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The world of digital marketing is in the midst of another seismic shift. For years, we’ve focused on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). A new discipline is emerging: Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Welcome to the era of visibility engineering. It’s no longer just about getting seen on Google; it’s about being the definitive answer on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
But there’s a problem. Many self-professed experts are offering outdated or simply incorrect advice. They’ll tell you to “just make good content” or that “the playbook is the same as SEO.” They’re wrong.
This is a new game with new rules, and there’s a significant advantage for businesses that get in early. The team at Press Ranger, a modern PR platform, has been deep in the trenches, running experiments across dozens of brands to figure out what actually works. Today, they’re sharing their playbook.
Why You Should Care About Ranking in AI
The numbers speak for themselves:
- Massive Reach: Over 3 billion users per month interact with AI tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.
- High-Quality Traffic: Referral traffic from chatbots converts approximately 3 times better than traditional cold search traffic.
- Universal Benefits: This AI-focused playbook is a rising tide that lifts all boats—it benefits your traditional SEO, PR, and overall brand awareness efforts when done correctly.
Getting Started: The Foundations
Before diving into the advanced tactics, you need to have the basics in place.
- Pick Your Target Query Start with your primary target query, which is likely similar to your main SEO keyword (e.g., “best accounting software for small business”).
- Niche It Down Be realistic. If you’re not the most dominant player in a broad category, don’t target “best lawyer.” Niche down to something specific and winnable, like “best family lawyer in Denver.”
- Cover the Table Stakes Ensure your digital house is in order. This is the non-negotiable baseline:
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- Claim Your Profiles: Actively manage your listings on G2, TrustPilot, Google Business, Yelp, and other relevant review sites.
- Automate Reviews: Implement a system to consistently capture 5-star reviews.
- Technical Health: Make sure your website is fast, crawlable, and SEO-friendly.
- Content Hub: Maintain a blog where you publish high-quality, human-edited content (AI can help draft, but a human must refine).
- Monitor Your Traffic: Use Google Analytics or a dedicated tool to track your traffic from AI sources.
With the foundation set, it’s time to reveal the secrets to dominating the AI-driven search landscape.
The Four Secrets to ChatGPT Ranking
Secret #1: Listicles Are the New King
Open ChatGPT and search for your target query. Scroll to the citations. You’ll find that over 90% of them are from listicles, such as “Top 10 X,” “Best 15 Y,” and so on.
Why? AI engines don’t rank like Google; they aggregate and compress information. For queries that involve recommendations, chatbots overwhelmingly favour the listicle format. Your job is to get your brand included in as many relevant listicles as possible.
Here are four ways to do it:
- Direct Outreach: Email the authors of every listicle that ranks for your target query and ask them to add your brand.
- Paid Placements: Pay to place your own well-researched listicles on relevant industry websites.
- Listicle Exchanges: Partner with non-competitive products in your space to feature each other in your respective listicles.
- Publish Your Own: Create listicles on your own website, targeting your query. It doesn’t matter if you rank yourself #1 on your own domain—it still works. The more surfaces you appear on, the more the AI sees you as a definitive answer.
Secret #2: Amplify and Target with Press Releases
Once you have your listicles, it’s time to supercharge them. Announcing each new listicle feature with a targeted press release using a service like Press Ranger’s AIWire can dramatically increase its weight and visibility. Releases syndicated to highly-cited publishers like Yahoo Finance, Morning Star, and Business Insider give your content instant authority, one of several critical trust signals that AI systems scan for.
Here’s how to craft your release for maximum impact:
- Headline: Use your target query directly in the headline. This is more art than science, but it’s crucial.
- FAQ Section: At the end of the press release, add a Frequently Asked Questions section about topics related to your target query.
- NAP Citations: Include your business’s name, address, and phone number exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile to strengthen local signals.
While this strategy is powerful for listicles, you can use press releases to promote guides, blog posts, new reviews, and product announcements to achieve guaranteed indexing in AI chatbots.
Secret #3: Build Organic Content for Robots (Query Fanning)
This is a little-known but incredibly powerful technique. When you ask a chatbot a question, it breaks it down into numerous sub-queries behind the scenes before aggregating the results. This means you don’t need to rank for your main target query to be included in the answer. You need to rank for the long-tail, hyper-specific sub-queries the AI is using.
How do you find these hidden queries? The secret lies in using a specific regex query within Google Search Console to reveal the exact questions AI is probing your site for. This is called query fanning.
Once you have this list of sub-queries:
- Create content that directly answers each one.
- Use the exact query as your page’s title tag and H1.
- Ensure the content is high-quality and easily machine-readable.
By doing this, you become the canonical, authoritative source for those specific sub-queries, making it almost certain that AI models will pull your content into their answers.
Secret #4: Master Reddit
Reddit is the most-cited domain on the internet, but it’s also the hardest to master. You can’t just spam your product; you’ll be blacklisted and find yourself in “AI jail.”
Here’s the strategic approach:
- Research: Google
"site:reddit.com "to find the top 30 most relevant threads. - Add Value: Your goal is to be a helpful presence in these threads. Each comment should be 95% value and only 5% brand mention. Be subtle and tasteful. This is a long-term play that could take six months to execute properly.
- Key Phrasing: After providing genuine help, you can subtly mention your brand with phrases like:
- “In the interest of adding more value…”
- “You can also use tools like…”
- “Full disclosure, I built a tool that helps with this…”
AI bots love Reddit because they see it as authentic human conversation. Seeding your expertise here will echo across every chatbot’s results.
The Takeaway: Your First-Mover Advantage
This isn’t theory; it’s a proven playbook that’s already working. Over time, these strategies will become common knowledge, and platforms like Press Ranger will build features to automate them.
But right now, you have an insider’s guide. Starting early will have an outsized impact, cementing your brand in future AI model training and securing your place as a leader in the new landscape of visibility engineering.
