I’ve been manually testing our brand visibility across AI platforms for the past month and I’m confused by what I’m seeing.
The situation:
Same brand. Same products. Wildly different visibility.
What I’m trying to understand:
We have decent press coverage, active social presence, and good reviews. But clearly that’s translating differently depending on where users are searching.
Anyone else experiencing this? How are you thinking about brand visibility in the AI search era?
The variance you’re seeing is actually expected. Let me explain why:
Each platform has fundamentally different data sources:
ChatGPT: Relies heavily on training data (knowledge cutoff) plus optional web browsing. Strong bias toward established brands with historical web presence.
Perplexity: Real-time web search focused. Cites whatever ranks well NOW and matches their quality criteria. More volatile but more current.
Google AI Overviews: Blends search index authority with AI synthesis. Heavy weighting toward Google’s existing trust signals.
The implication:
You need different strategies for different platforms:
My recommendation:
Stop thinking of “AI visibility” as one thing. It’s actually 3-4 separate battlegrounds with different rules.
This is incredibly helpful. So our ChatGPT strength likely comes from being around for 8 years with consistent coverage.
But our Perplexity weakness might be because our recent content isn’t ranking as well?
How do you prioritize which platform to focus on? Or do you need to optimize for all of them?
Exactly right on the diagnosis.
How to prioritize:
Check where your audience is: Some demographics heavily favor ChatGPT, others use Perplexity for research. Match your effort to where your buyers are.
Low-hanging fruit first: If you’re at 45% on ChatGPT and 3% on Google AI, the opportunity cost of ignoring Google is higher.
Cross-platform wins: Some tactics help everywhere (authoritative press coverage, Wikipedia presence, comprehensive owned content). Start there.
For monitoring, Am I Cited tracks across all major platforms so you can see where effort is paying off vs where you’re still invisible.
We went through this exact analysis 6 months ago. Here’s what we learned:
Brand mentions aren’t all equal. Context matters enormously.
We were excited when ChatGPT started mentioning us. Then we actually read HOW it was mentioning us:
The shift we made:
Stopped tracking raw mention frequency. Started tracking:
This gave us actual actionable intelligence vs vanity metrics.
The 58% stat that keeps getting cited - that consumers have replaced traditional search with AI for product recommendations - should scare every brand manager.
Here’s the scary math:
If 58% of your potential customers are using AI to discover solutions, and you’re invisible or mentioned negatively in those AI responses, you’re losing more than half your top-of-funnel before they even visit your website.
What we’re doing about it:
It’s basically a whole new discipline we’re calling “AI brand management.”
Adding some data to this conversation:
Research findings on brand mentions in AI:
Translation: The same query will likely show completely different brands depending on which AI the user asks.
The strategic implication:
If you’re only optimizing for one platform, you’re potentially invisible to users of other platforms asking the exact same question.
This is why I recommend monitoring tools that track across all platforms simultaneously. You need the full picture, not just one slice.
Practical question: How do you actually track brand mentions in AI at scale?
Manual testing is fine for spot checks, but I can’t ask ChatGPT 500 questions a week to understand our visibility.
What tools/approaches are people using?
We use Am I Cited for this exact reason. Here’s our workflow:
Setup:
Weekly review:
Monthly strategy adjustment:
Manual testing just doesn’t scale. And missing trends is expensive when the landscape changes this fast.
I want to highlight something that gets overlooked:
Unlinked brand mentions matter more than ever for AI.
In traditional SEO, we obsessed over backlinks. In AI visibility, the context of how your brand is discussed matters regardless of whether there’s a hyperlink.
AI systems learn about your brand from:
The implication:
Your “earned media” strategy should expand beyond press coverage to include community presence, review generation, and any platform where AI systems learn about brands.
Brand mentions are currency in the AI economy. Links are just one type of that currency.
This thread has given me a completely new framework for thinking about this. Let me summarize what I’m taking away:
Key insights:
My action items:
Thanks everyone for the insights. This is clearly an area where we all need to level up fast.
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