How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT (Part 8)

This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on October 30th, 2026.

Hey team,

Just when you thought I was going to blather on about iterative improvements to something most of you don't care about truly groundbreaking feature announcements, I’m taking a cue from 90s horror movies and using Halloween as an excuse to reboot the series you thought was dead: How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT.

Catch up on parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, then let’s dive in...

The last time I sent an email in this series was 7 months ago. We have a lot to catch up on.

The state of AI search

AI search is booming. AI Overviews reach 2.5 billion people, AI Mode 1 billion, and ChatGPT 900 million. Good for them, not for us, because traffic is not booming. News publishers lost 40% of their Google traffic in one year. Meanwhile, 68% of Google searches and 99% of ChatGPT sessions end without a click. Reddit fell out of ChatGPT (more below). Listicles are still the most-cited format on the internet. Oh, and those AI answers we’re all obsessing over? Ask ChatGPT the same question twice and there’s a less than 1 in 100 chance you get the same list of brands. And just because I want to say "I told you so," schema, llms.txt, and domain authority do (and always did do) nothing.

TLDR: your new website is someone asking a robot about your industry. We’re all in the same boat, fighting for less and less attention on land we rent from Google and OpenAI. That's the new game, so let’s learn how to win it.

Everything I know, in one list

• You need to be everywhere. LLMs rank brands on third-party mentions. You saying you’re the best is worth one point. Everyone saying you’re the best is worth a hundred. 84% of AI citations come from earned media.
• The formats haven't changed at all. Listicles, comparisons, and versus pages are still the most-cited content formats.
• Claim every profile and make them match. Look at your G2, Google Business, Yelp, LinkedIn, etc. and make sure they all have the same category, the same description, and your primary keyword. Go update the old descriptions today. It’s the easiest win on this list.
• Reviews, forever. 5-star reviews are worth more than gold. Automate the ask and never stop.
• Pick fights you can win. A new brand shouldn’t chase “best HR software.” Niche down, and go after long-tail searches like “best HR software for mid-sized companies in the UK.” Keep niching down until you have the content footprint to compete, then move up.
• Get into Bing. ChatGPT runs its searches through Bing. Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and connect your blog to IndexNow so new posts get indexed automatically.
• Double-check your robot permissions. Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new sites since July 2025. Make sure robots can reach your site, and recheck every quarter.

Ok, we're all caught up. Now let's dive into what's new.

Reddit is dead

Fire your Reddit marketing agency today and spend the money on something else. Reddit is, as the kids say, clapped (read: busted, cooked, donezo). In March, it showed up in 19.1% of ChatGPT answers. By September, it was 2.3%. One tracker watched its share of ChatGPT citations drop 86% in four days. On retail prompts it went from 15% of ChatGPT citations to 0.14%.

And even if you want to play, Reddit doesn’t want you. It now blocks 23 million spam views a day and uses AI to hunt for posts written to manipulate chatbots. Game over.

But content recency is alive

AI forgets fast. The average AI citation loses half its share 11 days after peaking, and 78% of cited pages are fading within two weeks.

That’s good news because small brands can pump out content much faster than incumbents that get stuck in approval loops. And it's bad news because your amazing content is stale in two weeks. The fix is to be everywhere, all the time (notice a theme?).

Important: this is not permission to flood your blog with AI content. Stick to a few human-edited posts a week. Google has shipped four spam updates this year, and sites pumping out scaled AI content keep showing up in the casualty reports. You have been warned.

5 AEO Hacks you can use right now

I've learned not to spill all my secrets, but I'm still going to give you five. Consider this your treasure map.

1. YouTube.
YouTube is now the most-cited site in Google’s AI Overviews, and almost anything aimed at a commercial category will rank almost immediately. Use the same content formats that always perform well. The more the merrier.

2. LinkedIn.

I first shared this hack in September 2025 and it's still working. Write long-form articles, published from your company page. When ChatGPT cites LinkedIn, about 80% of the time it’s citing a company page.

3. Facebook and Instagram.

Google’s AI Overviews cited Facebook in 19.5 million answers. Keep your pages active and your profile info current, and try putting your commercial search terms in your posts ?.

4. Press releases.
Shameless plug, but it's true. 100% of the Gold releases we track get cited by at least one AI engine, usually within three hours of going live. Every Gold release now proves impact with screenshots of the LLMs citing it. A strategic release aimed at the right prompt is the easiest way to be everywhere at once (web, social, video, AI, etc.).

5. 2027.

Last December we published a pile of “best of 2026” content. When the calendar flipped, the LLMs needed 2026 answers, and ours were already sitting there waiting. Will it work again this year? Only one way to find out.

That's it for me. If you're figuring our your AEO/GEO strategy for 2027, I'd love to help. Hit reply, and then go forth and conquer some robots.

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
• Part 7
• Part 8 (this post)