How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 4)

Part 4: how to use press releases to rank in AI search, with the headline formats that win commercial and informational queries.

Posted on October 3, 2025 AI Search
steve
steve
How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 4)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on October 3rd, 2025.

Hi team,

Happy Friday. Today, I’m giving away a ton of secrets. Secrets I actually thought I would never share publicly. That’s right, it’s time for Part 4 of How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT: Part 4.

But first, a quick reminder: I'll be speaking at Mint’s A.I. Business Growth Summit on October 7 at 10AM PT. My talk is literally called How to Rank Your Business on ChatGPT so if you’re nerding out with me on all of this, use this link to sign up for free.

Quick Recap of Parts 1–3

If you missed Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 you should read them first but here's the recap:

  • Listicles win. Those annoying Top 10 lists that humans hate? Turns out robots love them. Sorry. Get listed on as many as possible—do outreach, pay, swap, and make your own.
  • Your content footprint matters. LLMs use citations across domains as a proxy for authority. Press releases, PR, social, reviews, directories, everything—visibility everywhere adds up.
  • Your website still needs to be good. Human-written blog, keyword optimized, technical SEO, all the stuff.
  • Prioritize reviews. You need to be getting a regular stream of 5-star reviews. If you like this series, here’s a shameless plug to leave one for Press Ranger on G2 and then email me for a mystery surprise (ooo!).
  • Go index your site in Bing. ChatGPT and other bots use Bing’s index. It takes 5 minutes, and if you don’t do it you’re probably invisible. Do it here.

All caught up? Good, now it’s time to give away some secrets.

How to Use Press Releases to Rank In AI Search

Ok, we need to get a bunch of content on high-ranking domains. There are tons of ways to do this and most of them are expensive and hard. But press releases are easy and they’re impactful across many channels. But, of course, not all press releases are going to move the needle. If you’ve been here for a while, you know we changed our entire newswire in March to focus on getting our releases to rank on AI search and Google.

We even built a fancy thing called AIWire to make it easy to get content on Business Insider, Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, AP News, etc and also guarantee indexing on AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and more. No else does this.

But that’s just indexing content, how do we get it to actually rank?

I’ve now run thousands of experiments on how to get press releases to rank. Let’s dive in.

The Golden Rule: Get your primary keyword into the headline of the press release.

If your goal is to rank for Best CRM or Best PR Software or Best Lawyer in Dallas, you need to get the exact target keyword in the headline. There are no exceptions.

Easy! I’ll just run a press release with headline: "Press Ranger is the Best PR software". All done.

Wrong. There are strict editorial guidelines on what you can and can’t do in a press release and getting your keyword in the headline is art more than science.

Here’s what works:

How to Rank for High-Intent Queries like Best, Top, #1

Everyone cares about commercial queries like Top ___, Best _____, etc. They’re critically important in traditional SEO and AI search because your customer is actively shopping.

Here’s the best performing headline format to rank for commercial queries:

[Company] celebrates [milestone], reinforcing role as best [keyword]

Ideally, the milestone is a # of 5-star reviews but it can also be years in business, successful cases, sales milestones, etc.

We’ve done a ton of these and they all perform extremely well.

Examples:

Business Insider page with the press release "OtterlyAI Celebrates 10,000 Users, Cementing Role as Best AI Search Monitoring Tool for SEO Professionals"

Results:

Press release headline: "Press Ranger Celebrates 8,000 Users, Reinforcing Role as Best PR Software"

Results:

Receipts:

AI Brand Ranking table with Press Ranger in position 1, ahead of Prowly, CoverageBook, Critical Mention and PressPage

Pretty cool, right? Let's keep going.

How to Rank for Informational Queries like How to ____

The other thing people always want to rank for is informational queries like “How to ____”, “Why _____”, etc. These are easier to rank for because they are less competitive (usually) and your brand becomes the de facto source of truth for the question. They’re higher in a conversion funnel but if you can rank for them across a wide range of queries, you can own top of funnel search across Google and AI search.

The highest performing headline here is:

[Company] launches new guide on how to [keyword]

Again, we’re just putting the keyword in the headline and using some “art” to associate your company with the target query.

Examples:

Press release headline: "What is Wave Season for Cruises? CamJon Travel Announces New Guide on the Black Friday for Cruises"

Results:

Press release headline: "Call Center Coach Releases FONE Report: Why Executives Are Replacing Contact Center Leadership Training"

Results:

Amplify Your Listicles & Awards

Ok, ready for a real secret? When you get an award or you get placed on a listicle, you can amplify the listicle, your brand, and your target keyword using this playbook. Let’s work through an example:

Perplexity answer to "what are the best PR tools for 2025" with Press Ranger listed first

Another example:

Press release headline: "OtterlyAI Named Top-Rated Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Tool in Germany"

Here are the results:

Tips & Best Practices

  • Pick something winnable. Do research on keyword difficulty and choose something achievable given the footprint of your business.
  • Add an FAQ to the bottom of your release with the exact questions your audience might ask ChatGPT. Shoehorn your brand into all of the answers.
  • Amplify on social. Share the placement you get from Yahoo Finance or Business Insider on all of your socials. More amplification = stronger signal.
  • Stay consistent. One release can move the needle but this is a game of volume. For competitive searches, consider frequent release cadences and more channels.
  • We’re here to help. Reach out with your brand, your target query, and we’ll help you get started.

If you’re looking for a sign that it’s time to start issuing press releases, this is it.

Ranking your brand on AI search will never be as easy as it is today. Ranking your clients on AI search will never be as easy as it is today. The "industry" is evolving so fast that some of the stuff I put in Part 1 is already out of date.

Is Reddit marketing already overhyped? Is making a Wikipedia page for your brand worth it? Are LinkedIn influencers going to inherit the earth? All these questions and more will be answered in Part 5 of How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT. Stay tuned.

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

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