AI & LLM Search Ranking Factors – a Working List for AEO and GEO Purposes

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. See our post tracking top LLM model leaderboards for an up-to-date ranking.

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 the 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 essential to note that language models require a corpus, or an index, of content and entities to begin with. These are what people are discovering are the top discovery factors and sources:

• Wikipedia
• Bing search
• Indexnow
• CommonCrawl
• (Likely) a seed set of known high-quality websites
• (Likely) public data sets from institutions, government, orgs, all of it
• (Likely) all the books that can be scanned

Fundamentals Before Discovery and Ranking

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

• Landing page supremacy: Just like in SEO, you should have dedicated landing pages for the concepts, subjects, topics you want to rank for. The devil is in the details but finding the right balance of comprehensiveness and focus is the billion dollar question. We’ve been battling this in SEO for a long time, and it will see-saw back and forth for a while. Questions to ask: 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?

AI & LLM Search Ranking Factor Studies – What Others are Finding

This field is moving fast, but many firms have produced some interesting studies on what’s working in AI & LLM search optimization. We’ll continue to update and compile the latest here.

A May 2025 study by Ahrefs found that branded web mentions were the highest-correlating metric with showing up in Google’s AI overviews.

Ryan Law of Ahrefs notes on that same post the distinction between the factors between SEO & GEO/AEO:

“Unlinked mentions—text written about your brand on other websites—have very little impact on SEO, but a much bigger impact on GEO… LLMs derive their understanding of a brand’s authority from words on the page, from the prevalence of particular words, the co-occurrence of different terms and topics, and the context in which those words are used.“

From what I’ve observed this year, there has been a lot of heat around using digital PR as a strong AEO method to secure external brand mentions and links on high-authority domains.

An April 2025 presentation by Josh Blyskal at Profound found that there was only a 12% overlap between ChatGPT and Google SERPs:

Reddit is a Volatile Source in ChatGPT – the Latest October 19, 2025

Reddit, along with Wikipedia, has been a major source for both AI search answers as well as ranking in traditional Google Search. Both Google and OpenAI have Reddit partnerships, with direct access to their data.

So that’s the background context for the latest October 21, 2025 findings by Josh at Profound, showing the fluctuations:

The takeaway is that visibility in ChatGPT for Reddit is down from the peaks, but is also making its way back.

What’s actionable? For marketers, keep pursuing and considering Reddit as an important source, but don’t put all your eggs into that basket. Diversify across other domains and publications for full coverage.