How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 5)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on December 19th, 2025.

Hey team

Happy second-to-last Friday of the year. We've been hammering out a ton of admin stuff behind the scenes but no one wants to hear about operational efficiency on a Friday, now do they?

So let's give the people what they want. The most popular email I sent all year was the guide on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT, so let's close out the year with Part 5. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 if you need to catch up, but today we’ll summarize the state of LLM rankings, highlight the latest changes, and share some new secrets I’ve learned along the way.

And if you want more when you’re done, hit reply and let me know. If enough people clamor, I’ll spend my entire Christmas ignoring my family to write Part 6 so you can unwrap something amazing in your email next Friday.

? 2025 AI Search Summary?

• Ranking on ChatGPT and other chatbots went from nothing to everything in 2025. None of this existed a year ago.
• Brands care because AI referral traffic converts 5-10x better than organic search and is the first new digital marketing channel in a decade. The value is real even if market share is still small.
• It’s still very easy to influence AI search traffic and win market share, even in competitive markets and especially outside of software.
• To play the game, you must have a good website, a blog with content, active social media accounts, and a lot of 5-star reviews.
• AI chatbots use cross-domain mentions as a proxy for authority. Rank is about increasing your brand footprint.
• A good AI search strategy works for much more than just AI. The strategy I talk about in the Guide to Winning AI Search (and today) works for SEO, social, PR, brand awareness and more. Work smart, not hard.

But a lot has changed in the world of AI search. Let’s dive in:

What content performs best in AI search?

Content will always be the nexus of AI Search campaigns, but what content performs the best? I covered this extensively in other parts of the series, but a lot has changed.

Listicles are still king

If I was to summarize AI search in one sentence, it’d be: the most listicles you're on, the higher you rank. I told you 5 months ago what SEO giant Ahrefs published last week: Listicles are the highest performing content on LLMs. Hopefully you used that 5-month head start to publish a ton of content :-)

If you’re not publishing listicles on your own site, doing exchanges with other websites, paying to publish them, and/or running the other strategies in the guide to Listicles in AI Search then you have the perfect New Year's resolution.

Remember: You can use Press Ranger to find journalists who write top 10 lists in your niche to get amazing placements. This is how I got Press Ranger placed in Forbes as the #1 PR software for 2026:

“The 2026 Buyer Guide to X”

Think of “buyer guides” as super-listicles. These pieces have the same listicle style rankings, but contain much more content about the market. If you run a brand, you already know all of this so just put it all in one place. Yes, you should still rank yourself #1 and yes, you still need to mention competitors. You can put these on your own domain or external domains but, if external, be sure that each one is different. Content like this is starting to perform very well within LLMs. You can also create guides to match the buying categories that ChatGPT and friends all love, ex “The CRM Buying Guide for Small Businesses in 2026”.

Example: The 2026 Buyer's Guide to Law Firm CRMs

“X Alternatives” and “X vs Y”

Take your primary competitors and write two content pieces about them. The first is your product vs X. The second is another listicle of the best alternatives to X. All of these can go on your own domain. Put them in your footer for extra juice. This works very well right now.

Example: Top 10 best Zapier alternatives I’ve tested in 2025

Persona Landing Pages

ChatGPT loves to segment markets by personas. If you search for the best CRMs, it will segment answers for small businesses, freelancers, enterprise, etc. The easiest way to capitalize on this is to create landing pages for each persona, ex you need to make landing pages for “Best CRM for Small Business”, “Best CRM for freelancers”, etc. Ask AI to give you the personas so they’re straight from the (robot) horse’s mouth

Example: CRM for Freelancers

Try publishing one piece of content from each bucket while tracking your AI visibility using Otterly. You will be happy.

Press releases still outperform

Did you know I run AI search campaigns for about 30 large software brands? (Surprise!) Across all of the campaigns, we always have a cohort of press releases that outrank everything (even listicles). Why do press releases work so well? Or, better question, why do Press Ranger’s press releases work so well? Let me count the ways:

• We built our releases for this purpose. We scrapped our entire distribution network in March and purpose built our entire content delivery engine to be tailored for AI search. The result is AIWire.
• Each press release expands your content footprint much more than a single piece of content ever can. Each release has hundreds of artifacts across web, audio, video, and social (if you use Press Ranger).
• Every release we do is guaranteed to hit Business Insider, Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, AP News, and even more publishers that we know AI cites frequently when searching for answers.

PR is back, baby. I don’t want to pretend like Press Ranger is fueling PR’s resurgence, but it's certainly a nice coincidence, eh?

Dip your toes in by looking at the best performing formats in the Complete Guide to Using Press Releases for AI Search Visibility for more.

Yes, you can see what ChatGPT searches for

When you search in LLMs, they break your query into sub-queries to fetch information. This process is called “query fanning” and it's key to understanding how to rank higher. All of the “experts” in this space (we’re all one year old btw) still say there's no way to know what the individual queries are. Keep this one a secret so the experts don't feel bad. Here's how to see the fan out queries inside ChatGPT:

• Start a new ChatGPT chat
• Ask a high-intent buyer question like “What’s the best PR software?”
• Let it tell you all about Press Ranger. Sigh while smiling longingly:

• Then open up web inspector using Command + Shift + I
• Go to the network tab
• Click the request that matches the URL ID
• Search for “search_model_queries”
• Yahtzee:

So what?

In plain english: ranking for LLMs is about ranking for these almost-random phrases, not for actual keywords. Think long and hard about that.

What do we do with this?

This is the wild west. Your guess is as good as mine:

• Try making content with exact match headlines. Can’t wait to see your new blog post called “best CRM software reviews tools small business”.
• Add a big list of them to the end of blog posts and hide them from humans.
• Aggregate a ton of them for your niche, examine patterns, and create content that focuses on the patterns.

No one is doing this right now, so you will be a certified digital cowboy if you venture in this direction.

That feels like enough for the last Friday of the non-holiday year. But yes, I am holding out on you. I have many more secrets to rank higher on ChatGPT but I need to hear a bit of clamor. I only feel comfortable ending my year drowning in a sea of unread emails.

Should I ignore my family next week and close out my year spilling all of my secrets in Part 6 of this guide? Or should I take a week off and hug my kid? Tell me in the replies.

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

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