The New Battle for Brand Visibility
AI tools are on the rise, including AI search platforms such as SearchGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Chinese newcomer DeepSeek. Google will even invest $75 billion in AI development by 2025, and Perplexity hit the 100 million weekly searches milestone in 2024.
AI platforms have become the new playground for brand recognition. Many established marketing principles still apply, such as the importance of branding and PR, but there are some major differences. We discuss the possibilities for making your brand visible in AI tools.
Share of Model: The New KPI for AI Brand Visibility
One notable development is ‘Share of Model’ (SOM), a new metric that tracks how often a brand appears in AI-generated answers. It’s the AI equivalent of ‘share of voice’, and measures how often large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT mention a brand compared to competitors. Just as traditional SEO focuses on Google rankings, Share of Model is about visibility within AI-driven searches.
How do you make your brand visible in AI?
1. Paid advertising on AI platforms
Companies have recently been able to advertise on AI search platforms, and Perplexity is at the forefront. In November 2024, the AI platform launched sponsored follow-up questions and paid media placements. Brands like Indeed and Whole Foods seized the opportunity to promote their content in AI-generated answers. The ads are clearly labeled “sponsored,” ensuring transparency.
Other big players, such as Meta and Tencent, have also developed AI-driven ads that aim to increase user engagement with their platforms while also increasing revenue. OpenAI is currently investigating the possibility of implementing ads into ChatGPT. As AI advertising grows, questions about user experience, privacy, and potential bias arise, making it an interesting area to keep an eye on for future developments.
2. Organic AI Visibility
2.1. The new role of PR
AI models often get their information from trusted sources, such as news sites, blogs, research reports, and government or academic websites.
AI favors content from brands that appear on authoritative, high-authority websites. If you want AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity to mention your brand more often, a strong PR strategy is essential. AI learns from what’s available online, so the more your brand appears in trustworthy articles, news websites, blogs, and social media, the more likely it is to appear in AI-generated answers.
Think of AI as a giant librarian that only recommends the books (information) it can find. If your brand isn’t in those books (news articles, websites) then AI won’t talk about it. With a strong PR campaign you can make sure AI notices, remembers and includes your brand in its answers when people ask relevant questions.
2.2. SEO is still important for better findability in AI
Do you want AI platforms to mention your brand more often? Then SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is just as important as PR. AI models mainly get their information from websites that score high in search results. Our research showed that AI often used the top 20 results from Google as a source. Is your website not well optimized, and do you score low on important keywords? Then AI will find and use your content less quickly.
To increase your chances, you can do the following:
- Optimize for keywords relevant to your brand and industry.
- Create quality, in-depth content that Google values.
- Partner with trusted sources to build backlinks and boost your website’s authority.
- Ensure mobile-friendly pages that load quickly and meet search engine requirements.
2.3. Publish AI-friendly, quality content
AI works like a person with a small notebook that can only hold a limited number of words. These words are called tokens. When searching through thousands of web pages, AI will pick out only the most important bits that will fit in that notebook. The bigger the notebook, the more details AI can remember, but even then, it has to be smart about selecting what is truly relevant. You can use tools like The Tokenizer Playground to see how your text is “tokenized.”
These limitations make the way you present your content essential to being picked up by AI search platforms. Tools like SearchAttention can help you understand how AI reads your content. A heatmap shows you which parts of your text AI finds important. The most relevant parts of your article are highlighted in green. The least relevant parts are not highlighted at all.
3. Case Study: Optimizing Content for AI
We examined the blog content of The Weekday Pescatarian, an online platform that shares pescatarian dishes, to see how we could make the content more AI-friendly. The goal? Find strategies to increase visibility and relevance in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. We focused on improving structured data, keyword optimization, and content formatting to achieve better results in AI-generated answers.
3.1. For the optimization
During an initial scan of the website, two things stood out: AI focuses mainly on the first paragraph and sometimes ignores entire parts of an article.
3.2. After optimization
To make the content more relevant to the AI, we removed unnecessary information and provided a more direct answer to the user’s search query in the first paragraph. We also improved the structure by adding clear headings and bullet points, which makes the text easier for the AI to process. Additionally, we emphasized important words with bold text, added statistics and data, and added internal links. To check whether the optimized content was being picked up more often by the AI, we connected an LLM tracking dashboard to Google Analytics. This helped us track the number of LLM appearances on different platforms. The results showed a clear increase in the visibility of the optimized blog posts in AI platforms.
Conclusion
AI platforms work differently than Google; they don’t rank websites, but instead pull information from high-quality, high-ranking sources. To appear organically in AI-generated answers, a combination of PR, SEO, and AI-friendly content is essential. SEO gets you a higher ranking, PR gets you mentioned in trusted media and industry sources, and AI-friendly content makes your information more accessible to AI models. The higher the ranking, the more often mentioned, and the more trustworthy your brand is, the more likely it is to appear in AI-generated answers.
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