LLM Optimisation
🧠ChatGPT Just Rewrote the SEO Playbook
What OpenAI’s Apps SDK Means for Brands, Discovery, and the Future of eCommerce
8 October 2025
8 min read
This week, OpenAI quietly launched something that will reshape digital discovery: the ChatGPT Apps SDK - a toolkit that allows developers and brands to build mini apps that live inside ChatGPT.
It might sound technical, but the implications are enormous. For the first time, brands can create interactive, transactional experiences directly inside ChatGPT, bypassing websites and even Google entirely.
Let’s unpack what this means and why it’s one of the biggest shifts in brand visibility since the birth of search.
🚀 From “Drive to Site” to “Deliver in Chat”
For two decades, the journey looked like this:
User → Google → Your website → Maybe convert
You spent years perfecting SEO, building backlinks, and tuning content for crawlers. But that world just changed.
With the Apps SDK, the new flow looks like this:
User → ChatGPT → Your app (inside ChatGPT) → Convert in chat
Instead of trying to rank a page, you’ll soon be trying to rank a conversation where ChatGPT decides which apps, tools, or brands appear for a given intent.
🧩 What the Apps SDK Actually Is
An SDK (Software Development Kit) is a set of tools that lets developers build on top of a platform. In this case, it means ChatGPT can now host apps directly within the chat interface.
That could be a product configurator for a running shoe brand, a sunscreen finder that matches skin type and conditions, a “which size fits me” advisor for apparel, or even a checkout experience powered by OpenAI’s new Commerce Protocol — all without the user ever leaving the chat.
📉 The Decline of the Click
We used to worry about “zero click” search results on Google. ChatGPT just took that concept to its logical extreme.
In this new model, discovery happens inside ChatGPT, decision making happens inside ChatGPT, and conversion happens inside ChatGPT.
The web isn’t disappearing, but it’s being abstracted away. The next era of brand visibility will happen in agentic systems, not browser tabs.
🧠The Strategic Shift for Brands
For CMOs:
Your digital strategy just shifted from “drive to site” to “be useful where decisions happen.” You’ll need to budget for in-chat brand utility - experiences that plug into ChatGPT and solve user intent instantly.
For SEO and Content Teams:
Forget crawlability. Start thinking intent mapping, prompt clusters, and conversational relevance. Your keywords now exist as user intents inside conversations.
For Product Teams:
Your web experiences — fit finders, quizzes, configurators — need to become modular and callable via the Apps SDK. ChatGPT isn’t a channel; it’s a surface layer for your brand.
đź’ˇ The Takeaway
ChatGPT doesn’t care about your domain authority.
It doesn’t care about your backlinks.
It doesn’t care about your 10,000 pages of optimised content.
It cares about one thing:
Can you solve the user’s problem, right now, in chat?
That’s the new ranking factor. And it’s where the next decade of brand visibility will be won.
LMO7 helps consumer brands own their AI shelf space, optimising content, data, and strategy for visibility in Amazon Rufus, ChatGPT, and other large language models where discovery now happens.
If you want to explore how your brand could build or surface inside ChatGPT using the Apps SDK, get in touch.
It might sound technical, but the implications are enormous. For the first time, brands can create interactive, transactional experiences directly inside ChatGPT, bypassing websites and even Google entirely.
Let’s unpack what this means and why it’s one of the biggest shifts in brand visibility since the birth of search.
🚀 From “Drive to Site” to “Deliver in Chat”
For two decades, the journey looked like this:
User → Google → Your website → Maybe convert
You spent years perfecting SEO, building backlinks, and tuning content for crawlers. But that world just changed.
With the Apps SDK, the new flow looks like this:
User → ChatGPT → Your app (inside ChatGPT) → Convert in chat
Instead of trying to rank a page, you’ll soon be trying to rank a conversation where ChatGPT decides which apps, tools, or brands appear for a given intent.
🧩 What the Apps SDK Actually Is
An SDK (Software Development Kit) is a set of tools that lets developers build on top of a platform. In this case, it means ChatGPT can now host apps directly within the chat interface.
That could be a product configurator for a running shoe brand, a sunscreen finder that matches skin type and conditions, a “which size fits me” advisor for apparel, or even a checkout experience powered by OpenAI’s new Commerce Protocol — all without the user ever leaving the chat.
📉 The Decline of the Click
We used to worry about “zero click” search results on Google. ChatGPT just took that concept to its logical extreme.
In this new model, discovery happens inside ChatGPT, decision making happens inside ChatGPT, and conversion happens inside ChatGPT.
The web isn’t disappearing, but it’s being abstracted away. The next era of brand visibility will happen in agentic systems, not browser tabs.
🧠The Strategic Shift for Brands
For CMOs:
Your digital strategy just shifted from “drive to site” to “be useful where decisions happen.” You’ll need to budget for in-chat brand utility - experiences that plug into ChatGPT and solve user intent instantly.
For SEO and Content Teams:
Forget crawlability. Start thinking intent mapping, prompt clusters, and conversational relevance. Your keywords now exist as user intents inside conversations.
For Product Teams:
Your web experiences — fit finders, quizzes, configurators — need to become modular and callable via the Apps SDK. ChatGPT isn’t a channel; it’s a surface layer for your brand.
đź’ˇ The Takeaway
ChatGPT doesn’t care about your domain authority.
It doesn’t care about your backlinks.
It doesn’t care about your 10,000 pages of optimised content.
It cares about one thing:
Can you solve the user’s problem, right now, in chat?
That’s the new ranking factor. And it’s where the next decade of brand visibility will be won.
LMO7 helps consumer brands own their AI shelf space, optimising content, data, and strategy for visibility in Amazon Rufus, ChatGPT, and other large language models where discovery now happens.
If you want to explore how your brand could build or surface inside ChatGPT using the Apps SDK, get in touch.