Getting AI to recommend your business is the new SEO

Getting AI to recommend your business is the new SEO. There's a car wrap shop in Utah whose business is up for one reason: when someone asks ChatGPT for a wrap shop, it names them first. That's the whole game now — not ranking on a page of blue links, but being the answer the model gives.

So here are three tips on how to get AI to recommend you, pulled from Ahrefs — an SEO and AI data company. They'd know: they sit on millions of data points that let them see how AI recommends under the hood. Every number below comes from their research, linked as we go.

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This is the contrarian one, so I'll lead with it. 43.8% of all the pages ChatGPT cites are “best ___ list” articles — nearly half. So if you want to get recommended, that's the format to write in.

Here's the part nobody says out loud: ranking yourself #1 in your own list doesn't hurt whether you show up in AI search. If you market a journaling app, you can literally publish “The best journaling apps of 2026,” put yourself in the top spot, and ChatGPT won't care. Ahrefs found a self-promotional list — where the publisher ranked its own product first — still showed up in more than a third of ChatGPT responses in the software category. And generally, the higher your brand sits on a list, the more often it gets recommended.

Don't waste your time on monster articles. 53.4% of the pages AI cites are under 1,000 words. Over half. That cuts directly against the old wisdom that you needed a 10,000-word guide on your blog to compete.

That tactic worked in the old SEO era. We're in a new one. The correlation between word count and getting cited is basically zero, so write what the topic actually needs and stop padding it to hit some length target. Shorter, sharper, and updated often beats long and stale.

This is the surprising one, and it's the biggest. YouTube is the single strongest lever for showing up in AI. Across 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions correlated with AI visibility harder than any other signal — stronger than backlinks, stronger than domain authority, stronger than branded web mentions. And it held across ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, and AI Overviews, not just Google's own products.

Why? Both Google and OpenAI trained their models on YouTube transcripts. OpenAI's GPT-4 was trained on over a million hours of them. So if people are saying your brand's name on video, the model has already seen it — and treats that as proof you matter. On top of that, YouTube is now the most-cited website in the little AI summaries you see on Google, up 34% in the last six months.

If you take one thing from this: being talked about on video is now an SEO lever. That's also why I'm saying this on camera.

Here's the shift underneath all of this: ranking #1 on Google no longer guarantees that AI recommends your website. A year ago, about 76% of AI Overview citations came from Google's top 10 results. Today it's about 38% — roughly half, in twelve months. Google is increasingly pulling answers from fan-out sub-queries rather than the main results page.

Translation: it's less about traditional SEO going forward, and more about understanding how and why AI recommends. Win the topic, not the single keyword. Be the name that comes up no matter how the question gets phrased.

If you make anything online, the moves are simple:

• Get talked about on video. YouTube is the strongest AI visibility signal there is.
• Publish “best X” lists and put yourself in them. Nearly half of ChatGPT's citations are this format.
• Write what the topic needs. Length doesn't move the needle; freshness and usefulness do.
• Own the topic, not the keyword. Ranking #1 isn't the finish line anymore.

If you want help getting your business discoverable in AI, that's exactly the kind of thing I automate — grab a 15-minute chat and we'll find the highest-leverage move for your business. Follow for more — I dig through this stuff so you don't have to.