How to rank in ChatGPT (and why the answer keeps changing)

Short answer to how to rank in ChatGPT: you don't rank in ChatGPT. You get cited by it — and which sources it cites changes depending on how long it thinks.

That's not a metaphor. Semrush and Kevin Indig ran 100 prompts across 20 buyer journeys through ChatGPT's reasoning modes and compared the results. Only 25.6% of the cited domains overlapped between minimal reasoning and high reasoning on the same prompts. Nearly three in four sources were different. Same question, same model, different amount of thinking — a different set of sites gets named.

This post is for people who make games and want a model to describe theirs correctly: what ChatGPT does instead of ranking, how it picks the sources it cites, what just changed for Reddit, what you can actually do about it, and what the whole thing is realistically worth. If you came for a checklist that puts your game in the answer, this will disappoint you in a useful way.

Does ChatGPT rank websites?

No — and the distinction matters more than it sounds.

Traditional search engines produce a list. Ten positions, an order, a rank you can measure and chase. ChatGPT produces an answer, and pulls a handful of sources to build it. There are no ChatGPT rankings in the sense that Google rankings exist. There is a citation set: it varies by prompt, by phrasing, by mode, and — per the study — by how long the model thought about it.

ChatGPT search vs traditional search engines

Web search and AI search differ at the fetch layer, too. A search engine crawls, indexes and ranks pages in advance. ChatGPT search fires sub-queries at retrieval time — at high reasoning, 4.6× more of them — and assembles an answer from what comes back. Search behaviour changed on the user's side as well: people ask in natural language, in full questions, and follow up conversationally instead of reformulating keywords.

Which is why "ranking on ChatGPT" is the wrong frame, and why the SEO tools selling you a ChatGPT rank are selling a number that moves when the model breathes.

What the reasoning mode study actually found

The setup: 100 prompts, 20 buyer journeys, four verticals — B2B SaaS, finance, consumer tech, health and lifestyle. Each prompt run at minimal and at high reasoning, cited sources compared.

How does ChatGPT choose sources?

Not the way a search engine ranks pages. The model fires sub-queries, pulls multiple sources, and — this is the useful part — shifts which kinds of documents it trusts as it reasons harder. User-generated content loses roughly half its share. Government, academic and official documentation sites gain ground.

The more carefully the model thinks, the more it prefers primary and official sources over forum threads.

For a game, your "official documentation" is your own site: press kit, feature page, devlog, FAQ. That's the document class that gains share when the model slows down — and it's the one thing in this post you fully control.

High-authority sites and credible mentions

The pattern across the studies is unglamorous: being mentioned, by name, in text, in places that get read. Ahrefs' work on AI Overview brand visibility points the same way — brand mentions across authoritative sources track visibility more cleanly than the technical checklist items do. Credible mentions on high-authority sites build the topical authority that makes a model comfortable naming you.

That's earned, not configured. There is no markup for it.

Content structure: clear hierarchy, short paragraphs

What you can configure is whether the fact is extractable at all. Clear headings, a clean hierarchy, short paragraphs, one claim per paragraph, questions answered in the sentence right after the question. High-quality content in the boring sense: correct, specific, current, and written where a machine can reach it.

None of that is a ranking factor. All of it is the difference between a model quoting you accurately and a model paraphrasing someone else.

Brand mentions in ChatGPT are unstable — plan for that

SparkToro's testing found AI recommendations are highly inconsistent: ask the same question twice, get different brands. If you're tracking a single "ChatGPT ranking", you're tracking noise.

Reddit and AI citations: the advice just changed

For a year the standard tip has been: get talked about on Reddit, because Reddit gets cited constantly. That was true, and it's getting less true.

This does not mean stop talking to people in your community. It means: a Reddit thread is not your citation strategy. If the only place the fact "my game has X" exists is a comment you left in r/IndieDev, that fact is one reasoning-mode change away from disappearing.

How to appear in ChatGPT answers

Key strategies for LLM visibility

The general principle first, because the list is just it, applied: a model can only cite a fact that exists, in text, somewhere it can reach — and it will only trust that fact if it keeps meeting the same version of it. Accessibility, then consistency. Everything else is decoration.

Keep it current, too. Not on a schedule someone invented — nobody has shown that models reward a three-to-six-month refresh cadence — but because a page that contradicts reality gets you quoted wrongly, which is worse than not being quoted at all.

ChatGPT traffic: what it's actually worth

ChatGPT is enormous. Similarweb puts it around 5.5–5.7 billion visits a month. That number gets quoted constantly, and on its own it means nothing to you, because almost none of it leaves the chat window.

AI referrals sit at roughly 0.25% of traffic across the sites Ahrefs measured. Google sends about 210× more. And no storefront counts your web traffic as a discovery signal anyway — Valve documents this in its own words. The full argument is in AI search visibility won't sell your indie game.

So why do any of this?

Because the people who look you up on purpose — a journalist, a publisher's analyst, a festival juror, a player who half-remembers your name — increasingly ask a model first. The stake isn't organic traffic. It's whether the answer they get is accurate.

Tracking ChatGPT citations without fooling yourself

• GA4 will show you ChatGPT referral traffic. Expect a trickle, and don't build a strategy on it.
• Run the prompts yourself. Ask what you'd want a journalist to ask, a few times, in both modes. Read what comes back.
• AI visibility tools exist, and they'll happily sell you a score. Given 25.6% overlap between modes and SparkToro's inconsistency findings, treat any single number with suspicion.

Track accuracy, not rank. Is the genre right? The studio name? The release status? That's the metric that means something — and the one you can fix.

Generative engine optimization, minus the acronym

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting your content picked up and cited inside AI-generated answers, rather than ranked in a list of links. AEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO — the labels multiply faster than the findings, and they all describe the same ambition.

And while we're defining things: structured data (schema markup, JSON-LD) is machine-readable annotation you add to a page to describe what's on it — this is a review, that's a price, this is the author. It genuinely earns you rich results in Google. What it does not do, on the current evidence, is get you cited by a model. Useful file, wrong job.

Strip the acronym and what's left is unglamorous and mostly familiar: make the facts exist, in text, where a machine can read them; be mentioned by name in places that are read; keep it all consistent. SEO fundamentals do most of the work here, which is exactly why the AI-search industry doesn't enjoy saying so.

Common questions

Sources

• Semrush — Only 25% of cited sources overlap between ChatGPT's reasoning modes (with Kevin Indig)
• Search Engine Land — ChatGPT Thinking mode changes which brands get cited
• Ahrefs — AI Overview brand visibility factors
• Ahrefs — Schema markup and AI citations
• SparkToro — AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands
• Ahrefs — AI traffic share
• Similarweb — chatgpt.com traffic analytics
• Valve — Visibility on Steam