How (and Why) to Control Your Branded AI Answers in ChatGPT, AI Mode, Perplexity, etc.?
You cannot control everything but you can surely control more than you do now!
Increasing businesses’ chances of showing up in AI Answers as part of the suggested solution has become the major goal of the SEO for AI strategy.
But it all comes from two important questions:
How much do different LLMs “know” about your business (i.e., what kind of information do their current training data contain about your company)?
How much can they find about your brand when running live searches?
Note that even if LMMs run additional searches, they “fan out” based on what they already know about a company (based on their training data).
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AI Answers will often include “citations”, i.e., URLs where they pull the information from.
There are two important reasons to monitor these citations:
They directly impact your branded AI Answers (that may impact buying journeys)
They will likely become part of LMM training data (this content is already or will be used to form LLM “knowledge” about you).
With AI Answers summarizing what they know about you from your site and third-party sources, the content marketing has changed dramatically.
A bit more than a year ago, it took quite a bit of research to find clear answers about everything brands were choosing to be silent about:
Certifications (or absence of those)
Pricing and additional rates
Countries in which the products are manufactured or shipped from, etc.
LLMs can find these answers for your potential customers in minutes. Keeping silent about these issues or concerns means losing control over that sentiment.
Obviously, you are unable to control all of this sentiment, but it is important to answer as many brand-driven questions on your site to have better chances of your owned URLs being cited.
When you click a citation link in AI Mode, you will see the actual paragraph that was used to generate the AI Answer highlighted. This way, you can answer this question on your FAQ page or even create a separate article addressing the issue.
Previously, brands had to worry about the top ten results for their branded search queries. Nowadays, they need to answer all these questions on their sites to be able to add their voice to the answers.
The good news is, by expanding your site and creating and promoting more detailed “brand knowledge content”, you will also increase your company’s chances of being surfaced in more non-branded prompts, because you will be feeding LLMs more specific and detailed information about your business.
Control more AI citations:
Here you go: How many AI citations do you own? : r/AISearchAnalytics
To recap:
Ask major LLM platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode) about your business;
Take note of how LLMs fan out (these will signal what your brand is associated with in the current training data)
Find citations you don’t control and (if possible) which parts of the answer were pulled from them
Investigate if these questions are properly answered on your site (create content accordingly).
Adjust your social media editorial calendars to talk more about topics that seem to frequently confuse your audience about your products
It is also a good idea to run and analyze branded prompts for your competitors to compare answers and learn from.
There are a few third-party solutions helping you track citations for your branded prompts, because AI citations can be quite fluid. I am using Peec.AI, which tracks brand mentions and citations in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplecity for any prompts, so I just make sure to always add a few for my brand and my competitors.
You can view your citation report by domains (to see which domains are most cited in your branded prompts). As you can see, in the screenshot below, my site is not cited enough (there’s a third-party site cited as much), so that’s a good sign that I need more owned content about my business created:
You can also access URL-level reports, as well as separate reports for each LLM model.