This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on September 12th, 2025.

Hey team,

Happy Friday. A few weeks ago I shared my secret playbook on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT and it turned out to be the most popular email I’ve ever sent. But you didn’t really think I gave away all my secrets in Part 1, did you?

Part 1 covered the basics. A short recap is: listicles are your new best friend, AIWire is your amplifier, your own site matters more than you think, and Reddit is the hidden heavyweight. If you didn't read that one, read it here—but today I want to give away even more secrets.

Because here’s the truth: ranking on AI chatbots has the highest potential impact of any marketing channel right now and It’s easier today than it ever will be. If you’re old enough to remember when ranking on Google was easy, then you already know that this is not going to be this easy ever again.

So let’s dig into Part 2 of my secrets on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT:

1. The 10 Best Ways to Make Listicles for LLMs in 2025

As a recap: LLMs love listicles. They account for more than 90% of the synthesized results on commercial-intent searches. I glossed over this last time but let me say it very plainly: You can influence AI rankings by writing listicles on your own domain. Especially if you’re not in tech, you should start here. It’s free, it works, and it’s the single strongest signal to LLMs right now.

But what content ranks? Are all listicles created equally? Of course not. So let’s go through my list of how to make a good listicle (you won’t believe #4 🙄).

  1. Add expert bylines and bios to show the robots that the content was written by a real human with real expertise. “Steve is the founder of Press Ranger, an award-winning PR software tool that helps businesses tell their own story to the press. He has 20 years of product and engineering experience and has sold 3 startups to public companies.”
  2. Secret hack: Listicles perform better in first person. Expert shares their tips > business creates marketing content
  3. Use structured data. You need to attach structured data to every piece of content you produce. For a listicle, this is usually going to be Article, ItemList, HowTo or FAQPage. Try to use all of them for each piece.
  4. Include FAQs for easy snippet-style answers. Every article you make should have FAQs and they should be the exact queries you think people are going to ask LLMs. Put them at the end of the article.
  5. Include summaries everywhere. TLDR sections, “best for” summaries, etc. Chatbots love pulling this info. Are robots as lazy as humans? Summary: yes.
  6. Update old content—recency matters more than you think it does. An invisible article can be upgraded to visible just by changing the publish date and freshening up the content.
  7. Use literal, question-style headings like “How to do Y”, “How to do X”. I shared about how query fanning works in the last piece. You’re not writing headings for Google anymore. No keyword stuffing. Write like your customers will write.
  8. The tone is confident, factual, and objective. Be truthful and comprehensive. Mention competitors. Be clear where your product excels and where it’s not the right choice.
  9. Write about topics not keywords. Superficial SEO content will lose to comprehensive, authoritative content every time. You don’t need to keyword stuff anymore.
  10. Quality > quantity. Stop AI generating 1000s of pages and hoping for the best. This might work in the short term but it will get your domain flagged in the long term. Strategy is the multiplier. You will win by choosing high-intent commercial queries that you can win and building good content around them.