How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 1)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on August 22nd, 2025.

Hey team,

Happy Friday. I’m switching things up this week. Instead of telling you about shiny new features, I want to share my deepest, darkest secrets which, at the moment, is my playbook on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT.

How does this tie into PR? Well, the whole point of Press Ranger is to make a modern PR platform. And as PR changes, I’m thinking of it more as visibility engineering than anything else (hat tip Spin Sucks). We need our brands to be everywhere and as PR collides with SEO and now GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), I’m finding Press Ranger right in the crossroads.

But I’m seeing so many self-professed experts in this space giving away bad info. “Make good content and the robots will find it”, “The playbook is the same as in SEO”, and so on. All of these are wrong.

This is a new game with new rules and there’s a significant advantage for businesses who start this early. And Press Ranger will help you do it.

In March, we launched the first piece of the puzzle, AIWire. This is our content engine that guarantees indexing into AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, and Gemini. In the past 6 months, thousands of businesses have used it to improve their ChatGPT rankings. It’s targeted, it’s quick, and it works.

But there’s more. Much more. Behind the scenes, I’ve been running experiments across dozens of brands and I think I know more than anyone right now on what actually works. And today I want to give away my playbook on how to do it and preview the ways that Press Ranger is going to help make it happen.

Why You Should Care

• 3 billion users per month interact with Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude (yes, billion with a B)
• Referral traffic from chatbots converts ~3x better than cold search traffic (source: I have seen this across 10+ brands)
• The playbook here is AI focused but it works for everything (SEO, PR, brand awareness) if you do it correctly

How to Start

• Pick your primary target query. Usually it’s the same or similar to a traditional SEO query. , etc.
• Niche it down until it’s winnable. If you’re not the best lawyer in the US, don’t go for “best lawyer”. Niche it down to something winnable and specific like “best family lawyer in Denver”

Table Stakes

• Claim your business profiles on review sites (G2, TrustPilot, Google Business, Yelp)
• Automate capturing 5-star reviews
• Make sure your site is crawlable, SEO-friendly, and fast
• Have a blog where you publish real, good content. AI can help draft, but edit it like a human
• Monitor your AI traffic via Google Analytics or pay one of the million tools that do this (Email me for a great Google Analytics report)

That’s the baseline. Now here are the secrets:

1. Listicles are the most powerful format on the internet right now

Open ChatGPT and type in your target search. Scroll down and look at the citations. You’ll notice something: 90%+ are listicles—“Top 10 this,” “Best 15 that” and so on. That’s because AI doesn’t rank the way Google does. It aggregates and compresses. On queries where they recommend products, chatbots favor listicles more than any other content format.

So what’s your job? Get into as many listicles as possible. At the moment, this is easier than SEO ever was. There are 4 ways to do this:

1. Send an email to every citation on your target search and ask them to add your brand to the list
2. Pay to place your own listicles on relevant websites
3. Do listicle exchanges with overlapping but non-competitive products
4. Put well researched listicles on your own website for your own target query. It does not matter if you rank yourself #1 on your own domain, it will still work

The more surfaces you’re listed on, the more ChatGPT and friends see you as “the answer.” You’d be amazed at how well this works.

Side note for publishers: are you open to listicle exchanges with other brands? If so, reply to this email and I’ll get a list together so we can help everyone do this for free. Eventually this will be a filter in Press Ranger to make it even easier.

2. Amplify and target with AIWire / Press Ranger

Now we’re going to take all of those listicles and amplify them. Each listicle you publish becomes supercharged when you announce it via AIWire. Everything you publish via a Gold press release gets indexed directly into highly cited publishers like Yahoo Finance, Morning Star, Business Insider, and Market Watch which means a listicle from a small publisher now has 10x the weight.

So what should you say?

• Use the target query in the headline. This is an art more than a science. Email me with your target search and I’ll write the headline for you
• Add an FAQ about topics related to the target query at the end of the press release
• Make sure to include the business's address and phone number as it appears on its Google Business Profile (This counts for NAP citations, too)

Do I need to promote a listicle to be able to make this work?

No. AIWire is guaranteed to index content into AI chatbots and you can do this with anything including guides, blog posts, new reviews, milestones, product announcements, and more. Again, email me your target query and I’ll write the headline for you.

These two steps are an investment of a few hours and you will see your AI traffic graphs go up. I have seen single listicle/press release combos outrank highly competitive keywords. Niching down is still important, but this works really well.

3. Build Organic Content for Robots

(No one knows this one.) When you ask a chatbot a question, it turns it into a lot of sub-queries under the hood before aggregating everything it finds. That means that you don’t need to rank for your target query to be included in a search. That would be hard. You just need to rank for all of the long-tail, hyper specific sub-queries that AI is using- which is easy.

Everyone will tell you that you can't figure out what those queries are but everyone is wrong. Go into Google Search Console and run this regex query: ######## (I’ll share it with anyone who replies).

This is called query fanning and it reveals the exact questions AI is probing your site for. Then:

• Create content that directly answers those queries
• Use the query as your title tag and H1
• Make sure the content is good and machine readable

No one is doing this right now. If you do this, you will become the canonical source for those sub-queries.

Bonus: ChatGPT and Gemini autocomplete also give great hints about what content to publish.

4. Reddit

Reddit is the most-cited domain on the internet. It’s also the hardest to master because you can’t just shill your product everywhere.

Here’s what to do:

• Google "site:reddit.com {your target query}"
• Make a list of the top 30 threads.

Your goal is to be present in those threads. You can not do this via spamming or your brand will get blacklisted from all of Reddit which is equivalent to going to AI jail. Each comment you post should be 95% adding value and 5% mentioning your brand. You need to be tasteful and subtle. This might take 6 months to do properly but I promise it will be worth it.

Some key phrasing you can use to mention your brand (after adding value):

• In the interest of adding value…
• You can use tools like…
• Disclosure, I built a tool that…

AI bots love Reddit because it’s authentic conversation. If you can seed your expertise here, it will echo across every chatbot result.

That's it. That's the playbook. And this isn't theory. I’ve been running this playbook for brands and watching it work.

Over time, these strategies will become built-in features of Press Ranger. But for now, consider this your insider’s guide. Starting early on this will have an extremely high impact and will cement your brand in future model training.

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Jump to another part of the How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT series:

• Part 1 (this post)
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8