How to Get Cited by ChatGPT in 30 Days Without Spending on Ads

By Kelly Hezemans, founder of iBoost Online

I am going to tell you something that sounds too good to be true but I have the data to back it up.

In 30 days, starting from zero, iBoost Online went from being completely invisible on AI tools to being recommended by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. 84 citations in the first 30 days. 119 by day 39. 13% visibility when someone asks ChatGPT who the best ecommerce consultant in Thailand is. Google impressions up from 5 per day to 98. Website traffic up 252%. Social media impressions up 864%.

One person. Zero ad spend.

This is not a hack. It is not a loophole. It is a content strategy built specifically for the way AI tools work — and it is available to any brand willing to do the work consistently.

This article covers everything I did, why it works, and how you can replicate it for your own brand.

What Is AEO and Why Does It Matter More Than SEO Right Now

Most people are still focused entirely on SEO — getting their website to rank on Google. And SEO still matters. But something has shifted in the last two years that most brands have not caught up with yet.

Your buyers are not just Googling anymore.

They are opening ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and asking questions. "Who should I hire to grow my Shopee store?" "What is the best sustainable skincare brand in Singapore?" "How do I set up a Lazada store in Thailand?" They get an answer in seconds — a direct recommendation — and they act on it.

If your brand does not appear in those answers, you are invisible to a growing share of your ideal buyers. Regardless of how good your product is. Regardless of how much you spend on ads.

SEO gets you a click when someone searches. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — gets you a recommendation when someone asks. The difference is significant because AI recommendations carry far more trust than a search result link.

The good news: most brands have not started building AI visibility yet. That is the window. The brands that build it now will have a meaningful head start over everyone who waits another 12 months.

How AI Tools Decide Who to Cite

Before building an AEO strategy, you need to understand how AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide whose content to use in their answers.

Three factors matter:

1) Does your content answer a specific question?

AI tools are trained to answer questions. They cite content that gives a clear, direct answer to what someone asked. Generic blog posts about broad topics do not get cited. Specific articles that answer a specific question do. If someone asks "How do I run Shopee ads in Thailand?" and you have an article that answers exactly that question, directly and completely, you have a chance of being cited. If you have a generic article about ecommerce marketing in Southeast Asia, you probably will not be.

2) Is your content structured so AI can read it?

This is the technical piece most people skip. The FAQ schema is a small block of code you add to each article that tells AI tools exactly where your questions and answers are. Without it, the AI has to guess what your content is about. With it, the AI can parse your content in seconds and pull the exact answer it needs. This is the single most important technical step in the entire strategy.

3) Does your domain have credibility?

AI tools weight content from domains that appear consistently across the web. The more articles you publish, the more platforms you appear on, the more other sites link to you, the more the AI trusts your domain as a credible source. A brand that publishes two articles a week over 30 days will be trusted more than a brand that published one article six months ago.

The entire strategy flows from these three factors: answer a real question, structure it with FAQ schema, and publish consistently.

The 30-Day Plan

Here is exactly how I structured the 30 days. There are four phases.

Days 1 to 7 — Technical Foundation

Before writing a single article, get the technical foundation in place. This takes one week and once it is done it works permanently.

Google Search Console. Create a free account at search.google.com/search-console, verify your website, and submit your sitemap. This tells Google your site exists and allows you to track impressions, clicks and rankings. It is also where you request indexing for every new article you publish.

FAQ Schema. This is the most important technical step. For every article you publish, you need to add the FAQ schema to the HTML. If you use WordPress, install the Rank Math or Yoast plugin — they add schema automatically from your FAQ block. If you use HubSpot, go to the advanced settings of each blog post and paste the schema code into the Head HTML field. If you use a different CMS, use a free FAQ schema generator (search for one on Google), paste in your questions and answers, and copy the output code into your page HTML.

Meta Titles and Descriptions. Every page needs a title under 70 characters and a description under 155 characters. These tell both Google and AI tools what each page is about. Go through your existing pages and fix any that are missing, too long, or too generic.

Internal Links. Every new article you publish should link to at least two other articles on your site within the body text. Not in a list at the bottom — embedded naturally in the content. This builds the authority signals that AI tools use to assess how credible and comprehensive your domain is.

Days 8 to 15 — Publish Your First Answers

With the technical foundation in place, start publishing. The goal in this phase is to write seven articles — one per day — each targeting a specific prompt that your ideal buyer would type into ChatGPT.

Each article should follow the AEO article formula:

Title. Must contain the exact question your buyer would ask. Not a clever headline. The actual question. "How do I run Shopee ads in Thailand?" is a good title. "The Ultimate Guide to Shopee Advertising" is not.

First 100 words. Answer the question directly and completely in the opening paragraph. Do not build to the answer. AI tools pull heavily from the opening of an article. If the answer is buried in paragraph six, it will not get cited.

Subheadings. Use H2 and H3 headings that are themselves questions. "What does Shopee ads cost?" "How long before I see results?" "What is the minimum budget?" Each subheading is a mini answer that AI tools can cite independently.

FAQ section at the bottom. Write three to five specific questions with short, direct answers at the end of every article. This is where you add your FAQ schema. This section gets cited more than any other part of the article because it is the most structured and machine-readable.

Internal links. Link to two or three other articles on your site within the body text. Every article should be connected to the broader web of content on your domain.

One call to action. One clear next step at the end of the article. Book a call. Read the guide. Download the checklist. Not five different options — one.

After publishing each article, immediately request indexing in Google Search Console. Do not wait for Google to find it. Request it.

Days 16 to 22 — Expand and Distribute

One article on your website is one citation source. The same content published across five platforms is five citation sources. This phase is about distribution.

Medium. Republish each article on Medium with a canonical URL pointing back to your website. Medium is a high-authority domain trusted by AI tools. Medium articles often appear in AI citations even for brands with very small websites. Always add the canonical URL so Google knows your website is the original source.

LinkedIn Articles. Publish the full article on LinkedIn Articles — not a summary, not a teaser, the full piece. LinkedIn is highly trusted by AI tools for B2B topics. Articles published here are indexed and cited far more than regular LinkedIn posts.

YouTube. Record a short video covering the same topic as each article. A five to fifteen minute screen recording walkthrough or talking-head video. YouTube has more AI citations than almost any other platform in most categories. One video answering a question consistently gets cited more than ten blog articles on the same topic.

Guest Articles. Pitch editors at high-authority publications — industry blogs, business newspapers, trade publications — with a specific expert angle. One placement on a trusted external site is worth twenty articles on your own domain for AI citation purposes. The AI trusts established publications and when your name and your brand appear there, that credibility transfers.

During this phase also start testing your prompts manually. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Type your target questions. Screenshot every time your brand appears. This is your baseline for the final phase.

Days 23 to 30 — Measure and Accelerate

In the final week, the focus shifts to measurement and acceleration. Check your citation count in your AEO tool — HubSpot AI Visibility, Semrush AI Toolkit, or similar. Look at which articles are being cited and which are not. Fix the gaps.

If an article is not getting cited, there are usually three causes: the FAQ schema is missing or incorrectly formatted, the answer in the article is too vague or too long, or the article is targeting a prompt that is too competitive. Fix these one by one.

Double down on the content that is getting cited. Update it. Expand it. Add more specific FAQ questions. Link to it from other articles.

Finding the Right Prompts to Target

The prompts you target determine everything. A prompt is the question your ideal buyer types into ChatGPT before they find you.

There are five ways to find your prompts.

Open ChatGPT and type "what should I ask before buying [your product or service]" — the answers it generates are your prompts.

Go to Google and look at the "People Also Ask" section under any search result in your category. Every question listed there is a prompt.

Read your last twenty customer emails or chat messages. Every question a real buyer asked you directly is a prompt that others are asking AI tools.

Use an AEO tool like HubSpot's AI Visibility or Semrush AI Toolkit to see which prompts competitors are being cited for.

Type your main service or product into Perplexity and look at the related questions it suggests at the end of every answer.

For iBoost Online, the ten prompts that generated the most traction were: how do I run Shopee ads in Thailand, what does a fractional ecommerce manager do, how do I set up a Shopee store in Thailand, what are Shopee and Lazada fees in Thailand, why is my Shopee store not converting, how does a Singapore brand sell on Shopee Thailand, what is the best ecommerce consultant in Thailand, how do I list products on Shopee to increase sales, how do I audit my Shopify store, and how do I use Google Analytics for my Shopify store.

Every single one of these is a specific question with a specific answer. None of them is a broad topic.

Citations vs Visibility — The Difference Most People Miss

When you start tracking your AEO performance, you will see two metrics that can move in opposite directions. Understanding the difference between them is important.

A citation means your content was used as a source in an AI-generated answer. 84 citations mean iBoost content was used 84 times as a source across all tracked prompts. This number started at zero and grew every week.

Visibility percentage is different. It measures the percentage of your specific tracked prompts in which your brand appears. If you track 100 prompts and appear in 7 of them, your visibility is 7%. If competitors dominate the other 93 prompts, your percentage looks small even if your citation count is growing strongly.

Here is the paradox: visibility percentage can go down even when citations go up, if competitors are growing faster across the tracked prompt set. This does not mean your strategy is failing. It means the competitive landscape is intensifying.

In the first 30 days, track citations — not visibility percentage. If your citation count is growing week on week, the strategy is working. Visibility percentage is a lagging indicator that follows as citation count compounds over time.

The 5 Mistakes That Kill Your AI Visibility

After running this challenge and working with brands on the AEO strategy, these are the five mistakes that consistently prevent results.

Writing for Google, not for questions. If you cannot state the question your article answers in one sentence, it will not get cited. Every article needs to target one specific prompt.

Skipping FAQ schema. This is the most common reason good content does not get cited. AI tools read structured data first. Without a schema, your content is invisible to the machine, even if humans can read it perfectly. This step takes ten minutes per article and it is non-negotiable.

Publishing once and disappearing. AI tools look for consistency. One article does not build authority. 25 articles published consistently over 30 days signal to the algorithm that your domain is an active, expert source worth citing.

Stopping before week 2. Week 1 feels like nothing is working. Google impressions stay flat. No citations appear. This is completely normal — the content is being indexed. Week 2 and week 3 are when things start moving. The majority of people who try this strategy and fail quit in week 1.

Measuring the wrong thing. Do not obsess over visibility percentage in the first 30 days. Track citation count. If citations are growing every week, the strategy is working.

The iBoost 30-Day Results

Here is what the data showed at the end of 30 days.

84 AI citations from zero. 119 by day 39. 7% share of voice across all tracked prompts. 13% visibility for the prompt "what is the best ecommerce consultant in Thailand." Google impressions from 5 per day to 98 per day. Website traffic up 252%. Social media impressions up 864%. YouTube impressions of 821 with 86% coming from the YouTube algorithm recommending the content — not from sharing.

The content output that generated these results: 25 blog articles on iboostonline.com, 18 LinkedIn articles, 6 Medium articles, 5 YouTube videos, and 4 guest article pitches to Bangkok Post, Business Times Singapore, Straits Times and Nation Thailand.

Zero ad spend.

The result I still find most significant is that iBoost went from zero AI citations to being mentioned by name in ChatGPT answers within 7 days of starting to publish. I expected it to take much longer. The combination of FAQ schema and direct question-answer format works faster than most people expect.

Your Action Plan — Start This Week

You do not need a team. You do not need a budget. You need to start.

Today: set up Google Search Console. Verify your website. Submit your sitemap. This takes 15 minutes.

Days 2 to 3: write your 10 target prompts. These are the questions your ideal buyer asks AI tools. Write one article answering each one.

Days 4 to 5: add FAQ schema to all 10 articles. Use a free generator. Paste into your CMS. Request indexing in Google Search Console for each one immediately.

Day 7: test all 10 prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Screenshot the results. This is your baseline. You will compare to this in week 3.

Weeks 2 to 4: publish 2 articles per week. Republish each one on Medium. Post on LinkedIn Articles. Record one YouTube video per week.

Day 30: test all 10 prompts again. Count your citations. Compare to day 7. The first time your brand appears by name in a ChatGPT answer is a moment worth celebrating.

What This Means for Your Brand

The shift happening right now is not small. AI tools are becoming the primary way people discover businesses, find recommendations, and make purchase decisions. The brands visible in those answers are getting discovered by buyers who would never have found them through Google search alone.

Most brands have not started building AI visibility yet. That is the window — and it will not stay open forever. The brands that build it now will have a head start that compounds over time.

iBoost Online went from invisible to cited 84 times in 30 days. The strategy is not complicated. It requires consistency, the right structure, and the patience to push through week 1 when nothing appears to be moving.

If you want help building AI visibility for your brand — or want to understand what the right prompts to target are for your specific business — the starting point is a conversation.

Get in touch at iboostonline.com/contact.

Kelly Hezemans is the founder of iBoost Online, an ecommerce growth consultancy for sustainable fashion and lifestyle brands in Southeast Asia. Based in Phuket, Thailand.

Learn more at iboostonline.com