How We Ranked #1 in Google in Less Than 24 Hours

A couple of days ago I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I saw that HubSpot had just launched a new AEO tracking tool for AI search performance. So, the second I saw it, I knew this was a newsjacking opportunity. And that's why I moved immediately. We built two dedicated assets as fast as we possibly could, HubSpot AEO alternatives and Rankability versus HubSpot AEO. Then we ran both of these keywords through Rankability to identify the most relevant topics and supporting angles, and we built the content as quickly as possible. And once the pages were live, we added them to our rank tracker inside of Rankability and waited to see what would happen. And within 6 hours, one of those pages was already ranking number one in Google. But it didn't stop there. It was also being pulled in as a citation inside of Google's AI overviews, and Rankability was being recommended as an alternative to HubSpot AEO directly in the AI generated answer. And now, this is where it gets interesting. A lot of people think that SEO results take 30 days, 90 days, or even 6 months. And yes, in many cases that is true. But when you're dealing with an emerging keyword or a brand new trend in your industry, that timeline can compress dramatically if you know what you're doing. And we've seen this happen over and over again. We've run this kind of play thousands of times both in our own campaigns and across the agencies using our software. And over time, total brand visibility usually keeps expanding and it starts in Google and then grows into platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. And Grok usually moves a little slower than Google, but over the next 3 to 6 months, we should see broader visibility there, too. In fact, that's exactly what we've seen with other keywords where we've executed this strategy well. And once you establish that early foothold, you can end up dominating across multiple platforms and search environments. So, how do we actually do it? Let me break down the framework because this is the real lesson. So, the reason jumping on new keywords or trends for your industry is so powerful is because of first mover advantage. So, when a new topic appears, there's often little to no competition. And if you can identify the opportunity quickly and publish as fast as humanly possible, you have a chance to be the first strong result in that market. Now, there is an important caveat here. This works much better if your website already has authority, trust, and an established link profile. And truthfully, if you have a brand new website, this is going to be much harder. But if your site already has some authority, this is where you can really take advantage of that leverage. So, the first step is staying close enough to your niche to spot these opportunities in real time. And you need to keep a pulse on your industry at all times. And then when something happens, you don't just publish one random asset and hope for the best. You build a group of assets around that topic. Now, how many you build depends on your resources, but ideally, you want at least a couple of assets attacking the query from different angles. Even better, you build out a small cluster around the topic to cover every important angle. And this matters even more now because of query fanout. If you look at Google's AI mode, you'll notice that Rankability was cited twice in the retrieval sources. This wasn't random. It happened because we built two assets that we believe would line up with likely fanout queries. This is a huge concept to understand, and what you're really trying to do is predict what the AI is likely to fan out and search for behind the scenes, and then build assets that map to those possible subqueries. And if you do that well, you can increase your odds of influencing the AI answer itself. And that's exactly what happened here. Now, what do you do if you don't have a highly authoritative website yet? Well, there is one workaround, and that workaround is called parasite SEO. In simple terms, that means publishing on platforms that already have authority. So, if I were starting from scratch with a brand new site, I might publish these assets on LinkedIn, Medium, or another authoritative platform to get that initial lift. you're comfortable doing video, YouTube can also be very powerful here. Because if you have a decent channel with some authority, you can often get visibility much faster than trying to rank a brand new domain from zero. Now, once you identify the opportunity and choose your assets, the next step is building the content the right way. And there's definitely a framework for that, too. For listicle style content, you want to front-load the actual list as high in the content as possible. Don't make the user scroll forever to find the alternatives. Just give them the answer right away. Then, almost always, you want to include a comparison table. I call this AI bait because AI systems love tables. And a lot of the time, they'll actually pull directly from that table and use it in the AI generated answer. Now, one thing you do need to keep in mind is that when you're targeting newer keywords, you may not have much competitor data to work with. And that means you can't always

lean heavily on traditional competitor intelligence. Sometimes you have to use your own judgment and go a little blind. A good example is when we first launched Rankability back in 2024, and at that time, the term Rankability was actually a scientific term. If you searched for it, our software didn't show up at all, and the first page was full of scientific articles. So, if you had used a content optimization tool to optimize for Rankability or Rankability review back then, it would have pushed you in a completely irrelevant direction. And the output would have been totally off. So, this is a very important lesson. When you're dealing with a new keyword that don't yet have useful competitor intelligence, you have to rely more on strategic judgment than on data alone. So, here's the big takeaway. Stay in tune with your industry and always be looking for emerging trends, product launches, new features, and new conversations. And when you spot something promising, move and don't wait. Literally drop everything and go after it. Because if you can rank early, you'll start collecting those early signals. And the more signals you collect, the stronger your ranking moat is going to become.