How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 6)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on December 26th, 2025.

Hey team

Happy last Friday of the year and happy 50th New Feature Friday email of 2025. While some of you may be impressed by that, I am sad as it means I already took my standard-issue two weeks off this year. So while many of you encouraged me to spend time with my family for Christmas, that’s just not possible. Rules are rules.

For those who need it: I'm kidding. I obviously wrote this last week so it only looks like I’m neglecting my family.

For the final email of the year, we’re obviously going to do Part 6 of How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT. Last week we talked about content formats, query fan outs, and press releases. Catch up on what you missed in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 and then close out the year with some juicy secrets, predictions, and my list of “the biggest opportunities for regular people” in the AI search market.

To summarize:

• 2025 was the year of AI search. What started as barely a glimmer in the internet’s eye has ballooned into the hottest topic in digital marketing.
• People are still calling AI search a bunch of terrible names: generative engine optimization (GEO), answer engine optimization (AEO), or my personal least favorite, Retrieval Augmentation Optimization (RAO). We should just say “AI search”, though according to Google Trends, GEO is winning:

• Brands are throwing money at AI search because existing marketing channels like SEO, paid ads, social, and cold email have had 10+ years to remove all hope of asymmetric gains.
• Traffic from LLMs converts 5-10x better than cold traffic. Users come to you pre-sold with credit card in hand based on LLM recommendations.
• We’re still very early. Right now, it’s easy to influence LLMs to increase qualified traffic to your brand.
• In short: focusing on AI search is an easy way to get qualified, high-converting traffic if you do it right.

If you’ve been playing along for a while, you know that I’ve been on this since day one. When ChatGPT turned on the ability to search the web in October, 2024, we started reverse engineering how to influence AI rankings for Press Ranger users.

This is what Press Ranger did in 2025 to help you rank higher on ChatGPT:

• Rebuilt our entire press release distribution network in March to focus entirely on publishers that are frequently cited by LLMs (Business Insider, Yahoo Finance, etc.)
• Launched a content engine called AIWire to guarantee that all of our Gold press releases are indexed by *all* LLMs
• Released a new version of our AI campaign tool to make it easier to start, run, and track AI search campaigns
• Rebuilt all of 4 of our media databases (Articles, Journalists, Podcasts, Publishers) with new and constantly updated data to make it easier to get earned media
• Gave away all of my secrets in this 6-part email series and guide that gives away the playbook on how to use listicles, reddit, and press releases to rank higher

Not a bad resumé, eh? Ok enough nonsense, let’s dive into some juice.

Reddit is dead

Not really. But it did get de-ranked significantly from earlier this year, especially on ChatGPT. But even with the change, Reddit is still the most cited domain across AI search and threads rank extremely well on Google and Gemini.

My hot take: the AI execs got in trouble because they weren't paying Reddit for data (shocking). To get around it, they're still ingesting Reddit data, but not showing it as frequently as a citation source. I can't tell you how I know this, but I know this.

Shoutout that if you are a reddit spam bot or aspire to be one, the best way to create Reddit posts is with Syndr.

Check out our Guide to Reddit for AI Search for more info on how to do Reddit marketing in 2026.

Facebook is thriving

With Reddit’s decline, platforms that you thought were dead are now rising. Facebook groups are gold and that’s good news because they don't have nearly as many pesky rules.

Here's a query to find high-ranking threads in Facebook groups:
site:facebook.com/groups/ {your target query}

So if I want to find all of the Facebook groups that rank well for “PR software”, I’d type in this to Google:

site:facebook.com/groups/ “best PR software”

You’re going to see a ton of really old content that’s somehow ranking very well as search evolves. This is good news because all you need to do is be an "impartial" internet person and post helpful content that nicely mentions your brand in relevant threads.

Don’t forget about LinkedIn long form articles, Medium, and niche communities, either.

Exact match domains

LLMs are still stupid. They rank recency over relevancy and have no system for authority. This is going to change, but for now you should be pulling money out of the robots so that when all of this gets harder, you’ll already be on a yacht. One way brands are doing this right now is with Exact Match Domains. Let’s say you want to rank for “Best CRM”. The playbook is:

• Register a domain like Best-CRM-2026.com, BestCRMForSmallBusiness.com, etc.
• Build out exhaustive content on the domain. Think of it as one giant listicle where you can go much deeper on competitors, processes, alternatives, and adjacent queries.
• Build backlinks and authority to the domain by running press releases, social media posts, and media campaigns to it.
• Watch the domain increase in rank across Google and AI search

Example: https://www.arizonaonlinedivorce.com/ for Arizona Online Divorce.

What are the biggest opportunities in AI search?

Managing AI search campaigns for ~30 brands and running a newswire aimed at AI search gives me a cool vantage point to see opportunities. I’m going to break them down by group:

Biggest opportunities for brands:

I’ve been saying it all year, if you’re not doing this now when it’s this easy, you’re going to kick yourself later. This is free money.

• Optimize your website using AI search best practices
• Streamline the collection of 5-star reviews
• Use your company blog to post listicles and high-ranking content formats
• Use our highest performing press release formats to win visibility in AI overviews and LLMs
• Track visibility using a tool like Otterly

Biggest opportunities for agencies:

You can make a million dollars in 2026 running AI search visibility campaigns solely using Press Ranger, Writer, Otterly, and Syndr.

• Almost all of the agency offerings in this space are focused on publishing content to the client’s blog. This “works” but you quickly hit a ceiling and have to do things off of the client’s website which most agencies are bad at.
• Your edge is that you already know how to optimize a campaign off of a client’s website because you’re looking at it. The bar is very low and it’s easy to outperform everyone else right now. This will change.
• Charge $5k/month to manage a client’s blog, publish 2x monthly press releases, and place external listicles.
• This works in local services, software, e-commerce, and more.
• Sign ~20 clients and you’re at $1M/year at 90% margins.
• This isn't a theory. I’m watching people do this in real time.
• No one has more than 6 months experience. You can start this today even if you don't have an agency.

For everyone else:

• Start a blog.
• Write about software, law firms, healthcare, or some other topic that has a big market.
• Build up the blog by publishing every day for a few months and running monthly press releases. Be careful publishing AI content.
• Sell sponsored content on marketplaces like Collaborator, Getfluence, etc.
• Content sites that are a few years old making $100-500k/year are selling for 4x profit. This is the easiest business in the world right now. I spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on sites that are bad. The quality bar is very low. Please make me something better.

Ok, that’s it for 2025, folks. If you’re still reading this, thank you for playing along with me and thank you for being the best newsletter readers in the world. The memes you send, the feedback you give, and the reviews I extort out of you are just the beginning of what’s to come.

Oh- and we’re starting the new year off with a bang so make sure you rest up. I’ll see you in 2026.

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

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