What are the best ways to rank content within ChatGPT or Claude outputs?

On a recent Monday morning, a marketing director sat down to prepare for a pitch. She typed into ChatGPT: “What are the most reliable B2B content marketing platforms?” Within seconds, the model delivered a neat paragraph with three recommended vendors. Her company wasn’t one of them.

That moment captures what many brands are now waking up to. The familiar rules of Google rankings are no longer enough. People are asking generative tools like ChatGPT and Claude for recommendations, statistics, and definitions. Those tools are responding with authoritative answers—often citing specific companies, products, or studies. If your content isn’t in that mix, you’re invisible in the places where decisions are starting to be made.

So the natural question is: how do you make sure your content gets ranked inside these outputs?

How generative systems select sources

Tools like ChatGPT and Claude don’t operate with the same mechanics as search engines. They aren’t serving up a list of web pages. Instead, they generate a single response shaped by:

• What they’ve been trained on. Some of this is historical, drawn from broad datasets. Increasingly, though, companies like OpenAI are striking licensing deals with publishers to pull in fresher content.
• Real-time retrieval. Platforms such as Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to draw from current web pages when building answers.
• Signals of trust. Just like in search, models prefer sources that are well-maintained, authoritative, and easy to parse.
• Formatting and clarity. Language models latch onto statements that are direct and structured. If a piece buries its key fact halfway down in a long paragraph, it’s less likely to be reused.

That mix means traditional SEO best practices are still relevant, but they aren’t sufficient. To earn placement inside an AI-generated answer, you have to think about clarity, authority, and accessibility in new ways.

What research tells us about AI-generated visibility

Several recent studies shed light on how this new ranking layer works.

• Gartner projects that search engine queries will fall by 25% by 2026, as users shift toward chat-based discovery. That means the traffic flowing through generative tools is only going to grow.
• Semrush analyzed 200,000 keywords in early 2025 and found that more than half of them triggered Google AI Overviews. Even more striking: many of those overviews led to zero-click results, with users never moving beyond the AI summary.
• On the investment side, startups dedicated to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are gaining ground. Profound raised $20M in Series A funding in June 2025 to help brands surface in AI outputs. In Berlin, Peec AI raised €7M just months after launching with the same promise.

The data makes one point unmistakable: the contest for visibility is shifting inside these AI systems, and the brands that adapt first will see outsized benefits.

Practical ways to rank inside ChatGPT and Claude

Structure your content for questions

Most users phrase their prompts as questions. Writing in that same format increases the odds your content aligns with the model’s structure. Incorporate FAQ sections, use headers that reflect real queries, and put the answer up top before unpacking details.

For example, instead of writing a meandering intro, lead with a clear definition: “Otterly launched GEO Audit in April 2025, a tool that measures how AI-friendly your content is” (Otterly AI). That kind of sentence is easy for a model to pull directly into an answer.

Add semantic depth

Keywords still matter, but AI tools rely more on context. Semrush’s live database now tracks 26.7 billion keywords, yet what’s decisive is how comprehensively you cover the surrounding concepts. If you write about content marketing, also address topics like workflow automation, freelance marketplaces, and AI-assisted copy. This depth makes your page a better fit for the way models frame answers.

Keep information current

LLMs lean toward up-to-date information, especially when building responses on timely topics. Content that mentions Peec AI’s July 2025 funding or Profound’s recent Series A will be more attractive than content with older references. That’s why regularly refreshing pages with the latest stats and examples is critical.

Build trust with credible citations

Models are risk-averse—they prefer citing authoritative studies. Linking to resources like McKinsey’s 2024 global survey on generative AI adoption, Semrush’s AI Overviews analysis, or coverage in the Wall Street Journal helps signal your own credibility.

Test new GEO tools

The market for GEO tools is growing fast. Lists from Writesonic and NoGood cover emerging options, from rank trackers to AI-specific audits. Experimenting with them can help identify gaps in your content strategy.

Case examples

• MarketMuse and Monday.com: By restructuring their blog around comprehensive topical clusters, MarketMuse helped Monday.com grow organic traffic by 1,570%. That structural clarity also made their content easier for AI systems to cite.
• Otterly AI: When it launched GEO Audit in April 2025, it gave brands their first real diagnostic tool for measuring AI citability.
• Profound: Backed by its Series A funding, Profound is working directly with brands to ensure they appear in generative buyer’s guides and summaries.

These stories point in the same direction: clarity, comprehensiveness, and authority drive visibility.

Where Contently fits in

All of this requires sustained content creation, not just one-off posts. Brands need articles that are clear, structured, regularly updated, and authoritative. For many marketing teams, that’s a heavy lift on top of existing workloads.

Contently provides a way forward. Its marketplace of more than 160,000 vetted freelancers means brands can scale up production without sacrificing quality. Just as important, its editorial workflows ensure content is not only well written but also optimized for both human readers and AI systems. That combination—human storytelling and machine readability—is what gets content featured in ChatGPT and Claude outputs.

The road ahead

Search isn’t disappearing, but it’s being reshaped. Google still handles billions of queries every day, yet tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are becoming people’s first stop for answers. And when those tools decide which brands to mention, they are using a different set of signals than the familiar search algorithm.

That makes ranking in generative outputs the next competitive frontier. Companies that update content often, support it with credible sources, structure it clearly, and invest in GEO practices will see their names appear in the conversations that matter. Those that don’t may find themselves excluded from view.

Conclusion

For years, marketers measured success by whether their brand ranked on page one of Google. Increasingly, the metric will be whether a brand is named in a ChatGPT or Claude response. Getting there means writing with clarity, updating with fresh data, citing authoritative studies, and building content comprehensive enough to serve as a definitive answer.

The work is not simple, but it is achievable with the right systems in place. Partners like Contently offer both the scale and editorial rigor required to meet this challenge. In a world where AI is becoming the guide, the brands that adapt will be the ones that people hear about first.

Sources

1. Gartner forecast on declining search volume
2. Semrush zero-click / AI-Overview cohort study (200K keywords, Jan–Mar 2025)
3. McKinsey Global Survey: generative-AI adoption in early 2024
4. Contently Creative Marketplace (160,000+ vetted freelancers)
5. Semrush live database size (26.7B keywords, 2025 stats page)
6. Wall Street Journal feature on GEO startups (AthenaHQ, Profound, Scrunch AI)
7. NoGood roundup: “9 Best Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Tools” (2025)
8. Peec AI €7M seed funding (EU-Startups, 3 July 2025)
9. Writesonic blog — “Top 15 Generative Engine Optimization Tools to Try in 2025”
10. Otterly AI blog — GEO Audit launch (7 April 2025)
11. Profound raises $20M Series A (PR Newswire, 19 June 2025)
12. MarketMuse case study — Monday.com boosts organic traffic 1,570%