Want your brand to show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: LLMs don't crawl the web when they answer your questions. They search traditional indexes — ChatGPT leans on Bing, Gemini uses Google, and Claude appears to pull from Brave. So if you're not ranking in those indexes, you're not even in the consideration pool.
Dan Petrovic is one of the most respected (and delightfully nerdy) figures in SEO. He runs the Australian agency Dejan and was the top-rated speaker at Ahrefs Evolve in Singapore, where he presented research from asking Gemini one million questions to map how it ranks brands.
In this episode, Tim and Dan unpack what it actually takes to show up in AI search — from the mechanics of how LLMs select sources to the practical steps you can take today.
You'll learn the difference between grounding, citations, and mentions (and why a linked mention is the holy grail), why Reddit gets rejected over 90% of the time, why there's no such thing as "prompt volume," and how Dan uses on-page optimization in an agentic loop to make models "unable to resist" a client's page.
In this episode:
(00:00) Intro
(00:48) My brand doesn't show up in ChatGPT — what do I do?
(04:02) Two ways to get into AI answers: outreach vs. building your own pages
(07:11) Is LLMs.txt actually pointless?
(09:29) How ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude each use different search indexes
(10:42) Universal ranking factors: topical centrality, engagement, and popularity
(17:17) Practical example: what Ahrefs Podcast should actually do
(19:31) Should you optimize for every search engine, or just Google?
(22:59) How is AEO actually different from SEO?
(28:03) Can you influence LLM training data?
(33:58) Going nerdy: separating quality content from spam with Gzip compression
(37:27) On-page optimization in an agentic loop: making models "unable to resist"
(42:45) How often do LLMs ground their answers vs. answer from memory?
(47:37) Measuring AI visibility: entities, mention share, and citation share
(51:44) Why "prompt search volume" doesn't exist — and what to track instead
(56:35) How to generate prompts for tracking AI visibility
Where to find Dan Petrovic:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dejanseo
X: @dejanseo
Website: dejan.ai
Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timsoulo
X: @timsoulo
Website: timsoulo.com
Referenced:
Dejan — dejan.ai
Brave Search — search.brave.com
Ahrefs — ahrefs.com
