How to Cultivate Brand Mentions for Higher AI Search Rankings
Building brand awareness is a crucial yet often overlooked part of SEO. Discover why unique brand qualities matter for meaningful engagement and sustainable traffic growth.
How to Cultivate Brand Mentions for Higher AI Search Rankings
Building brand awareness has been an important but widely overlooked part of SEO.
A website must have unique qualities that would positively impress people and make them enthusiastic about the brand. If the site you’re trying to build traffic to lacks those unique qualities, then building links or brand awareness can become a futile activity.
The SEOs have noticed that AI search results tend to recommend sites that are recommended by other sites and brand mentions.
Brand mentions are important whenever the brand shows up online- whether someone links to your site or not. Any time someone mentions your brand name online, without necessarily linking to you, that’s a brand mention. It’s like a signal to search engines that you exist.
Beyond one-off emails, you can build deeper relationships with writers, creators, and communities who are already talking about skincare.
- Leaving thoughtful comments on their blog or TikToks
- Sharing their content and tagging them
- Thanking them publicly when they mention you
- Encouraging DMs
Doing such small things helps in building connections.
Search for a competitor’s links
The “-site:example.com” removes the competitor site from the search results, showing you just the sites that might mention the full URL of the site, which may or may not be linked.
The TLD segmented variants include:
Example.com site:.net “resources”
Example.com site:.org “resources”
example.com site:.edu "resources"
example.com site:.ai "resources"
example.com site:.net "links"
example.com site:.org "links"
The ultimate goal is not necessarily to get links. It’s to build site awareness and build popularity.
Brand Mentions by Company Name
To identify brand mentions, search by company name using the TLD segmentation technique.
Making a broad search for a company’s name only gets some of the brand mentions.
Segmented Brand Mention Search
The competitor’s site is on the .com domain, and you’re limiting the search to .com websites.
Segmented variants:
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.org
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.edu
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.Reddit.com
Etc.
Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles are indexed by search engines and ranked in AI search surfaces such as AI Mode and ChatGPT, presenting opportunities to purchase a sponsored post, enabling the presentation of a message with links that are nofollow and a prominent “sponsored post” disclaimer at the top of the web page- all in compliance with Google and GTC guidelines.
Brand Mentions: Authoritativeness is Key
ChatGPT and AI Mode are found to recommend sites that are mentioned in high-quality authoritative sites.
Some Ways to Search
Product/Service/Solution Search
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored article”
etc.
Sponsored Post Variant
Name Of Product Or Service Or Problem Needing Solving site:.com “sponsored post”
Etc.
Competitor Search
Competitor’s Brand Name site:.com “sponsored post”
Etc.
Pure Awareness building with Zero Internet Presence
Organizations and associations that print magazines or send out newsletters to thousands of people who are an exact match for the people you want to build top-of-mind brand name recognition with.
As emails and magazines do not have links, the goal is to build name-brand recognition with positive associations.
Relationship building
You can build deeper relationships with writers, creators, and communities who are already talking about skincare.
- Leaving thoughtful comments on their blog or TikToks
- Sharing their content and tagging them
- Thanking them publicly when they mention you
- Encouraging DMs
Doing such small things helps in building connections.
Don’t Forget PDF Magazines
For example, subscribing to a surf fishing magazine that is entirely in a proprietary web format can only be viewed by subscribers.
If I were a fishing company, I would make an effort to meet some of the article authors, in addition to the publishers, at fishing industry conferences where they appear as presenters and in product booths.
Returning to the industry associations and organizations, many of the strategies discussed in this book would apply to this type of brand building, but this is a whole subject in and of itself, and I’ll address it in another piece.
Using the filetype search operator in combination with the TLD segmentation would yield some of these kinds of brand-building opportunities.
[product/service/keyword/niche] filetype: pdf site:.com newsletter
[product/service/keyword/niche] filetype: pdf site:.org newsletter
- Segment the search for opportunities search by TLD .net/.com/.org/.us/.edu, etc.
Segmenting by TLD would aid in discovering different kinds of brand-building opportunities. Websites on a Dot Org domain often link to a site for different reasons than a Dot Com website. Dot org domains represent article writing projects, free links on a links page, newsletter article opportunity, and charity link opportunities.
- Consider Segmenting Dot Com Searches
The Dot Com TLD would yield an overabundance of search results, making it imperative to segment the results to find all available opportunities.
Ways to segment the Dot Com are:
- Kinds of sites
(blog/shopping related keywords/product or service keywords/forum/etc.)
- Context-Audience Relevance Not Keyword Match
Audience Relevance Not Keyword Match
- Quality and Authoritativeness
Final Thoughts
Increasing brand mentions in AI search has become one of the most important goals for brands in 2026. If your business is not showing up in AI-generated answers, you lose visibility at the exact moment users are searching.
Specific actions make your brand more quotable, more verifiable, and more present across AI-driven search experiences
