The new battle for brand visibility
More and more AI tools are emerging, including AI search platforms like SearchGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and the Chinese newcomer DeepSeek. Google will even invest $75 billion in AI development by 2025, and Perplexity reached the milestone of 100 million searches per week in 2024.
AI platforms have become the new playing field for brand recognition. Many established marketing principles remain valid, such as the importance of branding and PR, but there are some key differences. We’ll discuss the possibilities for making your brand visible in AI tools.
Share of Model: The New KPI for AI Brand Visibility
A 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 leading the way. In November 2024, the AI platform launched sponsored follow-up questions and paid media placements. Brands like Indeed and Whole Foods seized this opportunity to promote their content in AI-generated answers. The ads are clearly labeled “sponsored,” ensuring transparency.
Other major players, such as Meta and Tencent, have also developed AI-driven ads to increase user interaction with their platforms while simultaneously boosting their revenue. OpenAI is currently investigating the feasibility of implementing ads within ChatGPT. As AI advertising grows, questions arise regarding user experience, privacy, and potential bias. This makes it an interesting area to monitor 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. Want AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity to mention your brand more often? Then a strong PR strategy is essential. AI learns from what’s available online, so the more often your brand appears in reputable articles, news websites, blogs, and social media, the more likely it is to appear in AI-generated responses.
Think of AI as a giant librarian that recommends only the books (information) it can find. If your brand isn’t listed among those books (news articles, websites), then AI won’t mention it. A strong PR campaign ensures that AI notices your brand, remembers it, and incorporates it into its answers when people ask relevant questions.
2.2. SEO is still important for better findability in AI
Want AI platforms to mention your brand more often? Then SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is just as important as PR. AI models primarily draw their information from websites that rank highly in search results. Our research showed that AI often used the top 20 results from Google as its source. If your website isn’t well-optimized and you rank low for important keywords, AI will be less likely to find and use your content.
To increase your chances, you can do the following:
- Optimize for keywords relevant to your brand and industry.
- Create high-quality, in-depth content that Google values.
- Partner with trusted sources to build backlinks and strengthen your website’s authority.
- Ensure mobile-friendly pages load quickly and meet search engine requirements.
2.3. Publish AI-friendly, high-quality content
AI works like a person with a small notebook that only holds a limited number of words. These words are called tokens. When searching through thousands of web pages, AI chooses only the most important pieces that fit in that notebook. The larger the notebook, the more details AI can remember, but even then, it must intelligently select what is truly relevant. You can use tools like The Tokenizer Playground to see how your text is “tokenized.”
Because of these limitations, the way you present your content is crucial for AI search platforms to pick it up. Tools like SearchAttention can help you understand how AI reads your content. A heat map shows you which parts of your text AI considers 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 it more AI-friendly. The goal? To identify 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 for 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, making the text easier for AI to process. Additionally, we emphasized important words with bold text, added statistics and data, and created internal links. To verify that the optimized content was being picked up more frequently by AI, we connected an LLM tracking dashboard to Google Analytics. This helped us track the number of LLM appearances across different platforms. The results showed a significant increase in the visibility of the optimized blog posts in AI platforms.
Conclusion
AI platforms work differently from Google; they don’t rank websites, but instead extract 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 leads to higher rankings, PR generates mentions in trusted media outlets and sources in your industry, and AI-friendly content makes your information more accessible to AI models. The higher the ranking, the more frequently your brand is mentioned, and the more trustworthy it is, the greater the chance it will appear in AI-generated answers.
