I Used ChatGPT to Rank #1 in Google (in One Hour)

You might think that Google hates AI content because they have a whole section about it in their spam policies. But the key word here that is often overlooked is "spam." In fact, I think they love AI content when it's

used

in a very specific way. I'm going to prove it by

rank

ing #1 on Google, beating out some of the biggest sites in the world that use only AI content. In fact, I'm going to do it in less than an

hour

from... now. Alright, so the way we're going to

rank

#1 is to look for a keyword that has a featured snippet.

And the only thing you really need to qualify for a snippet is to be in the top 10 for that keyword. So let's find those keywords. I logged into my free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, went to the Organic Keyword Report, and set up a couple of filters to find featured snippet opportunities. And after a minute of work, I had over 7,000 keywords to choose from. Okay, so my plan is to Google some of these keywords and pick one where I think the current snippet can be improved. And I was going to make some minor edits to our post using content generated by ChatGPT.

So, I'm thinking 15 minutes of work, max. And then from there, it's just a waiting game to see if Google thinks our page deserves to be ranked #1. My hopes were high and my spirits even higher. But that's when I remembered what happened the last time I tried this... There's a hole in my plan. The last time I tried to make small edits and shortcut my way to #1, it didn't work. And I basically had to rewrite an entire article in order to win that snippet, which Google called "epic tips" by the way. Anyway, I obviously don't have enough time to do a full rewrite nor do I trust ChatGPT to do a full rewrite.

And more than anything, I don't want to make the same mistake again. My stress levels were increasing. And with time running out and no hope in sight, I felt like I was on the express train to Fail Town. But after a moment of success, two questions came to mind that would put me on the right path. Ok… so what if the last time wasn't a failure? But more like, didn't I give Google enough time to give credit to those little changes I made? What if... what if instead of optimizing for one keyword, I optimized for several until I ran out of time?

I have to try. So I went back to the organic keywords report to choose my keywords. And since there were 7,000 to choose from, I set some rules for myself. Rule 1. Our blog post must match the query well. For example, this page's ranking for "create an affiliate program" matches the keyword perfectly. Our “Affiliate Marketing for Beginners” guide is not. So, disqualified. Rule #2. The page that owns the snippet must have a similar or, ideally, higher authority level than our website. And that's because people love to comment things like, "This will never work for 99% of websites. Ahrefs has one of the highest domain authorities." "It is worth mentioning that Ahrefs has a high domain authority." Yes, we do... but so do all our competitors, including Wikipedia, which has a DR 96!

And yes... I'm definitely going after Wikipedia. We have a DR 91 in case you were wondering. And rule number 3. Our pages cannot have recently ranked in the featured snippet for an extended period. Again for Pagerank, the last time we had and saved the snippet was about 7 months ago. This way, I will know that a sudden number one ranking for an extended period of time would have been due to my work and not luck. So after 15 minutes, I chose 10 keywords to track. It was time to call my team of writers. And by writers… I'm talking about ChatGPT. Alright, the first keyword I have is “marketing funnel.” And it looks like HotJar owns the snippet here and it's clearly a definition or paragraph snippet.

So I'm going to copy this definition, go to ChatGPT, and say, "I want to earn the featured snippet for the query "marketing funnel." HotJar currently owns it with this definition." And Paste. "This is the definition of our page." And I'll copy and paste it into our chat. "Now make ours better." And I couldn't believe the definition he gave me... The definition is like a whole blog post. Nobody wants to know this. This one is terrible. I thought it would be a home run win. I was even planning to scale this to over 7000 eligible keywords on our blog!

We would get a vertical increase in traffic, I would share it on our YouTube channel and everyone would subscribe because they would know that this is the place to learn digital marketing. But all my dreams were shattered – by a single message… And a single message is the real reason why this didn't work. Well, I remember reading in the OpenAI API documentation about the system functions... and I can't find the exact snippet, but just look at their code examples. They all define a function of the system, such as you are a helpful assistant, a personal math tutor, or a human resources robot, and you have access to files to answer employee questions about company policies.

Now, I'm not an AI expert or an engineer, but what I think a "system role" does is add context and expectations to the conversation. What makes a “good” featured snippet? ChatGPT and I have to align here to play from the same playbook. And once we're on the same page, only then can I request a snippet optimization and expect something, perhaps, decent. So, in an attempt to set context and expectations, I asked ChatGPT to tell me the different types of Google Featured Snippets. And the first two types were exactly what I wanted to optimize for. I decided to start with definition snippets, so I asked. it: "What makes one definition fragment better than the other?" And ChatGPT described a criteria checklist.

Now, since I agreed with most of the things said, I didn't ask for edits or provide any more suggestions I needed to start editing. These posts because I was racing against time. So I gave it my first target keyword, the snippet content, and the full content of its page for additional context. I also told him my goals, gave him our full content, and asked him why HotJars. It's better than ours based on the criteria we established earlier and the justification was decent. Now was the moment of truth "ChatGPT, can you rewrite my definition to be better than hotjar's?

Explain why it is better to use our 7-point criteria as support." And with only 35 minutes left I saw something unknown... hope. Alright, this still isn't perfect, but it's much better than what we had before and it's actually working. a framework that I can reuse for all the other keywords I chose. So I'm going to fine-tune this definition with ChatGPT and then we'll try to parse the rest of our keywords. I told ChatGPT to shorten our definition. I gave him some complementary images that would be

used

in our post and asked him to use simpler language. And although it would have been much faster to edit the definition manually, I did it. on a mission to prove that Google really loves AI content when it is used to improve clarity and user experience.

Okay, I did the first featured snippet and I feel like there's some chemistry now, so I'm going to continue. and try to finish the rest of the 9 fragment optimizations. ChatGPT and I optimize snippets for the query "PageRank", "SEO tips", "SEO vs. SEM" and more. We were like two peas in a pod. And with less than three minutes left, it was time to call it a day. Well, I did 9 out of 10 AI snippet optimizations that I'm pretty happy with, so all we can do now is wait. And we didn't have to wait long. Just one day passed and it happened again… Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss… I got my first “SEO vs SEM” snippet!!!

I was at a high level of SEO and there was nothing that could bring me down. I went to bed thinking about what might happen over the weekend. Will Google add me to their SEO starter guide page? Will they issue me a billion dollars in stock? All I knew was that whatever came my way would be well deserved. And before I knew it, it was Monday, December 11th. I logged into my Ahrefs account, went to my Project Rank Tracker and it disappeared... I lost the snippet. And the goal of this was not just to win it, but to win it and keep it for a sustained period of time.

So, we're back to square one with less than three minutes of our time. I need a break…. The next day came… then the next… and the next… but nothing. I knew something was missing, but I didn't know exactly what. So, as a last ditch attempt, I went back to Google and searched for “seo vs sem” to see what I might be missing… Okay, this is going to sound like a complete “SEO conspiracy” type theory, but stick with Me here. So, I noticed that the SERP is still showing the old date. And that's because I didn't change the update date on the post considering it was a very minor edit.

So I think I have about three minutes left of my original time, so I'll just change the updated dates to the time the posts were changed. Don't go to the top of the blog or anything like that. I'm literally just going to change the dates. So I did that with the 9 posts I updated and submitted most of them to Google Search Console for indexing. My time bank had officially hit zero… And two days later, I learned that my SEO conspiracy theory might not have been as far-fetched as I had originally thought. Okay, so it's December 15th and I think something is up.

So, our share of voice had a noticeable increase for our featured snippet keywords; The most notable movement was for the keyword "pagerank." And yes, it's not a number one ranking but I feel like something is brewing here. And as crazy as it may seem, I think it has to do with changing this small part, which by the way, has nothing to do with the quality of the changes. It was driving me crazy? It sure felt like that. So I had to get to the bottom of this. And I knew exactly who to call to find out if he was crazy or if something was going on beneath the surface.

Okay, so when I changed the PageRank article definition and Google crawled the page again, nothing actually happened in terms of an increase in rankings. But when I changed the last update date and nothing else, we jumped like 3 positions. So do you think the date change had anything to do with this push? Maybe. There are many SEOs who believe that if you update the date, it will help. I think you probably turned on another system, maybe the featured snippet system, got a better response, and it's trying to rank you higher. Some of those processes are delayed a little bit, so I think it's a little more likely.

So you're saying there's still hope of winning the shard? There's always hope. The fire inside me was rekindled. And I knew it was only a matter of time before we were successful. But with the holidays right around the corner, I decided to take some much-needed time off. I sang Christmas carols with the family, exchanged gifts, and rang in the New Year with a delicious burrito. And before I knew it, I was back in the office on January 3rd, reviewing our rankings… I did it!!! I can't believe I did it! Alright, I got the “seo vs. sem” snippet and I got the “keyword cannibalization” snippet.

Additionally, we moved from position 6 to position 3 for the keyword "pagerank". So we'll keep it and we're really not that far from overtaking Wikipedia. But I quickly realized that the battle was not won because at least one of our keywords needed to maintain the number one ranking position for an extended period. Days passed and we lost the “keyword cannibalization” featured snippet. But we still stood strong by maintaining the “seo vs. sem” bit. More importantly, our total share of voice remained at a new sustained level. Something was happening. Then, on January 9, the unthinkable happened. Yooo, I just surpassed Wikipedia!

And at the end of the month, I maxed out adrenaline and won 3 out of 9 Featured Snippets using only AI content. Now, coming to the keyword “seo vs sem”, we held the number one position for over a month and the last time this happened was almost a year ago. And the same thing happened with the "pagerank" with a little more volatility. When we were in mid-February, we had the 3 keyword snippet: “marketing funnel”, “seo vs sem” and “pagerank”. Well, it's the end of February and it's safe to say this is a win, but I want to show you something even crazier than ranking #1 for some keywords.

So, I wascrawling the 9 URLs I was working on in Ahrefs, and just look at the huge increase in total traffic! Even with just these small optimizations, it is estimated that we have over 10,000 more monthly visits from search. This is incredible!!! But then I realized that maybe I hadn't proven anything. I mean, was the increase in ranking due to the change in dates? Did we have any luck with any algorithm updates? I knew the only way to prove that Google loves AI content was to return it to original human-written content. So I went to archive.org and pasted one of our URLs, but they didn't have a snapshot of our page when I made the changes.

So I checked the Ahrefs Inspect page... OMG there are so many dates to choose from. I chose the date just before making the changes on this page. I scrolled down and immediately saw the original version there. So all I had to do was copy and paste this into WordPress and hit the Update button. I then submitted it to Google Search Console. Rinse and repeat for the other pages and we're back to the waiting game. But I didn't have to wait long... Okay, so It's only been like three

hour

s since I submitted the indexing in GSC and we already lost the "seo vs. sem" bit.

And let me remind you: we saved that snippet for two months straight… And a few hours later, we lost the “marketing funnels” and “pagerank” snippet. Now, while I've shown that AI content snippets outperform our human-written snippets, that doesn't exactly mean that Google likes all content created by AI tools, clearly. Google loves what the user loves, and when a user searches for informative content, he wants simple, clear and concise information, which AI turns out to be good at creating, probably better than humans. So instead of creating spam AI content, risk being deindexed and losing a huge chunk of your business in the name of scale… Focus on clarity and AI can be a good help for that.

If you want to see how to do it, watch our video where I ranked #1 in a super competitive query in less than 24 hours.