How to increase visibility with AI brand mentions and build your brand beyond your website

Your website is still the foundation

Your website is still the foundation of your brand. It should make your current features, services, use cases, pricing, etc. all easy to understand.

Answer engines use the information on your website to cite and recommend your brand. Citations and recommendations are not the same thing.

If your website is skeletal, or your copy is unclear, you are not giving the answer engines much to go on in terms of surfacing you as a recommendation (telling someone to use you) or cite you (using your website as a source of information).

Find the right places for your brand

Different types of external content help with different parts of your customer’s buying process.

A comparison article weighs competing products. A guide can introduce your product when providing a solution to a broader problem your customers face. A review or a ranking can provide more context to features, product fit, pricing and more.

For a SaaS company, you may want to appear in:

• A comparison of tools for your users
• A guide built to answer problems your product solves
• A product roundup, review site or ranking
• An article touching on an important feature or use case
• An industry publication or newsletter
• The same places your competitors are

For a college, you’d want to be:

• On a review site
• Listed on a college counseling website
• Featured in an online high school newsletter
• On library websites in your area
• In publications related to degrees you offer

Contextually, your brand should be in certain locations on the web. These make sense from a branding and marketing perspective, and from an AI perspective. When the AI scours the web looking for sources, your brand needs to be highly visible.

How third-party content supports AI visibility

Third-party content is an important part of how brands become more visible in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity, Claude and more.

When the AI systems provide an answer for a buyer, they often draw from external articles, guides, comparisons, rankings, reviews and other publications from across the web. Building a strong presence in these places gives your brand more opportunities to show up in the answers to the questions your customers are asking.

Start with the questions your customers ask

You’ll want to start with the likely questions your customers are asking. There is an infinite number of ways someone can ask a question now, but you can think of common questions that someone may type in as they search for something you offer. These are called prompts.

Within the prompts are the citations used to build the answer. There are the citations you can see (and these are always changing as these engines mature) and there are the ones you can’t see but are built into the knowledgebase of the AI engine (called the parametric layer).

Seeding your brand around the web in the places your brand should contextually appear is the best way to ensure you are in the citation pool today, tomorrow and into the future.

Build your brand beyond your website

So much of the focus in marketing goes toward the website. While this is a huge part of your marketing toolkit, the offsite growth is crucial too. The more places you are on the web, the more people can find you, and the more contextual evidence there is about your brand, the more likely you are to be recommended.

Think about it this way – if you are recommended the most throughout the web, then the AI engines will want to recommend you, too. Their lists and recommendations to consumers won’t feel as legitimate if the most important players are not mentioned.