How to Improve Your Brand’s Ranking in AI Search Results: 10 High-Impact Strategies

AI search is redefining how brands are discovered online. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two years, you are noticing more and more of your friends and family describing how they were able to get to better, more efficient outcomes by going to AI models instead of traditional search. With platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and Claude becoming digital gatekeepers for this new way to find information, traditional search rankings are no longer enough.

Unlike legacy search engines that deliver a list of links, AI platforms serve synthesized answers. These often include a handful of brand mentions—those that have earned trust, authority, and visibility across the web. While the AI models love giving practical advice, they are also very likely to recommend brands or companies that can help. Those often come in the form of citations, but more on that later!

The shift is becoming more and more evident... If you’re not being recommended in AI-generated answers, you may be invisible to your potential customers.

Here are 10 practical, technical, and strategic actions you can take to increase your brand's presence in AI search results. Each is backed by real-world examples and focused on long-term impact.

1. Understand How AI Search Works: Intent, Context, and Authority

AI models such as GPT-4, Gemini, and Claude don’t simply crawl the web... they try to understand it. Their core strength lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which allows them to interpret meaning, context, and relationships between topics and entities.

Why This Matters

Where traditional SEO focused on keywords, AI search is about contextual relevance through the lens of prompts. These models decide what to surface based on a mix of:

-Relevance to the user query

-The perceived authority and trustworthiness of the source

-The clarity and usefulness of the content

Real-World Example

If someone asks ChatGPT, “What’s a good CRM for real estate agents?” it might respond:

“Many real estate agents use platforms like HubSpot, Follow Up Boss, or Zoho CRM due to their automation and integrations.”

Why those brands? Because their names are consistently associated with relevant content, third-party reviews, and instructional material across the web.

Key Takeaway

To rank in AI-generated responses, your brand must be clearly associated with specific topics or problems. Vague or generalized content won’t help you. While fluffy language might sound nice for your brand image, unfortunately it might hurt you when it comes to the AI models understanding your website.

2. Create Content That’s AI-Friendly and User-Focused

AI tools reward content that’s helpful, well-structured, and written in natural language. Your writing should sound like something a human expert would say during a podcast, not a keyword-stuffed webpage. This isn't to say that traditional SEO techniques are not helpful for other reasons, but the AI models need to know that you, the human expert, wrote the content.

Best Practices for Content Creation

-Answer questions directly: Don’t bury answers five paragraphs down. Lead with value.

-Use headers and summaries: AI models use structural cues (H2s, bullet points, summaries) to find and extract relevant answers.

-Write for humans, optimize for machines: Use conversational language, but include specific terminology where appropriate.

Example: Good vs. Better

❌ Bad: “Our platform is ideal for business optimization efficiency processes.”

✅ Good: “Our software helps small business owners reduce time spent on manual data entry by automating their invoices.”

The latter is what AI looks for: clarity, specificity, and relevance.

3. Leverage Structured Data and Schema Markup

Structured data allows AI (and search engines) to understand the type of content you’re publishing and how to categorize it.

What You Should Mark Up

-Product details

-Author bios

-FAQ sections

-Reviews and ratings

-How-to guides

-Organization data

Technical Example

A blog post about tax deductions for freelancers should include BlogPosting schema, plus FAQPage if it answers specific user questions.

Bonus Tip

If your site features products, use Product, Offer, and Review schema. This helps AI understand not just that you sell something, but what it is, how it’s rated, and how it compares to similar products.

4. Target Featured Snippets and AI Overview Triggers

AI-generated results often mirror or pull from content that earns featured snippets in traditional search. I can't stress enough how important this is! Optimizing content for snippets, meaning being specific and direct, will help in so many other ways for the AI models.

How to Target Snippets

-Use question-based H2s (e.g., “What is a Roth IRA?”)

-Follow with a 40–60 word concise answer

-Include examples, statistics, or comparisons where possible

Example: High-Snippet Opportunity

H2: What is a SEP IRA?

A SEP IRA (Simplified Employee Pension) is a retirement account that allows small business owners to contribute to their employees’ retirement savings with higher limits than traditional IRAs.

This format is ideal for both featured snippets and AI-generated responses.

5. Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO for Crawlability and Speed

Content won’t help you if AI crawlers can’t properly access or index your site. This also includes adding llms.txt file to your website.

Technical Priorities

-Site Speed: Aim for mobile load times under 2.5 seconds. Use lazy loading, compress images, and remove bloat.

-Mobile Usability: Over 60% of AI search queries occur on mobile or voice interfaces. Your site must be responsive or you risk being skipped.

-Clean HTML: Use semantic tags and minimize unnecessary JavaScript.

-Canonical URLs: Prevent duplicate content confusion.

-Sitemap & llms.txt: Ensure AI crawlers can access everything important.

Example: Hidden Content Pitfall

A SaaS company hosted key documentation in a gated portal. AI tools couldn’t access it, so their solutions never showed in AI-generated answers. Once they moved the content to a public help center, their mentions in ChatGPT doubled very quickly.

6. Get Cited by Authoritative Third-Party Sources

AI search models reward what’s known as off-domain validation. They trust your brand more when others trust you too. This is very similar to traditional SEO techniques of acquiring backlinks to your website to prove to the search engines that others think you are great too.

Ways to Get Mentioned Elsewhere

-Pitch guest posts on reputable industry blogs

-Partner with influencers who link to or mention your brand

-Use tools such as Just Reach Out to get featured in news stories

-Publish proprietary research or original data... this attracts links organically

-Pitch yourself to be a guest on podcasts

Real-World Impact

A fast casual restaurant chain called Springbone selling paleo-friendly healthy meals was mentioned in a very popular food blog in an article about where to buy healthy lunch food. Within days, they were showing up in ChatGPT as an option for “best bone broth and paleo food in NYC.”

These mentions create a flywheel effect that boosts your visibility in both search and AI.

7. Build Brand as an Entity: Structured Presence Across Platforms

AI platforms use entity recognition to understand who or what your brand is. There is a way to quantify this through Embedding Cosine Similarity. This means having a digital footprint that consistently supports your brand identity.

How to Build Your Entity

-Maintain consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) info across listings

-Get listed in structured data sources (Wikidata, CB Insights, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile)

-Claim your brand on knowledge bases like Google’s Knowledge Panel

-Use Organization schema with links to social profiles and logos

Example

A former ABC News data and politics reporter with minimal online content got a boost in Google AI rankings after creating a detailed online profile, launching a Substack, and publishing thought leadership pieces under their own name.

The AI began recognizing Galen as an authority on interpreting data in elections. Amazingly this was not because of page volume, but due to brand clarity.

8. Measure AI Visibility and Performance with ChatRank

Traditional SEO tools fall short when tracking how often your brand shows up in AI-native search environments.

That’s where ChatRank comes in.

What ChatRank Does:

-Tracks how often your brand is cited across platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini

-Compares your performance to competitors

-Shows which content is driving AI mentions and provides additional content to write for continued growth

-Recommends site optimizations for improved AI visibility

Use Case

A small but successful SaaS platform used ChatRank to monitor its performance. It found that Perplexity mentioned a competitor 3x more often in queries like “best software tools for getting booked on podcasts.”

This insight led them to revamp their product description page for Podcasts with clearer headings, expert quotes, and FAQs—leading to a 40% increase in AI model visibility within six weeks.

9. Refresh and Re-Optimize Existing Content

AI models favor current, authoritative sources. Outdated content can silently sink your visibility over time.

Refresh Best Practices

-Audit your top 50 pages quarterly

-Update statistics, citations, and links

-Add internal links to newer pages

-Expand content to include new FAQs or trends

-Use the “Last updated” tag for freshness signals

Example

A productivity app saw dwindling mentions in ChatGPT answers about “best tools for remote teams.” After updating a 2021 blog post with 2024 stats and new use cases, their visibility in AI queries rebounded within a month.

10. Adapt to AI Search Trends in Real Time

The AI search ecosystem is changing fast. What worked last month may not work tomorrow.

Stay Ahead With:

-Weekly testing of your brand in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude

-Subscribing to update feeds from OpenAI, Google, and Meta AI

-Experimenting with long-tail conversational queries

-Creating content specifically designed to answer how, why, and which questions

You can do all of that yourself, trying to stay ahead of the AI changes and updates. Or, you can sign up for ChatRank to help streamline all of that for you.

Final Pro Tip

Don’t optimize content to “rank” just for the sake of ranking. Optimize to be useful in the exact context your audience cares about. AI models are trained to surface the most valuable, context-rich, human-readable responses. It's not gaming the system, it's expanding your brand to the new world of AI.

The Bottom Line

AI search rewards brands that invest in quality content, clear technical structure, external authority, and strategic measurement. I hope these 10 strategies give you a blueprint to thrive in a world where the front page is now a conversation. The winners will be the ones who are spoken about, not simply searched for.

Ready to measure your AI visibility and outpace your competition? Start tracking your mentions on ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, and more with ChatRank.