This piece was originally sent as an email via New Feature Friday on December 19th, 2025.

Hey team

Happy second-to-last Friday of the year. We've been hammering out a ton of admin stuff behind the scenes but no one wants to hear about operational efficiency on a Friday, now do they?

So let's give the people what they want. The most popular email I sent all year was the guide on How to Rank Anything on ChatGPT, so let's close out the year with Part 5. Read parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 if you need to catch up, but today we’ll summarize the state of LLM rankings, highlight the latest changes, and share some new secrets I’ve learned along the way.

And if you want more when you’re done, hit reply and let me know. If enough people clamor, I’ll spend my entire Christmas ignoring my family to write Part 6 so you can unwrap something amazing in your email next Friday.

2025 AI Search Summary

• Ranking on ChatGPT and other chatbots went from nothing to everything in 2025. None of this existed a year ago.
• Brands care because AI referral traffic converts 5-10x better than organic search and is the first new digital marketing channel in a decade. The value is real even if market share is still small.
• It’s still very easy to influence AI search traffic and win market share, even in competitive markets and especially outside of software.
• To play the game, you must have a good website, a blog with content, active social media accounts, and a lot of 5-star reviews.
• AI chatbots use cross-domain mentions as a proxy for authority. Rank is about increasing your brand footprint.
• A good AI search strategy works for much more than just AI. The strategy I talk about in the Guide to Winning AI Search (and today) works for SEO, social, PR, brand awareness and more. Work smart, not hard.

But a lot has changed in the world of AI search. Let’s dive in:

What content performs best in AI search?

Content will always be the nexus of AI Search campaigns, but what content performs the best? I covered this extensively in other parts of the series, but a lot has changed.

Listicles are still king

If I was to summarize AI search in one sentence, it’d be: the most listicles you're on, the higher you rank. I told you 5 months ago what SEO giant Ahrefs published last week: Listicles are the highest performing content on LLMs. Hopefully you used that 5-month head start to publish a ton of content :-)

If you’re not publishing listicles on your own site, doing exchanges with other websites, paying to publish them, and/or running the other strategies in the guide to Listicles in AI Search then you have the perfect New Year's resolution.