context: i do content for a small b2b tool company. earlier this month a customer reached out saying they found us through chatgpt. asked them what they searched. they said something like 'best tool for [our use case] for small teams' and chatgpt described our product, mentioned us by name, and they typed our brand into google after.
then another customer said the same thing the next week. then 4 more over 3 weeks.
so something is working. but heres the part that bugs me. when i go look at what chatgpt actually says about us, its... almost word for word from one specific post i wrote in march. just paraphrased a bit. so chatgpt isnt 'writing about us' in any creative sense, its lightly rephrasing my own positioning back at people, and sometimes those people end up on our site.
which raises some questions i havent worked out:
- if i wrote that one specific post differently, would the citation rate change? clearly format matters, but what specifically?
- is there a way to track 'paraphrase distance' between my source content and the AI answer, or am i overthinking?
- should i be writing more posts in that same shape to increase the chance of being the lifted source for adjacent queries?
the post that gets quoted has clear definition sentences, named comparisons, and the brand name appears in context (not just the title). everything else i write is more conversational and i think thats why it doesnt get lifted.
anyone else here seeing this loop where AI paraphrases your content and sends warm traffic back? if so, did you find a way to deliberately design content for it? or did it just kind of happen?
dont need a course pitch, looking for what people actually saw.