AI Ranking Factors – a Working List

What are the AI ranking factors for LLM tools like ChatGPT?

No one really knows all of them, but there are some hints out there in the community. So this is a crowdsourced working list of top AI ranking factors.

Top AI Ranking Factors for LLMs like ChatGPT

These ranking factors are on a sliding scale and the weights are subject to change depending on the model and the context. These factors mentioned below are not binary, but should be considered for minimum inclusion but then also for further algorithm optimization.

• Content that supports general consensus for inclusion
• Ranking in Bing
• Mentioned on external sites
• Linked to from external sites
• Included in listicles and rankings
• Included in comprehensive guides
• Clear dates
• Fresh updates – and recently
• Frequency of updates
• Authorship on content
• Comprehensive content so the AI crawler only has to visit one source rather than many
• Tables of data – both for consensus and to contribute new ideas

Top AI Discovery Factors for LLMs like ChatGPT

It’s important to distinguish that language models need to have a corpus, or an index, of content and entities to start with. These are what people are discovering sare the top discovery factors and sources:

• Wikipedia
• Bing search
• Indexnow
• CommonCrawl
• (Likely) a see set of known high quality websites
• (Likely) public data sets from institutions, government, orgs, all of it
• (Likely) books

Fundamentals Before Discovery and Ranking

Here are some building block fundamentals. This applies to AI, but also have strong overlaps with traditional SEO.

• Do you have a page for the product, service, company, person, or entity you want to be discovered. Beyond the homepage, what is it you want to be known for and does it have a dedicated page.
• Is your content crawlable and reachable by AI and search engines’ crawlers
• Is the content relatively fast, not overly slow
• Are you obscuring content behind paywalls, JavaScript, or other blockers

This is a working list that should be updated as we get more intel.