How Shhots AI grew its new users from ChatGPT by 684% in a month

The problem

Shhots AI makes ad creative for marketers: UGC videos, product photoshoots and video ads from one product photo. Its traffic plan was Google.

When people started asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot which ad tool to use, visits from those assistants showed up in analytics as referral or direct traffic. Nobody could say how many there were, which pages earned them, or whether they signed up.

Google was also changing under us. Its AI Overviews quoted sections of our posts thousands of times and sent almost no clicks back. We needed to know where people were actually coming from before deciding what to build next.

What we built

In each system, Claude does the work and I check it before it goes live.

1. Pages for the questions people ask assistants. People ask ChatGPT things like “which one is free?”, “what does it cost?” and “what’s a cheaper alternative?”. So Claude drafts free-tier roundups, pricing pages and comparisons. Every price is checked on the vendor’s own page and dated. Every list that includes Shhots says so in a disclosure line.
2. Cited pages stay where they are. We don’t retitle, merge or move a page that assistants cite. When a change is needed, we make one change to that page and wait 14 days before the next.
3. A site AI tools can read. AI crawlers are welcome in robots.txt. An llms.txt file lists every page and the product’s core facts. Each deploy notifies Bing through IndexNow, because ChatGPT and Copilot search draw on Bing’s index.
4. AI assistants measured as a channel. In GA4, assistants have a channel of their own, ranked above organic search, so their visits no longer hide in referral traffic. Sign-ups are counted by source. Since 27 Oct, the same prompts run every Monday on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot, and we log whether Shhots is named, which pages are cited and any wrong facts.

What goes into each page, and how we choose which questions to answer, is the part we keep for clients.

What it cost

• Tools: Search Console, GA4 and Bing Webmaster Tools are free. Claude and Semrush are paid subscriptions, not included here.
• People: one founder reviewing and approving every change.
• Not included: the product itself.

What came out

	Before	After
Where AI assistant visits showed up	Mixed into referral and direct traffic	A channel of their own, above organic search
New users from ChatGPT in one week	Baseline (7 to 14 Aug)	684% more (9 to 16 Sep)
ChatGPT’s new users next to Google organic search’s	Not measured	94% as many (9 to 16 Sep)
Source with the most key events (sign-ups, app clicks, purchases)	Not measured	ChatGPT (9 to 16 Sep)
ChatGPT visitors who land straight in the app, not the blog	Not measured	About 1 in 4 (28 days to 23 Sep)

These numbers come from Shhots AI’s Google Analytics and Search Console.

That last row matters most. ChatGPT sends people to the sign-up and create pages by URL, which means it recommends the product, not just a blog post. On the money pages, ChatGPT visitors triggered close to one key event each.

What we learned

• Keep cited pages where they are. In July we merged our free image-to-video roundup into a bigger post. On 9 Sep we restored it at its old address, with no redirect, and it became the page ChatGPT sends the most people to. Now a page that assistants cite stays where it is.
• Count sessions and sign-ups, not citations. Copilot cited our pages hundreds of times a day, but a citation is not a visit. So we measure what assistants send: sessions, sign-ups and purchases.
• Answer many questions, not one. Each new page answers a different question buyers ask, so the channel grows across the whole site.
• Independent lists come next. ChatGPT already names Shhots when asked for an MCP server that makes video ads. For the broadest questions, it leans on third-party “best tools” lists, so getting Shhots into those lists is the next piece of work.

Installed on your company

This fits any business whose buyers ask an AI assistant before they ask a person: “which software should I use”, “who should I hire”, “what does it cost”. Read how AI lets one founder run Shhots AI for the rest of that setup.

In week one, we run your buyers’ questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Copilot. We log who gets named, which pages get cited and what the assistants get wrong about you. Then we set up AI assistants as their own channel in your analytics, so the baseline is real.

Each month you see AI assistant visits and sign-ups by source, which questions name you, the pages we shipped, and every wrong fact we found and fixed. It is part of AI for growth. To find out where you stand, pick a time in the calendar below.