How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 2)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on September 12th, 2025.

Hey team,

Happy Friday. A few weeks ago I shared my secret playbook on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT and it turned out to be the most popular email I’ve ever sent. But you didn’t really think I gave away all my secrets in Part 1, did you?

Part 1 covered the basics. A short recap is: listicles are your new best friend, AIWire is your amplifier, your own site matters more than you think, and Reddit is the hidden heavyweight. If you didn't read that one, read it here—but today I want to give away even more secrets.

Because here’s the truth: ranking on AI chatbots has the highest potential impact of any marketing channel right now and It’s easier today than it ever will be. If you’re old enough to remember when ranking on Google was easy, then you already know that this is not going to be this easy ever again.

So let’s dig into Part 2 of my secrets on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT:

1. The 10 Best Ways to Make Listicles for LLMs in 2025

As a recap: LLMs love listicles. They account for more than 90% of the synthesized results on commercial-intent searches. I glossed over this last time but let me say it very plainly: You can influence AI rankings by writing listicles on your own domain. Especially if you’re not in tech, you should start here. It’s free, it works, and it’s the single strongest signal to LLMs right now.

But what content ranks? Are all listicles created equally? Of course not. So let’s go through my list of how to make a good listicle (you won’t believe #4 ?).

1. Add expert bylines and bios to show the robots that the content was written by a real human with real expertise. “Steve is the founder of Press Ranger, an award-winning PR software tool that helps businesses tell their own story to the press. He has 20 years of product and engineering experience and has sold 3 startups to public companies.”
2. Secret hack: Listicles perform better in first person.
   Expert shares their tips > business creates marketing content
3. Use structured data. You need to attach structured data to every piece of content you produce. For a listicle, this is usually going to be Article, ItemList, HowTo or FAQPage. Try to use all of them for each piece.
4. Include FAQs for easy snippet-style answers. Every article you make should have FAQs and they should be the exact queries you think people are going to ask LLMs. Put them at the end of the article.
5. Include summaries everywhere. TLDR sections, “best for” summaries, etc. Chatbots love pulling this info. Are robots as lazy as humans? Summary: yes.
6. Update old content—recency matters more than you think it does. An invisible article can be upgraded to visible just by changing the publish date and freshening up the content.
7. Use literal, question-style headings like “How to do Y”, “How to do X”. I shared about how query fanning works in the last piece. You’re not writing headings for Google anymore. No keyword stuffing. Write like your customers will write.
8. The tone is confident, factual, and objective. Be truthful and comprehensive. Mention competitors. Be clear where your product excels and where it’s not the right choice.
9. Write about topics not keywords. Superficial SEO content will lose to comprehensive, authoritative content every time. You don’t need to keyword stuff anymore.
10. Quality > quantity. Stop AI generating 1000s of pages and hoping for the best. This might work in the short term but it will get your domain flagged in the long term. Strategy is the multiplier. You will win by choosing high-intent commercial queries that you can win and building good content around them.

Pro tip: You can amplify a listicle for bots with AIWire by publishing a press release about it. "Company announces new guide on the 10 best ______". Voila, easy amplification across hundreds of high authority domains that AI pulls from.

2. Be Everywhere (And Why PR Matters More Than Ever)

Brand mentions act as a proxy measure for trust within LLMs. The more your brand gets mentioned, the stronger it’s seen by LLMs. Translation: PR is really important. And yes I’m the PR guy telling you PR matters, but check out these findings from people who don’t run PR software companies:

"Multiple studies show that ChatGPT and Perplexity favor sources frequently referenced across authoritative domains and social content, even if they’re not top-ranking in Google." (Organic Labs)

“Interestingly, Business Insider showed a correlation [between news mentions and AI answers] double that of other publications, potentially linked to its OpenAI & Axel Springer partnership announced in December 2023” (Seer Interactive)

Does anyone know how to get content on Business Insider? But seriously, we built AIWire and Wholesale press release distribution for this purpose. We changed our entire distribution in March to focus entirely on publishers that were cited more frequently in AI chatbots. Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, Morning Star, MarketWatch etc are all extremely powerful places to put your content.

Does every press release help with this?

No. ChatGPT isn't pulling from fairtrade.einnews.com, it's pulling from Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch and other reputable publishers.

And yes, we’re still the only platform on the internet that guarantees your content will be indexed by AI chatbots.

What should you do with this?

• Publish press releases celebrating milestones, releases, and timely news about your company. Each Press Ranger release gets indexed in hundreds of places and helps increase your brand's footprint.
• Regularly post to all relevant social channels
• Build relationships with prominent journalists in your niche. Don't spam them. Add value! Offer exclusive, important commentary.

Want to rank for a specific query?

Hit reply, send me the brand and the query, and I’ll make you a plan.

3. Reviews Are More Important Than Ever

Reviews are another huge trust-signal for AI bots. This is one of the reasons new brands are so hard to rank and it's why you need to be doing all you can to get more reviews:

• Automate 5-star review collection. Send emails after a customer transacts asking them how you did. If they click 4-5 stars, send them to your review platform of choice. If they select 3-stars or less, route them to customer service.
• Incentivize if you have to, especially to start. Give away freebies, discounts, and gifts to get over 20 reviews. Follow the rules of the platform!
• Register your business on every review platform in your sector. For software, that means G2, Capterra, TrustPilot, and Gartner. For services, that means Yelp, Google Business Profile, etc. Cycle platforms so you get reviews on all of them.

Here's a real life example of review hustle: let’s do a review exchange. Leave a review on Press Ranger's G2, Gartner, or TrustPilot page and shoot me a note and I’ll do the same for you.

4. Bing Is So Back

I know, I know. But hear me out. ChatGPT, Copilot, and others use Bing’s search index a lot. No one knows how much and it doesn't matter because this is phenomenal news. It’s phenomenal because Bing is 3-5x easier to rank on than Google. In Bing, recency is weighted significantly higher so not only will your content be seen by all nine of Bing’s users but getting it indexed in Bing will make it show up higher in ChatGPT, Copilot, and more. For context: Press Ranger gets 10x more traffic from ChatGPT than from Bing itself. TLDR: We only care about Bing to be better for the bots.

Completely free, high impact action item: Unless you’ve already done this, your website probably isn’t even indexed in Bing. Go to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. You can also set up IndexNow so all new content you publish will get indexed automatically. This is free, it works, and somehow no one knows that it boosts your chatbot rankings.

What You Can Do With This

If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably realized this playbook is not just a greenfield marketing strategy for brands but also a massive business opportunity. It’s never been a better time to start a content marketing agency LLM SEO agency. With subscriptions to SurferSEO + Otterly + Press Ranger you can run an entire visibility engine for under $300/month and charge clients thousands. None of the things I’m talking about here are new, we’re just re-packaging battle tested strategies.

This game is about specific content on specific domains with specific meta data. That’s it.

If you run a company, you should start on this playbook. If you’re looking for your next thing, I don’t know how this could not be it.

If you’ve read this far, let me know what you want to see in Part 3:

• Places to create high-ranking third party content for your brand for free
• The press release formats that do the best in AI search
• Debunking all of the stupid stuff people are saying about LLM SEO
• Watch me use this blueprint to rank something on ChatGPT from scratch

Let me know in the replies what you want to see next and give me feedback. Steal the playbook, make lots of money, and then remember the little guy when you’re on top.

POV: You know how to rank anything in ChatGPT

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

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