Mastering AI Search Visibility for Brands

Understanding AI Search Visibility

So you have a website, a brand that is important for you to have good exposure on AI platforms for users to find you. User behavior has already changed. People are becoming more and more passive. Instead of searching through websites and reading page by page to come up with a conclusion, they tend to take the easy approach of asking AI so that it does the hard job of researching across all websites and comes back to summarize the answer in one go for them. A lot of people, including myself, are getting our information from AI conversations, and we tend to trust the information even though we know there is a possibility of hallucination and wrong answers.

Traditionally, SEO was important because the closer you are to the first rank position, the more users will see your brand and potentially take action on your website. But the game has changed in the AI field. Unlike Google search results, where you're either on the first page or second page but at least you appear somewhere, and that ruled how many users you could get either more or less, so the game was like this: either you had strong visibility or weak visibility. But the game in the AI field is different and simple. Your brand either exists or your brand is totally invisible to users. There is no weak and strong position. So this is alarming and dangerous. If you don't get into the AI game, you can be fully invisible to users because no AI knows about your brand and they're not going to cite your brand or mention your brand, which is equivalent to zero potential sales.

What Is AI Visibility?

AI visibility simply tells you how much AI platforms know about you when it comes to answering user questions. The source is coming either from their training knowledge or via browsing the web. Let me make it clear in the beginning: the main purpose of any AI visibility tracking tool is to show you how many times your brand has been cited to users and how many times your brand has been mentioned in the conversation. So the formula is simple: AI visibility is the sum of the number of citations plus the number of mentions.

Understanding Citations in AI Answers

Citation means how much your brand is being referenced or cited for the answer provided to users. These references come from AI platforms searching the web and learning from your brand that piece of information that helps answer the user.

When you ask a question on almost any AI platform, whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or others, the mechanism of answering is simple. The AI, based on your question, decides whether to answer you with its training knowledge or browse the web to get a more updated and accurate result. Recently, most of the questions are being triggered. If AI decides to answer you with its training knowledge from whatever date that it has been trained and cut off, you wouldn't get any references or citations. On the other hand, for AI to answer your question, it may need more fresh and accurate data, so it triggers a search and starts browsing websites and collecting data to summarize the answer, which we call synthesizing.

We can see in new models of most of the AIs that the chances of browsing rather than using the training knowledge is higher. Most of the time, browsing capability triggers. This is where citation matters, where your website will be cited as a reference to the user.

How to Get Cited in AI Answers

So there are two major stages you need to understand that help you focus on being more cited. One is the stage of data collection, and the second is the stage of being selected as a source for citation.

Phase 1: Data Collection

So here is where traditional SEO becomes critical for your brand. Under the hood, all AIs, when they want to answer your question and browsing capability triggers, search the web just like how people use Google to search for a certain query. The sources of which search engines each AI uses are not fully clear, although there are some assumptions out there, like ChatGPT uses Bing or Exa search engine, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that if your website is weak on search engines and doesn't appear in results, especially not being in the first 20 results for user questions, then you already lost the game and your website is not one of the nominees of being cited later on. So the first rule of being cited is to have good exposure on search engines, a strong SEO, and organic exposure.

Phase 2: Being Selected as a Reference

Now let's say you are in the first 10 or 20 results for the user question where AI asks search engines. Now how will you be shortlisted to be a reference in the answer among all other websites that were picked in the data collection result? Let me give my example with ChatGPT's process, where I have done research.

After I studied streamed responses from ChatGPT, here is what I learned from ChatGPT's thought process:

When your website is referenced in an answer, it falls into one of three internal arrays:

Only Main Sources are cited directly in the response. The other two won't appear as citations in the answer, but they can show up under "More" in the right sidebar.

Here's how ChatGPT "thinks" about each type:

Main Sources

"I'm going to cite this website."

These are shown as citations in the final answer, usually because the site shows strong signs of authority and trust, had fresh content, and gave a clear, direct answer.

Fallback Sources

"I could cite this instead, but others were better."

Your site was considered to be cited, but another source was favored, often due to higher domain authority, clearer structure, or more recent information.

Supporting Sources

"This helped me understand the topic, but didn't directly answer the question."

Your site gave useful background context, but the information was too generic and not directly answering the question.

So what we learned here is that your website needs to have these three things:

If you are asking how to increase website authority, you need to work on four important things that we call EEAT, which stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust signal. Especially if your website is related to finance or health, you need to work harder on these signals, which Google calls YMYL (Your Money, Your Life). I'm not going to break down each signal for the sake of not diverting from the AI visibility topic of this article, but you can search EEAT on Google. There are tons of articles for you to learn.

For fresh content, it all depends on the type of question, but if the user's question is time-sensitive, your article should not be more than three months old based on my research, and make sure you have a publish date on your article pages.

AI Mentions: Building Brand Awareness

Being referenced is one side of success. Your brand needs to be mentioned to the users. AI tracking tools count how many times your brand has been mentioned in specific questions as a solution in AI conversations that appear as text, not a link. This is the game of brand awareness. You should investigate across the AI platforms how much they are aware of your brand, no matter if this comes from AI answering via training knowledge or from browsing. If, let's say, a user asks for the top 10 AI search visibility tracker tools and you are not in the list of 10 AI suggestions, that's a red flag. You need to work on brand awareness.

There are many ways to boost your brand for mentions, but the most critical one as the first step, if your brand has absolutely zero mentions, is you can quickly check if there is any technical issue on your website where AI crawlers for some reason cannot access your content. Sometimes your website looks fine at first glance and is being indexed, and you are not blocking any bots in robots.txt, but you need to dig deeper. How does your server respond to AI visits? It could be silently killing the AIs without you even noticing. We have seen that in server log file analysis where AI bots would receive a 406 status from the server instead of 200. So go around your website and make sure you don't unintentionally block any AI that comes for training to your website.

The 80/20 Rule of AI Visibility Optimization

I would say 80% of AI visibility optimization, or what we call LLM optimization, is still the same SEO practices that help you get better organic exposure across Google and LLM platforms. However, there are a few tweaks that you need to do specifically for AI platforms that we never practiced before. One example is adding llms.txt to your website. It is simply a language that communicates with AI about the content of your website without too much noise like HTML and CSS codes and others. This is not officially confirmed by any AI company, but many specialists in the SEO community believe this is effective. I have personally tested this by adding an llms.txt file to our website, and after analyzing the log file, we noticed in less than two hours ChatGPT bot had visited the page. So this did not give us 100% confidence that this works, but at least we know the visit happened.

This was just an example. There are more ways to improve your visibility. We will write more about it here in our later posts.