Summary
Writing for each persona also means optimizing your presence on ChatGPT, but not all formats have equal chances of being cited. In-depth, structured content (for the Informed Expert) gets picked up most often, while short or opinion-led content (for the Simplifier and Curator) connects better with humans than with AI. Depth gets you cited. Structure gets you read.
700 million people open ChatGPT every week. They send over 2.6 billion messages a day, and a growing chunk of them are looking for exactly what you sell, they’re just not searching it only Google anymore.
In 2025, information-seeking prompts on ChatGPT grew from 14% to 24% of all conversations in a single year. ChatGPT isn’t just a productivity tool, it’s becoming the place people go to make decisions, get recommendations, and find solutions. It’s a decision engine, a personal advisor, for a huge and growing portion of your audience, and most brands still have no strategy for it.
So the question isn’t whether you need a ChatGPT content strategy. It’s whether you understand who is using it, because they are not all the same.
In this article, I’m going to walk you through the 4 consumer personas that define how people use ChatGPT, what content to write for each of them, and why getting this right is also the foundation of your AI SEO strategy.
Before we get into the personas, it’s worth grounding this in the real data, because it’s more surprising than most people expect.
OpenAI’s first official study on ChatGPT usage, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper produced with Harvard economist David Deming, analyzed over 1.5 million conversations. Ars Technica broke down the seven most interesting findings. Here’s what stood out:
This isn’t a niche audience of tech enthusiasts anymore. It’s your customers.
A Salesforce study of 2,552 U.S. consumers identified four distinct personality types engaging with AI agents. It’s worth noting the research covers AI agent users broadly, not ChatGPT specifically. But the behavioral patterns map closely to how people actually use ChatGPT in practice, and they should directly shape how you write content.
The largest group by far. This person values being well-informed and won’t make a decision until they’ve done their research. They use ChatGPT primarily in “Asking” mode, they want thorough analysis, structured information, and all their follow-up questions answered in one place. You’ve probably met one. You might be one!
Key facts:
This persona maps directly to the OpenAI data: highly educated users and those in professional occupations are substantially more likely to use ChatGPT for work-related tasks, 57% of messages from users in computer-related fields are for work, compared to 40% for non-professional occupations. The Smarty Pants is very likely the professional using ChatGPT to research vendors, compare solutions, or build a business case before making a decision.
What content to write and why ChatGPT will mention it:
Mostly Gen X and Boomers. They’re not excited about AI, but they know it can make life easier, and that’s enough. They want the decision made for them and the steps kept simple. They’re in “Doing” mode: just handle it.
Key facts:
This connects to something interesting in the OpenAI data: editing and critiquing text is actually more common than generating text from scratch, 10.6% of conversations involve users asking ChatGPT to edit or critique content, versus just 8% dealing with generating personal writing from a prompt. The Minimalist isn’t creating, they’re delegating. They paste in what they have and ask ChatGPT to fix, simplify, or summarize it.
What content to write and why ChatGPT will mention it:
Tech-savvy, comfortable with AI, and always optimizing. This persona lives in “Doing” mode, and they’re almost certainly power users. About half of messages (49%) are “Asking,” while Doing accounts for 40% of usage, and for work-related activity, Doing tasks dominate even more. The Life-Hacker is the one pushing that Doing percentage up.
Key facts:
What content to write and why ChatGPT will mention it:
Predominantly Gen Z and Millennials. They don’t want generic, they want curated, personalized content, and theirs. 46% of ChatGPT users are aged 18–25, and the Tastemaker is driving a significant chunk of that number. They customize everything, from their phone settings to how they prompt AI.
Key facts:
The OpenAI data adds an important nuance here: about 1.9% of all ChatGPT conversations are related to relationships or personal reflection which, with 18 billion weekly conversations, still represents 342 million such conversations a week. The Tastemaker isn’t just buying, they’re building an identity, and they’re using ChatGPT as a sounding board while doing it.
What content to write and why ChatGPT will mention it:
The way people use ChatGPT isn’t uniform, and your content strategy shouldn’t be either. The article that wins a Smarty Pants (long, structured, data-rich) will lose a Minimalist in paragraph two. The content a Life-Hacker saves immediately, a Tastemaker finds too generic.
But here’s what ties all four personas together: they’re all using ChatGPT as a decision-making tool, not just a search engine. Researchers found that ChatGPT functions as an advisor, task assistant, and space for personal reflection, not just an information retrieval tool. That changes what “good SEO content” means. It’s not just content that ranks in Google, it’s content that answers clearly, specifically, and with enough credibility that an AI feels confident surfacing it.
You don’t need to write four versions of every article. You need to know which persona you’re primarily speaking to, and structure your content around what they actually need when they open ChatGPT and start typing.
That’s where your AI SEO strategy starts. And if you’re not sure which persona your audience falls into, that’s exactly what we help with at Marketez.
At Marketez, we help businesses build AI SEO and content strategies that reach the right people, including the ones finding you through ChatGPT. Get in touch if you want to figure out which persona your audience is, and what content will actually work for them.
