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“How do I rank on ChatGPT?”
This is the hottest question in SEO and digital marketing today. While there is no shortage of articles and social media posts on this topic, we have seen many posts oversimplifying the steps to LLM ranking, treating it like a few simple tricks. The reality is that AI citing your brand relies on a wide, complex range of trust and technical signals. It is time for our own comprehensive, expert take on the topic.
We focused this guide on the two most widely used LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) and consulted our own 2Stallions SEO team, general industry literature, and crucially, the sources themselves —by asking ChatGPT and Gemini to explain their own recommendation processes. Here is what we found and how you can apply it.
The New Ranking Game
For two decades, the goal was simple: get your link onto the first page of Google. Today, with the fast growing usage of ChatGPT, Gemini and other large language models (LLMs), it also becomes crucial to have your brand cited or recommended in the answers of AI engines, a process often called AI SEO or LLM Optimisation.
Here’s a simple analogy: Traditional SEO is like getting your book onto the top shelf of a library. AI SEO is like getting your brand mentioned or content referenced in the summary of a topic written by the head librarian.
The new goal: For your content to be the source LLMs cite for authoritative answers, or for your brand to be cited when users are asking for recommendations for specific types of products or service providers.
Asking ChatGPT & Gemini Their Ranking Factors
To understand how to rank, we need to understand what the AI models value. While their exact algorithms are proprietary, we performed a practical experiment: we asked ChatGPT and Gemini directly.
Using our industry as an example, we asked both models to recommend the best digital marketing agencies in Singapore.
After receiving the above list (and thankfully from ChatGPT, a mention!), we asked both models to explain the key factors they used to compile that recommendation.
Based on ChatGPT and Gemini’s responses, the models seem rely foremost on these factors to come up with the lists of recommended agencies:
- Frequency of the agencies’ brand mentions from third-party sites, especially “best of” industry listicles
- Google’s search results (especially for Gemini)
- Quantity and quality of reviews
- Local (Singapore) presence signals
- Trust signals: awards won, recommendations
Key ChatGPT & LLMs Ranking Factors: A Summary
Based on the models’ responses, expert insights from the 2Stallions SEO team, and a review of industry literature, LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini seem to select content and recommend brands based on three main factors:
- External Trust (Consensus): Your brand must be mentioned widely and positively across multiple high-authority, third-party sources.
- Authority (E-E-A-T): Content must come from a visible expert and align with your brand’s core expertise, backed by real experience and data.
- Technical Clarity (Readability): Content must be easy for machines to process, requiring structured data (Schema Markup), fast speed, and a clean, logical format.
Strategies to Rank on ChatGPT & LLMs
In short, the path to AI SEO visibility is three-pronged: focusing on building brand trust signals, E-E-A-T signals for content, and ensuring technical readability.
Grow Brand Mentions & Digital Presence
As also argued by SEO figurehead Rand Fishkin , brand mentions appear to be the most critical factor for gaining an LLM’s trust. When a query is commercial (e.g. “best digital marketing agencies”, “best japanese restaurants”), the AI defaults to brands that are widely, positively, and expertly recognised outside of their own website.
From our own experiment above, both ChatGPT & Gemini heavily relied on the frequency that the agencies are mentioned in “best digital marketing agencies” listicles and industry agency directories as SemRush, Clutch and Digital Agency Network (DAN).
How can you apply this to your own brand?
Secure “Best Of” Listicles and Citations
LLMs heavily rely on curated lists from authoritative third-party publishers. Getting included in “Top 10 [Industry] Companies in [Target Country]” or “Best [Service] Tools” provides a high-trust citation signal.
To select the most worthy publications to target, go to Google search and type in “best [your product/service category] in [target region]”, and observe the listicles that appear. Also ask ChatGPT (or your LLM of choice) to recommend the products/providers in your industry and discover the resource links that are cited in their answers.
Leverage digital PR
Regularly disseminate press releases to secure placements (either through an in-house team or a PR agency) on major industry platforms and publications. Each mention on a high-authority site acts as a powerful trust signal for LLMs, reinforcing your brand’s prominence and reputation
Target the right platforms, focusing on the top sources that LLMs trust:
- Industry Platforms & Publications: Aim to gain visibility in the most prominent directory and news sites for your industry.
- Reddit & Quora: These forums provide real-user context and sentiment, which LLMs use to characterise a brand (e.g., “known for great customer service”).
- LinkedIn & YouTube: Content and brand mentions by experts and users on these platforms contributes to your trust signals
Grow Your Visibility Holistically
Stay active in promoting and growing your brand from all possible sources– online and offline. LLMs are sophisticated. They pick up signals from events, partnerships, social media and public relations efforts. A strong, visible brand in its niche naturally becomes seen as a reputable one.
Accumulate Social Proof: Reviews, Testimonials, Case Studies
Social proof is the real-world validation LLMs use to judge your brand’s credibility.
Prioritise Customer Reviews: Actively gather customer reviews on platforms the LLMs reference: Google Business Profile and Yelp (for local businesses with physical locations), industry-specific review sites (e.g., Trustpilot, G2, Capterra, Clutch), and local directories. Quantity, ratings and recency matter.
Social Proof on Your Website: Ensure testimonials and case studies on your website are clear, specific, and structured. LLMs can scrape these for evidence to support a recommendation (e.g., “2Stallions helped an F&B brand achieve X results, as seen on their website”).
Create Content the Way ChatGPT & LLMs Prefer
To maximise the chance of being cited, any content created must be written to be trusted, easily consumed and synthesized by AI models.
Create Comprehensive Content (Topical Authority)
Write well-researched, exhaustive content that addresses a topic (and all related sub-topics) completely. Move beyond single-keyword focus; ensure all related questions are answered on a single hub page. Include original information, expertise, real-life insights, and experience.
Don’t simply AI-generate a blog article, as LLMs look for unique content rather than simply recycled information.
Maximise E-E-A-T Signals
Use named authors with the right job title and industry experience (ensure these are visible on-page), and cite original case studies, data, or insights LLMs can use as fact.
Create Content Around Common Queries
Focus on questions, which form the type of queries that are entered into LLMs (as opposed to keywords in search engines). Identify the most common queries in our industry and write comprehensive, in-depth resource articles about them.
Use “answer-first” content format similar to the structure of a featured snippet. Provide the direct, concise answer in the opening paragraph of a section, before the deep explanation.
Format Content to be LLM-Friendly
Use clear, conversational language. Structure content to be citation-ready– with clear headings, lists, tables, bullet points, and clear FAQs. Stay away from long-winded paragraphs.
Regularly Update Key Content
LLMs prioritise content that is fresh, factual, and verified. To maintain visibility, you must regularly audit, update, and refresh your existing articles, ensuring statistics are current and the content reflects the latest industry developments.
Aim to update your most important content (Homepage, service pages, most popular blogs) every six to twelve months at the minimum. Keep in mind that ‘updating’ does not necessarily mean rewriting the entire content. This can involve adding new FAQ items, revising a paragraph or adding a new section.
Ensure Technical Foundation
Before LLMs can cite your content, they need to be able to easily access it. Implement the following technical fixes to ensure that your content and website are easily accessible by LLMs.
Implement Schema Markup (Structured Data)
This is the “source code” for AI Answers.” Mark up the category of each page and every possible content element (FAQ Schema, How-To Schema, Product Schema). This gives LLMs clean, labelled data, which is faster and more reliable than scraping raw text. Download an SEO plugin such as RankMatch to be able to add schema markup without coding knowledge.
Improve Page Load Speed
Ensure fast page load speed as LLMs need to access websites and content fast to provide answers promptly. Pages that are slow or poorly structured are more likely to be ignored by crawlers. Use Google’s free PageSpeed Insights to check the speed of your key pages or through an website SEO audit.
Ensure AI Crawlability
Make content accessible to AI crawlers with clean HTML and ensure the AI crawlers are allowed in your robots.txt. Some experts have recommended creating an llms.txt file to manage AI crawler access specifically.
Looking for a trusted SEO agency to help your brand adapt to the era of AI? 2Stallions combines data-driven strategies with personalised service to help your business rank higher and grow online. Claim your free website audit today.
Don’t Neglect Traditional SEO
Your traditional SEO foundation creates the base for AI visibility. Additionally, a study cited by Search Engine Land showed that brands ranking on page one of Google appeared to receive more mentions in LLMs. Gemini is known to rely heavily on Google search, and ChatGPT has been speculated to rely heavily on Bing search results.
From our own experiment above, the agencies recommended by Gemini and ChatGPT are also the ones appearing in top search engine results. Gemini ‘admitted’ to searching the relevant keywords on Google to generate its recommendations. It is thus important to still rank in search engines to gain visibility in LLMs.
From our own experiment above, the agencies recommended by Gemini and ChatGPT are also the ones appearing in top search engine results. Gemini ‘admitted’ to searching the relevant keywords on Google to generate its recommendations. It is thus important to still rank in search engines to gain visibility in LLMs.
Also, many of the key LLM ranking factors mentioned above, such as using schema markup, structured headings, and fast page load speed– are already the traditional components of SEO best practices.
How to Evaluate Your Efforts
Rather than keyword rankings, the new objective for visibility in ChatGPT and LLMs are brand mention and content citations
Track Branded Search Volume
If users become interested in your brand after it is cited by an LLM, they are likely to search for it directly. Monitor the search volumes on your branded queries through Google Search Console. An increase in branded queries is a powerful success metric.
Platforms Tracking AI visibility
There are various emerging platforms specialised in tracking AI visibility, such as Clearscope and OmniSEO. The most widely used SEO platforms (Ahrefs, SemRush, Ubersuggest) have also added new features to track AI mentions.
Takeaways: The Future of SEO
Earning a citation in an LLM’s answer is not about employing a few simple tricks; it is about accumulating visibility and establishing your brand as being a trustworthy source in your niche. AI and search engines today have become too sophisticated to be fooled by basic SEO tactics that used to work in the past. They now rely on a wide range of signals to identify the sources and brands to trust. They seem to ‘know’ who the most reputable players in each industry are and tends to recommend them. Your aim would be to maximise the visibility and credibility of your brand in the eyes of AI and the digital space generally, which would involve SEO/GEO optimisations as well as wider, general marketing efforts.
Ready to adapt your marketing for the future of AI search?
The shift to LLM visibility requires an evolved SEO strategy. Our SEO team have updated our approach, now called Search Everywhere Optimisation– to help our clients capture both traditional search traffic and valuable AI citations. Explore our SEO services and claim your free, no-obligation website audit to learn how your brand can start improving your visibility across search and AI engines today.
2Stallions: Who We Are
2Stallions is an award-winning, full-service digital marketing agency with offices in Singapore and Malaysia. Since 2012, we’ve helped brands of all sizes turn strategy into growth through SEO services, SEM services, social media marketing services, content marketing services, to website design and development.
Need funding support? We’ve got that covered too. 2Stallions is a pre-approved vendor for the PSG Digital Marketing Grant, allowing eligible Singaporean SMEs to claim up to 50% off our services. We are also a registered vendor of the Digi-TAC Grant.
Our results-oriented approach has earned us various industry accolades, from the Marketing Excellence Awards, Asia eCommerce Awards, the Drum Awards for Digital Advertising APAC to Quantum Leap in AI & Digital. We’re also certified partners with Google, TikTok, and Shopify, giving you direct access to the tools, insights, and support that drive real digital performance.
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