What actually makes a brand rank on ChatGPT?

On top of traditional SEO, the things that drive LLM visibility are: brand mentions in high-traffic Reddit threads, placements in listicles, competitor comparison content on your own site, and consistent posting across every major social platform. Brands doing all of these are winning in both Google and LLMs.

Is posting brand mentions on Reddit against the rules?

Yes, it's openly against Reddit's terms of service. New Seas does it anyway and says it works — both for sticking on Reddit and for boosting AI visibility. They lost over 50% of 100 accounts when starting out and have since figured out how to keep comments live and avoid bans. Whether to do it is a brand decision.

Will listicle links hurt my Google rankings?

They can, if you go all-in on listicles without balancing them. Kai's recommendation: keep building your normal link profile alongside listicle placements. Add more branded homepage anchors from high-traffic sites to offset the influx. Listicles can drive significant ChatGPT traffic while having minimal Google impact, so the blend matters.

Is competitor comparison content legal?

Generally yes, if it's based on publicly available information and isn't written to bash. New Seas has published roughly 300 competitor comparison and alternative articles. They've seen about three or four legal actions in 18 months — all cease and desist letters — and taking the article down resolved each one. The other 295+ articles generated revenue without issue.

Which social platforms actually help with LLM visibility?

LinkedIn is the strongest one Kai points to — he can see his own website visibility is significantly driven by his LinkedIn profile. Medium was stronger before and has cooled off but is still being tested. Reddit, YouTube, Facebook groups, Crunchbase, and Wikipedia-style profiles all add LLM touch points. The more places your brand appears in text form, the more surface area LLMs have to find and cite you.

If I'm already making money from ChatGPT, does that mean my strategy is working?

Not necessarily. Kai's point is that early ChatGPT revenue for most brands was luck — the same SEO work that ranked them on Google happened to get picked up by LLMs. Without actively targeting LLMs through Reddit, listicles, competitor content, and social, that revenue will be inconsistent. He saw brands go from $0 to $1,000 to back to $0 month over month until they started doing deliberate LLM work.

What It Actually Takes to Rank on ChatGPT and LLMs (And Why Most Brands Won't Do It)

There's a pattern Kai keeps seeing with e-commerce brands, SaaS companies, and local businesses all trying to grow through SEO: they want maximum visibility on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, but the moment they hear what's actually required to get it, they back away. They want the result. They don't want to do the work.

The four things that drive LLM visibility — brand mentions on Reddit, placements in listicles, competitor-based content, and volume posting across every social platform — all meet resistance for different reasons. Reddit is against the terms of service. Listicles might hurt the backlink profile. Competitor content feels legally risky. Social content is hard to produce at scale. These are real concerns, but they're also the reasons everyone else isn't doing it, which is exactly why it still works.

Brand Mentions on Reddit

Reddit brand mentions directly feed what LLMs are trained on and cited from. If your brand isn't mentioned in relevant, high-traffic threads, you're not getting picked up. That's not a theory — it's what New Seas has seen consistently across client accounts.

Getting it to work at scale is hard. New Seas bought 100 Reddit accounts about 8 months before this video and lost over 50% of them to bans in the early stages. They kept buying, kept testing, and eventually figured out how to keep comments live in subreddits for long periods without getting accounts banned. It's still not perfect — accounts still get banned occasionally — but the comments are sticking and the AI visibility is moving.

Yes, this is against Reddit's terms of service. Kai's position is clear: if you want a perfectly white hat brand, that's your call, but you're not going to get meaningful LLM visibility without being mentioned on high-traffic Reddit threads. The window for this probably won't last forever. Reddit's current structure makes it unusually influential for what LLMs cite, and that may change.

Getting Mentioned in Listicles

The main objection from brands: will this ruin my backlink profile? The short answer is no — if you're doing it alongside your normal link building. The concern isn't unfounded, but it's also not a reason to skip listicles entirely.

ChatGPT doesn't evaluate domain quality the way Google does. Low-quality listicles that would barely move the needle on Google can produce real ChatGPT traffic. There are documented cases of brands that blasted listicles at their site and saw a flood of ChatGPT-driven revenue while Google traffic barely shifted.

The safe approach is to do both at once: keep building your standard link profile with branded homepage anchors from solid sites, and layer in listicles on top. It's a less conservative blend of links, but it covers both Google and LLMs without torching one for the sake of the other. This does cost more — you're doing more link building, not less. Agencies that say they're now doing "AI SEO" and are charging more for it without actually doing anything different are a real problem in the market right now.

Competitor-Based Content

About a year and a half ago, most brands Kai worked with were excited about competitor comparison content. Now roughly seven out of ten push back. The fear is legal action or reputational damage. Neither holds up well under scrutiny.

Your customers are already comparing you to competitors. They're typing "[your brand] vs [competitor]" into Google and ChatGPT. If you're not the one providing that comparison, someone else is — and it's probably not framed in your favor. Comparison ads and competitor keyword bidding in Google Ads are standard practice. A side-by-side article on your own website is the same instinct.

SaaS companies have done this for years without incident. New Seas has published roughly 300 competitor comparison and alternative articles across clients. In 18 months, they've seen about three or four legal actions — all cease and desist letters. Taking the article down resolved every one. The remaining 295+ articles generated revenue. The risk-reward math is pretty clear.

The content should be based on publicly available information and should compare fairly — not bash the competitor to prop up the client. That's both the ethical standard and the practical one: inflammatory articles are more likely to draw legal attention and less likely to convert.

Posting on Every Social Platform, Every Day

The brands winning on LLMs are posting everywhere: Instagram, TikTok, TikTok Shop, YouTube, Facebook groups, Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, Crunchbase. They're building touch points in every place an LLM might look for information about them. Most of the brands New Seas works with are only on Instagram and maybe TikTok.

One brand Kai mentions was generating $50,000 regularly out of a 10,000-person Facebook group. That window may have passed, but the point stands: every platform your brand is consistently present on is another surface area for LLMs to find and cite you.

LinkedIn and Medium for LLM Visibility

New Seas is actively testing LinkedIn and Medium as text-based channels to boost LLM visibility. LinkedIn is already showing up as a meaningful driver of visibility around Kai's name and the agency. For e-commerce brands, LinkedIn has traditionally been either a recruiting tool for large companies or completely ignored — but posting three or four times a day takes about 10 minutes with AI assistance. The downside is nothing happens. The upside is measurable LLM visibility gains.

Medium cooled off somewhat as a source LLMs actively cite, but it's still being tested. It may come back. Even if it doesn't, the cost of posting there is low enough that it's worth running the experiment.

What Happens If You Don't Do Any of This

When ChatGPT first started driving shopping behavior, a few of New Seas' clients started seeing a couple hundred dollars a month from it without having done anything specifically for LLMs. They were excited. Kai was honest with them: that money came from the same SEO work that ranked them on Google. ChatGPT just happened to pick it up. It wasn't a strategy.

And sure enough, those numbers were inconsistent. One brand did $0, then $1,000, then $0 for two or three months. Once they started doing deliberate LLM work — Reddit, listicles, social volume — the numbers started climbing predictably, the same way organic search revenue climbs with consistent SEO work.

If you're making ChatGPT revenue right now without doing any of this, that revenue is probably not going to grow, and it may disappear. You're playing with house money.

For brands that are happy growing on Google and have no interest in agentic shopping or LLM-driven commerce over the next few years, none of this is necessary — Google is still where the most SEO revenue will come from in the next 12 months. But if you want to be positioned for what comes after that, the work starts now.

What It Actually Takes to Rank on ChatGPT — And Why Most Brands Won't Do It

99% of Brands are Scared to Optimize for LLMs, Be the 1%