Brand visibility in AI search

When someone asks ChatGPT “who’s the best seo company in Austin” or “find me a reliable AI search strategist,” the AI doesn’t return a list of links. It assembles an answer. The businesses that get mentioned are the ones that get considered. The ones left out don’t exist in that moment.

This is what we mean by brand visibility in AI search:

• How often your business appears
• How prominently it’s positioned
• What the AI says about you when it does

There’s an important difference from traditional search. AI answers are probabilistic. Ask the same question twice and you might get different results. Ask from a logged-in ChatGPT account versus a fresh session and you’ll see variation based on personalization. Tracking AI visibility requires monitoring patterns across multiple queries over time, not just checking a single ranking.

ChatGPT now has nearly 900 million weekly active users, up from 400 million in early 2025.

How AI categorizes your business

AI systems don’t just scan for keywords. They build a kind of mental map, associating your business with specific topics and attributes based on what they’ve learned.

For example, an AI might associate your business with “emergency plumbing” and “Austin” (topics) and describe you as “reliable” or “24-hour” (attributes). The more consistently those associations appear across your website, reviews, and citations, the stronger that identity becomes in the AI’s understanding.

When the associations are weak or scattered, your brand drifts and becomes less likely to surface for relevant queries.

Citations and authority signals

When AI tools search the web to answer a question, they pull from sources they trust. The platforms showing up most often in AI citations include:

• Google Business Profile and review sites
• Reddit threads and forum discussions
• Industry-specific directories (Avvo for attorneys, Healthgrades for doctors, Angi for contractors)
• News articles and blog posts
• YouTube transcripts and LinkedIn content

This is where citation and local SEO work pays off. Consistent business listings, reviews, and a strong presence across directories supports traditional search rankings and increases the likelihood of being cited by AI systems.

We’ve expanded our citation strategy based on what we’re seeing AI tools actually reference. Reddit, for example, has become one of the most-cited platforms by AI models. For our existing clients, we’re factoring that into how we approach your online presence.

The challenge: AI data is hard to get

Tracking AI visibility isn’t like tracking Google rankings. There’s no equivalent to checking your position for a keyword. AI models personalize answers, sometimes hallucinate, and don’t offer standard metrics. We’ve trialed three dozen AI search tracking tools over the last six months. Most only capture part of the picture. That’s why we’re building our own approach.

How we’re tracking this

We’re building a layered system that combines multiple data sources:

• Referrer tracking to see when AI-driven traffic actually reaches your site
• AI search monitoring to track brand mentions and citation patterns across platforms
• Our AI optimization audit that evaluates content against factors that influence AI visibility

This lets us connect actual changes on a website to movement in AI visibility, something most tools can’t do because they’re only looking at one piece of the puzzle.

Our research & experiments

We’re not just following best practices. We’re running our own research.

Our first project is an llms.txt plugin that helps websites communicate directly with AI crawlers like GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot.

9,500+ websites have opted in, giving us anonymized data on which AI systems are actively crawling and how often.

Here’s what we’re seeing so far:

• GPTBot detected on 610+ sites
• GoogleOther (Google’s AI-related crawler) on 557 sites
• ClaudeBot on 330 sites

Our latest research is an AI search optimization project. This combines the latest industry research with our own dataset, letting us track actual website changes and connect them to movement in AI visibility. The audit evaluates factors like:

• Whether content includes original research signals (data, surveys, case studies)
• How content is structured for AI extraction (answer formatting, lists, schema)
• Authority signals like expert quotes and statistical evidence
• Technical factors like crawlability and content freshness

For our existing clients, we’re applying this methodology to your sites, which means you benefit from both published research and our proprietary testing.

When you’re cited in an AI Overview, you get 35% more organic clicks compared to when you’re not cited at all.

Traditional SEO still matters for AI visibility. But there’s a new layer now, and we’re building the infrastructure to track, improve, and continue to win lead generating placements for clients now and in the future.