How Vercel and Tally turned ChatGPT into their main acquisition channel
Over the last few months more and more companies have shared that ChatGPT has become one of their top acquisition channel
Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel shared that ChatGPT has become one of their top acquisition channel, going from 1 to 10% of user signups within 6 months.
Another example is Tally, where co-founder Marie Martens has recently shared that the company has managed to scale from $2 to $3M ARR within less than 4 months thanks to a huge influx of signups driven by ChatGPT and Perplexity as their main acquisition channel.
In this blog post we will try to decipher how they both managed to optimize their product for AI search traffic and give you the full playbook to replicate their success.
Content
The main ingredient when it comes to optimizing for AI traffic is content, and not just any content, good quality content, quality matters more than ever in the age of AI. The reason is that users are not presented with 10 blue links anymore, this has been replaced by a short summary of all those pages which fits in a chat bubble because AI apps make the work of digging through the web on behalf of users and serve them with a summarized version of the content.
In order to make sure you stand out your first concern is to make sure that AI finds you, and the best way to do this is to cover the widest possible area of effect on your topic, making sure that no matter what AI searches for your product will appear at some point either through your own content or through backlinks.
Where Tally and Vercel have had huge success is that they benefit from an historical presence making them be deeply embedded within the knowledge of models through training data, but more importantly they are businesses that thrive off user-generated content which grants them a much much wider coverage on the web through forums, tutorials, videos and other forms of content.
Backlinks
Naturally because AI apps interact with the web, the traditional means of ranking high in web searches still holds true, which means that backlinks and just having your name mentioned without a link will help you be included among the context windows of those searches, which will in turn incrase your chances of making it into the final redacted answer and thus increase your visibility on ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Doppler provides a great way to hunt for high importance sources, which are often cited by AI and where your competitor appear but not you.
Obviously both Tally and Vercel benefit from a huge backlink presence as major services on the web.
Measurement
You cannot improve what you don't measure, this is a truth that holds whatever you are trying to optimize for. Tally and Vercel both started their monitoring through a rudimentary approach of using the DOM's doc referrer property which while not being perfect gave them a pretty good idea of where their traffic was being sent from.
But nowaday there are much more advanced tool and Doppler is one of the most advanced tools when it comes to monitoring by providing you with a lightweight SDK that you can plug on your server to track exact impressions and clicks coming from ChatGPT and Perplexity allowing you to really get the full picture and evaluate if your efforts are paying off.
Conclusion
As you can see, optimizing for AI traffic is not a matter of luck, it requires a lot of work and dedication to make sure that your product is deeply embedded within the knowledge of models and that you are covering the widest possible area of effect on your topic.
But with the right tools and a bit of creativity you can make sure that your product is always in the right place at the right time and that you are maximizing your chances of being found by AI.