How to rank #1 on ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode FAST

Most people focus on Google SEO, but the problem with that is it's dying. AI-driven search is the future. So if you think about optimizing for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, that's where things are going in the future. And I'm going to show you how you can rank number 1 for these quickly. So what I'm showing you on my screen right now is the fact that my podcast Marketing School ranks number 1 for a lot of these LLMs. You look at Perplexity, you look at Claude, and you look at Grok. You look at Gemini, it's there. And I even threw in DeepSeek, which is a new player in town. And even with DeepSeek, which I leveraged with Perplexity, you can see that it's number 1. And by the way, if you look at the Perplexity screenshot where it shows 3 citations, that is the number 1 thing that you have to think about when it comes to ranking highly on the LLMs, or this is also known as LLM optimization or generative engine optimization, GEO or LLMO. You can use either one, doesn't matter. Citations matter a lot because with Marketing School, and you can see DeepSeek called it out here, it took a look at the over the thousands of episodes that we've done. So over 2,200 episodes, I think at this point it's probably closer to 3,000 or so, but 3,000 episodes and we've got thousands of reviews. And both my podcast co-host and I, Neil, we're relatively known in the marketing space, at least the digital marketing space. And so there's a good amount of reviews. Those are citations. There is a ton of content. Those, each page you can count as sure, like a citation as well, because there's a lot of links that tied it, that are tied in with it as well. Um, there's also people that review the podcast that talk about it on the internet. So there's other people talking about it. And you can see here, the fact that it cited 3 different sources, that's pretty good. A lot of the other results only have, you know, I'm seeing 2, 1, 3 or so. So the more citations you have, the better chance you're going to have of ranking highly on these AI-driven search engines. So the second part to consider here is that even though search engines themselves are losing ground in terms of popularity, they're not going to just die overnight. What is going to happen though, is website traffic is going to continue to decrease over time. And that's because you're seeing more AI overviews in the results. So when you search on Google, when you search on Bing, you're getting a lot of AI overviews, which means a lot more people aren't clicking through to the actual websites themselves. And that's not a good thing for website owners. But that being said, still, these LLMs are still pulling from Google. They're still pulling from Bing. If you are looking to rank highly on ChatGPT, you got to optimize for Bing. In fact, of those examples I showed you earlier with marketing school, the only one where it didn't rank number 1 was ChatGPT because we've never optimized for Bing in the first place. So you have to think about optimizing for Bing. So you got to optimize still for Google, still for Bing, but you have to understand that we're going into a new world. And which brings me to my next point around AI overviews. You have to optimize for AI overviews. And that means that when you're answering a question, think about getting to a succinct answer. If you're putting up a blog post, for example, maybe you're getting to the answer in a paragraph, or maybe it's formatted really well because that way engines can easily see that, oh, okay, this is not only authoritative website, this is a very direct answer. And that's how people used to rank for— rank highly for these rank 0, for example, these rank 0 results. Those are now replaced by AI overviews, right? It's always been about kind of just getting to the point because users just want to get to the point. The attention span is going lower and lower. And so when you think about ranking highly for LLMs, you got to think about, okay, how are future searchers going to experience the internet? I think we're already starting to see that right now. Now, number 4, when I talk about citations, I also mean highly trusted platforms like Reddit or Quora. And these are especially gaining favor in Google. The more citations you can get there, or let's say you're— if you're a software company, If you can get reviews on G2, for example, the more people you can get talking about you, the better, right? So you got to think about where is your community hanging out in the first place and where you can get more people talking about you. And this is where community is going to continue to get stronger from an SEO standpoint. That's why community traffic is going up. You think about HubSpot's community, Reddit's community, Quora continue to go up. Community is going to be a big thing. If you can start your own community to have your own community talking about you all the time, that is going to be a big benefit as well. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. All right, so the other piece is going to be around search everywhere optimization. So it's no longer just search engine optimization. You got to think about optimizing for, again, wherever your audience is hanging out. The more places your audience is hanging out, the better for you, because let's say they're hanging out on LinkedIn. They're hanging out on X, for example, all these sites are being crawled. And let's say if you're trying to optimize for Gemini, okay, well, if you're posting to YouTube, that's going to be another leg up too. And so when these LLMs are looking at everything, they're looking at the entire internet. They're also looking at what other people are talking about. They're trying to serve you the best possible answer. To me, search everywhere optimization means that it just means that attention is so fragmented now that you can't just look at one search engine. It used to be like that maybe 10, 15 years ago. But now attention is so fragmented that people are looking at so many different things, they're getting distracted by so many different things. You got to think about search everywhere optimization. And if you're thinking about going back to the engines, this will be the final point. If you go back to the search engines still today, you have to optimize for page speed, you should try to optimize more for natural language, you have to think about schema markup, all those things, right? And then making things easy for things to crawl. So for example, if you have different languages on your website, you might have hreflang, for example, And you might have these languages stored in different subdirectories or subfolders, and that's going to help. So even as of this making, it's not that SEO, traditional SEO is completely dead. I will say as an SEO, traditional SEO is dying, but that doesn't mean that you can't take advantage right now and still bridge the gap because there's still ample opportunity for you to reap the rewards. You just have to understand that we're transitioning into the search everywhere optimization world, which includes optimizing for LLMs. And this is how you're going to rank highly. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. You look at Marketing School, that is one really good example of consistency across the board. And I believe that you could do the same thing too. So let me know in the comments what you think. And if you enjoyed this video, check out this next video over here on this AI marketing stack I'm using to add millions to my business.