How an agency made $430k by getting one SaaS listed inside ChatGPT

Half the timeline is telling you to burn your SEO playbook and learn a new acronym. The other half is quietly compounding backlinks and getting cited in ChatGPT with the same boring moves as always. This week the receipts came in for the second camp, including Google itself weighing in. Here is what actually earned citations and revenue, and the exact moves to copy before your competitors do.

Google finally answered the question everyone's been arguing about. In a new piece titled "Good SEO is good GEO," Google's Brendon Kraham explained that its generative features, AI Mode and AI Overviews, run on the same core ranking and quality systems as regular Search and pull from the existing search index. Google says it plainly: you do not need to write awkward content for bots, stuff pages with artificial snippets, or create special AI text files. The move: stop hunting for a secret AI trick and go make content Google can crawl, understand, trust, and match to what a buyer actually typed.

One nuance worth keeping. Google flagged "query fan-out," where a single complex question quietly becomes several searches across subtopics. Ask for the best payroll software for a construction company with multi-state contractors, and it may need pages on construction payroll, contractor payments, compliance, pricing, integrations, and alternatives. One generic page loses. A brand with useful content across the whole buying journey has more chances to get pulled in.

The number that made Greg Isenberg's head explode: AI search converts at 10 to 40%, versus 1 to 2% from SEO. His breakdown explains why. When someone asks an AI for "the best xyz tool," the model explodes that into 100+ derivative queries, scrapes around 1,000 pages, and synthesizes one answer. By the time that person clicks through to you, they have effectively sat through a thousand-page sales deck delivered by a neutral third party. They land credit card in hand. The volume is still a fraction of Google's, but the intent is on another level, so being the answer is worth far more than being one blue link.

Domain reputation is the wall you keep hitting, and content doesn't get you over it. A B2B founder shared the mistake he wishes he'd skipped: Google ignores you until you have domain reputation, and that comes from great backlinks, not more content. Legacy players sitting above DR 70 collect the clicks while your sub-50 domain racks up impressions and no one arrives. His fix is unglamorous:

Then steal an old-school link hack that still prints. One SEO netted 12 quality backlinks for free with the broken-link method: find statistics pages in your niche, run them through a broken-link checker, spot the dead sources they cite, build an updated version of that resource on your own site, then email the owner to swap the dead link for yours. The whole play is five steps and zero budget. Block an afternoon and run it once.

The boring tactics keep working, even in the AI era. A practical list making the rounds skips the clever stuff for the plays that compound:

None of it is new, all of it still ranks in AI Overviews and ChatGPT. The full thread is a good gut-check against chasing the next shiny tactic.

And the ceiling on that approach is enormous. Airbnb ranks for every "places to stay in [city]" search on earth and wrote none of those pages. One template plus their listing data generates millions of combinations, each aimed at someone who just typed "places to stay in Lisbon" and already has the intent. The reframe for founders: your app already does something specific for someone specific, so map every "best invoicing tool for freelancers in the UK" version of that, build one template, and let structured data fill the rest. Just make each page genuinely useful, or you have built index bloat instead of a moat.

A viral free tool cut this maintainer's revenue in half, and the traffic graph hid it for a year. The developer behind lightGallery added a YouTube-thumbnail downloader to pull in users. It went viral: 1.4 million impressions on one query, 47% of all clicks on the domain. Not one of those visitors ever bought a license. Meanwhile the searches that actually convert collapsed: brand searches down 52%, developer searches down 50%. Added together it read as "traffic down 10%," which is why he never looked. Google slowly re-learned the site as a free-tools domain and dropped "javascript gallery" from position 2 to 15. The full autopsy has one rule: if you build free tools, make sure they sit dead center in your niche, not off to the side where they teach Google the wrong story about you.

How one agency made a client $430k in 12 months by getting them cited inside ChatGPT. They took a B2C SaaS brand from invisible to quoted across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity: $430,000 in added revenue and 1,000%+ traffic growth. Here's exactly how they did it, in two moves you can copy. First, a foundation rebuild that tripled the client's impressions in months, so Google actually trusted the domain. Then an "LLM layer" on top: deliberately building the citable, quotable content and third-party mentions that AI engines reach for when they synthesize an answer. The order is the whole trick, fundamentals first so you earn trust, then citation-building so you get pulled into the answer. Run the same two moves on your SaaS. The full write-up has their timeline.

BacklinkBot clears the 300+ directory and listing grind for you, the exact domain-reputation work that lets Google and ChatGPT trust you enough to cite you. That leaves you free for the one thing no tool can do: being the clearest answer to the question your buyer just asked.

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What's BacklinkBot? BacklinkBot gets your SaaS listed across 300+ directories, niche listicles, and review sites, building the backlinks and citations that Google and AI search both reward, without the manual grind.

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— Piyush, BacklinkBot AI

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