How to Rank in AI Search in 2026 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and more)

Search is changing fast. While people still Google it, millions are turning to AI assistants like ChatGpt and Perplexity for quick answers, often without visiting websites at all. If your brand doesn't show up in AI answers, you're missing out on millions of potential customers. So, in this video, you'll learn how AI search works and differs from traditional search, five practical ways to make sure your brand is visible in AI search, and how to measure your success in the AI era. Now, you've probably heard that GEO, that's generative engine optimization, or AEO, that's answer engine optimization, is the new SEO. Some even claim AI search is killing Google. But is that true? To test this, we've built a tool that compares the traffic makeup of 50,000 websites. The result, Google sends roughly 196 times more traffic than Chat GPT. So, while Google remains a traffic giant, AI search is changing how people discover brands, shifting the game from clicks to mentions. But there are some differences. Traditional search gives you a list of links to explore, while AI search delivers direct answers. Instead of fighting for clicks, you're now fighting for mentions within the answers themselves. See where I'm going here? The goal is no longer about ranking high in search results. It's about increasing your brand visibility in AI answers, making sure you're part of every conversation, even if users never click through your website. The good news is that large language models and AI platforms pull real-time search results from search engines to generate their answers. This means SEO best practices are still the foundation for getting picked up in AI search. So, Jio isn't replacing SEO, it's building on top of it. To make your brand visible in AI search, all you need are SEO fundamentals mixed with a few tactics borrowed from other marketing disciplines. Here's our five-step process. Increase brand mentions across the web. Write content AI loves to site. Structure for AI comprehension. Dominate Reddit and YouTube. And close AI mentions and citation gaps. All right, let's talk about increasing your brand mentions across the web. To do that, you first need to take inventory of your existing brand mentions in AI. That's exactly why we built Brand Radar, our new AI visibility tool that monitors all your brand and product mentions across six AI assistants, including Google AI overviews and newly released AI mode, Chat GPT, Perplexity, and more. Simply add your brand at the top and instantly see which AI platforms mention your brand. Now that we know your exact AI footprint, let's talk about concrete ways to increase it. This may surprise you, but most of your brand mentions will come from other websites, not yours. When I look at the top resources for HRES brand mentions in AI responses, third party websites dominated. For example, in Google's AI overviews, the top 10 pages mentioning hrefs didn't even include hrefs.com. Our site only appeared as a secondary source only on position 12. Chat GBD was even worse. We didn't even get mentioned at all. So, this isn't a random occurrence. Our latest study of 75,000 brands across millions of AI overviews also proves that branded web mentions correlate more strongly with brand mentions in AI overviews. Unlike traditional SEO, AI picks up brand mentions with or without backlinks. This makes sense because more brand mentions means more training data for the large language models to learn from. So to increase your brand authority outside of your own website, focus on getting featured on industry best of lists, PR and media coverage outlets, and customer reviews and case studies. These all send powerful trust signals to AI that you're worthy of being mentioned in AI answers. For example, let's say that you're looking for best of listicles like top 10 SEO tools for 2025 to feature SEO tool there. To find them, go to Brand Radar and type in your niche in the market field, SEO in this case. Then go to the cited pages report and filter for quiries that include the word best in them. This will show us the exact pages that get cited the most in the SEO niche for AI queries that contain the word best in them. And we've got over 300 such cited pages. These are all publications you could collaborate with to build quality associations in LLMs. To further see the specific quiries citing each page, just click on the responses dropdown. Next, let's talk about creating content AI loves to site. Not all content gets picked up by AI tools. Based on our study, the following content types earned the most AI traffic. Best content 7.06%. How to guides 6.35%. Top lists 5.5%. Versus product comparisons 4.88%. 88% plus product focus pages in the following percentages. Contact 6.8%, products 6.43%, product 4.71%, and services 4.53%. With this in mind, your strategy should be simple. Cast a wide net. Some people want quick trend updates. Others need step-by-step tutorials like this one, while many are hunting for data studies to back up their decisions. A good starting point is to audit your existing content. So head over to Href's free web analytics and check the AI search traffic channel to see how visitors from chat GPT and the likes interact with your website, including the pages they actually visit. Here's an extra tip. Keep your content fresh and up to date. We analyzed 17 million citations across seven AI search platforms only to find out that AI assistants prefer citing content that is 27.5% fresher. Why does freshness matter so much? It all comes down to how GEO works. AI systems draw information from training data and real-time searches on Google, Bing, and the other search engines. When they already know an answer from their training data, they don't need to search. But when they encounter something new, they actively look for the freshest information available on the web, especially from emerging topics. This process is called retrieval augmented generation, short for rag. And freshness is your key to getting cited more often. Since we're talking about content, let's see how to better structure it for AI comprehension. GEO requires your content to be clear and structured so AI platforms can extract and present it in the most comprehensive way possible when generating fanout queries. Your goal is to create atomic content content paragraphs able to stand on their own delivering a complete answer when surfaced by Google Chat GBT perplexity and other AI search platforms. If this sounds familiar, it's because that's how well optimized SEO content has worked for years. To create atomic content, keep those two things in mind. First, apply the bottom line upfront framework. Frontload the most important information at the top of the paragraph. Then, proceed with an explanation, example, or supporting details. Bluff works because humans scan and read information in an F-ike pattern. Second, check for completeness. Before publishing, it's worth scanning your page and asking yourself, is related information group logically? Is each section clear and easy to follow? Does this paragraph fully answer the intent of aquiry? To make this audit faster, plug your content in Href's AI content helper. Then toggle the highlight button to visualize your topic coverage on a sentence by sentence basis. This will help you see overlapped or fragmented sections that should be merged, like this one, or sections that don't cover a topic completely. If this all sounds like a lot, here's a few simple formatting rules to keep your content AI friendly. Organize your content logically with clear headings and subheadings. This will help AI to jump to your particular section in the article when someone asks a question. Also, use bullet points for list items so AI doesn't miss out on any vital information to be quoted and add FAQs and product information. Now, this might sound like a no-brainer, but simple answers to questions like, "Do you have a GSC integration?" Yes, we do, can surface your brand at the top of the AI generated answers. All right, we're down to our next step, and that is to dominate Reddit and YouTube for maximum AI reach. These are the second and third most cited domains in AI responses, according to our study. Yet, most people ignore them. Let's start with YouTube. Video content gets heavily cited by AI systems because it often contains detailed explanations that AI loves to reference. So focus on creating tutorials and product demos with clear timestamps. Use keywordrich titles and descriptions and add detailed video descriptions AI can parse. We've put together a complete guide that walks you through our video SEO strategy. But if you want to take a quick look at how your brand stands on YouTube, go to brand radar, enter your brand, and you'll find brand mentions in titles, descriptions, and transcripts. Not the full ones, just snippets. So you can jump to the video part where your brand gets a shout out. As for Reddit, your goal should be to find hightraic Reddit threads already ranking on Google and add thoughtful, helpful answers to relevant subreddits. So head back to Atres brand radar. Plug in your niche SEO in this case. Go to the cited pages report and filter for URLs containing reddit.com. This will reveal prime threads so you can contribute with valuable insights about your niche. If you want to dig deeper, go to the Reddit report which surfaces subreddits ranking in Google which already mention your brand. The bottom line is that both platforms reward authentic engagement over promotional content. So focus on being generally helpful and the AI citations will flow naturally. Finally, time to see where your competitors get AI mentions and citations, but you don't. Head back to Brand Radar and enter your brand plus your competitors. You'll see an overview of your brand's AI footprint versus your competitors. Now you have two ways to find opportunities. If you want to find pages that mention your competitors but not you, hover over any AI platform chart, say AI overviews, and click others only. Then check AI answers to see AI responses you ought to be mention in. If you want to find pages that site your competitors but not you, clear all filters. Go to sited pages, then filter for cited domains that site your competitor's domains but exclude yours. This reveals exactly which content topics and pages sites your competitors, plus the search volume of those quiries. Now you know precisely where to create deeper content to compete for those AI citations. While we're here, it's worth noting that you can't measure GEO success the same way we do SEO. That is with rankings. Instead, track these metrics, some of which we already mentioned. AI mentions, your brand showing up in AI responses with or without links. AI citations, those are mentions that link back to your own website, and AI traffic, which is often higher quality since users are pre-qualified by the AI chat bots. All these metrics can be tracked through ATS brand radar, site explorer, and web analytics. All right, so now that we're at the end of the video, we've seen that good content, clear structure, and solid authority signals on thirdparty platforms work for both SEO and AI search. The good news is that you're not starting from scratch. You're building on top of SEO to account for not just clicks, but also AI mentions and citations. So, as Ryan Law from HF team put it, whether you call it GEO, AEO, LMO, it's all just SEO. Heck, we might even call it SEO for AI search. Thanks for watching and see you in the next video.