How we rebuilt thecmo.ai in a day to show up in ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s search reads Bing, not Google. So the first check was Bing Webmaster Tools, not Search Console. Bing had the site: six of eight pages indexed and crawled the day before. Our robots file let every crawler in.

So visibility was not the problem. The words were.

We fetched our own page as a crawler would and read only the text. Three problems:

• The homepage sold a texting service to local businesses, an offer we had just retired. The words “agency” and “brand” did not appear once, and that is who we sell to.
• Three old pages still sold offers we had stopped selling.
• Search engines carried a third description of us from an even older version. Three stories about one company.

An answer engine can only repeat what you say about yourself. We were saying three different things.

We rewrote the homepage around one sentence and repeated it everywhere:

TheCMO is an AI marketing system for agencies and companies. It does the work across Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO, content, websites and Shopify, follows your own playbook, asks before it changes anything live, and keeps a record of every change.

• The same sentence opens the page, the FAQ, the structured data and llms.txt.
• Every FAQ answer stands on its own, because that is the part that gets quoted.
• Old offer pages were removed and redirected to the homepage, so their links still land somewhere.

• A canonical pointing at a redirect. Our pages told search engines the real address was thecmo.ai, but thecmo.ai redirected to www.thecmo.ai. Mixed signals. We moved everything to the address that actually serves.
• IndexNow. One request tells Bing which pages changed. It answered 202, accepted.
• Structured data. Organization, software and FAQ markup, saying the same thing as the page.
• Unreadable legal pages. Our privacy page had light grey text on a light background, left over from an old design. Nobody had noticed. Google reads that page when it reviews an app’s access, so it mattered.

The product page answers the question a buyer now asks first: isn’t this just a bundle of AI skills? Every number on it was checked against the product that day, and a note in the page’s source says where each came from.

We also caught ourselves overclaiming. The first draft described a feature that takes work off you step by step as if it were live. It is not built yet. The page now says “this is what we are building next”, which reads as more credible, not less.

Read the product page

We pulled about 15,000 keyword ideas straight from Google’s Keyword Planner through the Google Ads API, five years of Google Trends, and the “People also ask” questions for 32 topics. The paid data cost about nineteen cents.

• “ai marketing” and “ai seo” went from almost nothing in 2021 to mainstream.
• “generative engine optimization” (4,400 a month) and “answer engine optimization” (2,400) are real markets now.
• “claude for marketing” grew about seventeen-fold in a year.
• Some big numbers are traps. “roas” shows 3.35 million searches, and the results page is Ross Dress for Less.

Those findings became the guides on this site, starting with these.

• Screenshots at desktop and phone width, read before shipping.
• A copy linter that blocks the tells of machine writing. It caught one on a page we had not even touched.
• Every old address tested live to confirm it redirects.

Whether Bing picks up the new pages, whether ChatGPT describes us correctly, and whether it starts naming us for the questions above. We will check a fixed set of prompts and post the answers here, good or bad.