Brand Visibility In The Generative AI Era

Brand Visibility In The Generative AI Era

Brand visibility in the AI search is a crucial aspect for driving success in the new age digital era.

The process of optimizing your AI search visibility is called AEO/GEO.

For influencing AI search recommendations for your brand, you need to understand how AI ‘think’. Unlike traditional search, AI search operates on a much deeper level. Its goal is to understand the context of a query and provide a direct answer by pulling together information from countless sources.

Creating well-structured, authoritative, and digestible content is key to driving brand visibility in the AI age.

While Google is clearly still the market leader, with 14 billion searches per day globally, and an estimated 37.5 million “searches” on ChatGPT represent an opportunity for your brand.

Use of Generative AI Chatbots to learn about the brand

Use genAI tools for asking them questions about the brand to find the sources they use for answering your queries. This ultimately aids in understanding what sources it’s been trained on, what pages on your site (or competitor sites) matter for understanding the brand.

For instance, if you ask ChatGPT-4o, “Tell me about HubSpot,” it gives a nice summary with a lot of useful citations.

In this, a legal page is being cited multiple times in a company overview, so those are important. HubSpot Knowledge Base are also seen where information is being pulled from as well. Often, a company’s About page is the main citation, but clearly, HubSpot has built out a better legal section than its core pages.

Use Credible Citations and Quotes in Content

When a brand’s content includes citations from authoritative sources or quotes from recognized experts, it increases the likelihood of the brand being seen as a credible source by AI models.

Use of language such as “according to [source],” enabling the addition of statistics with a credible citation, or a quote from a known expert, increases the likelihood of showing up in a genAI chatbot response by as much as 25.1% for sites ranking in position 4 in Google and by 99.7% for sites ranking in position 5 in Google.

Adding statistics to content led to a 10% increase in visibility in LLMs if the site is in position 4 in Google, and a 97% increase in visibility in LLMs if the site is ranked in position 5 in Google.

Mentions in Prominent Databases and Forums

Prominent forums like Reddit and Quora, or popular database sites such as Wikipedia.

They own a lot of organic search real estate, and also have obvious sites for training LLMs.

Reddit is selling data licensing to AI companies. So being a topic of discussion on these sites would only help your brand, and there is no better time to get into being active on Reddit than now.

It is more acceptable to interact genuinely on behalf of a company (as long as affiliation upfront revealed) and is frequently encourages to address consumer inquiries. On the path to generative AI optimization, it will probably help you as well.

Develop an Exceptional About Page

Generative AI models use ‘About Us’ types of pages for understanding what a company do and how credible the company is.

Answering queries about queries heavily relies on the About page. If the About page does not describe business and products, you may see LLMs citing the legal pages instead, like in the case of HubSpot mentioned earlier.

Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

The modern transformer-based LLMs are based on a statistical analysis of the co-occurrence of words.

Entity mentioned in connection with another entity with frequency in the training data, the probability of a semantic relationship between the two entities increases.

Use keyword research tools for a better understanding of related keywords.

Surging emphasis on a better understanding of the relationships and relevance between concepts ensures the content is of high quality and the user intent is matched.

Stop Siloing SEO

Entering an era when websites are getting fewer and fewer clicks from organic search. For most brands, a multi-channel strategy has never been more imperative.

Building brand recognition helps in fueling some of the other best practices, and LLMs are also being trained on social media and marketing content.

Aligned, cross-channel strategy strengthening your brand.

Additionally, building a sales flywheel in a content ecosystem means no need to panic about staying ahead of the ever-evolving world of SEO.

Track Your Referrals and Reverse-Engineer

Generative AI platforms driving traffic on a site, pay attention towards the pages responsible for it.

Try to recreate searches for the pages to answer.

Learn about the topics of these platforms associated with your brand, and find ways to double down on the type of content. 

Strategies for Getting Brand Mentions in AI-Generated Results

1. Conduct brand perception audits in AI tools
2. Optimize content for clarity, expertise and trustworthiness
3. Publish original research, case studies and thought leadership
4. Build and maintain authoritative backlinks
5. Monitor and update brand information everywhere

Key Takeaways

Tool companies are trying to catch up with digital marketers for optimizing in the era of genAI. You need to be reliant to reverse-engineer what to see in the data and run the experiments.

Traditional SEO is not dead but transforming. Strategic action is needed if the brand isn’t appearing in AI search engine results.

Brands investing now by aligning content with genAI search models, improving trust signals and creating exclusive insights, which ultimately shaping the online visibility.