figure checked against the source, the first-hand detail added, the register cut.
4. A read-back that refuses invented numbers. This library runs one: any figure in a page that is not in its brief is flagged before the page is published.

Skip step one and the model fills the gap with invention. Skip step three and the page reads like a hundred others. Skip step four and one wrong number survives for a year.

A chat has no access to your Search Console, your analytics or your database. When you ask it why your traffic dropped, it will produce a list of the usual reasons, which is a list you could have written yourself, and none of them will be checked against your data.

The honest sequence is to bring the data to the chat: export the queries and pages from the Performance report, paste the rows, and ask it to sort and read them. Now it is working with your figures rather than with the shape of the question.

We make Porteur, which does that reading from your own figures once and writes the findings out, if you would rather not paste rows into a chat.

Say you sell an invoicing tool at yourproduct.com and you want the query “how to invoice a client abroad”.

1. 1

   The results page

   Ten results: four bank blogs, three accounting firms, two competitors, one forum thread. The questions underneath are about currency, VAT and getting paid.

2. 2

   The brief

   The model reads the paste and reports that every page covers currency and none covers what happens when the client pays late in another currency. That gap is your section.

3. 3

   The facts

   You write the facts yourself: what your product does with multi-currency invoices, what it does not do, and the two rules your support team repeats every week.

4. 4

   The draft and the pass

   The model drafts the sections from those facts. You add the sentence only you can write: the mistake your customers actually make. You check every figure. You write the title last.

Elapsed time: an afternoon. The part that made the page worth publishing is the part the model could not do.