How to Get LLMs to Mention Your Brand

What Are AI Mentions?

AI mentions are references to brands in AI-generated responses—like those provided by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Google AI Mode.

AI mentions can appear in various conversational contexts, and their tones can be positive, negative, or neutral. Mentions can also be linked or unlinked.

Your brand’s visibility and portrayal in AI-generated responses depends on three main factors:

Your brand’s visibility and portrayal in the model’s training data
Your brand’s visibility and portrayal in any supplementary data sources (e.g., web results)
The tool’s understanding of the user and their prompt

AI Mentions vs. AI Citations

AI citations are references to specific sources or pages used to generate AI responses, rather than general references to brands in AI responses.

Generative AI tools (commonly known as LLMs) sometimes include AI mentions and AI citations in the same response. Like this:

Why Are AI Mentions Important?

AI mentions are important because they can influence users’ buying decisions. This is largely because LLMs can provide personalized and human-like responses that users trust.

Basically:

If an LLM mentions your brand favorably or neutrally, users may be more likely to engage with your business
If an LLM mentions your brand unfavorably, users may be less likely to engage with your business
If an LLM doesn’t mention your brand in relevant contexts, users might not even hear about your brand

LLMs are also highly influential because they can guide users through the entire buying journey, eliminating the need for users to engage with other marketing touchpoints.

To reach and influence target audiences during these centralized buying journeys, you must secure favorable AI mentions. And try to get an edge over any mentioned competitors.

Linked AI mentions may be particularly valuable because they can encourage users to click through directly to your website.

How Visible Are AI Mentions?

AI mentions can be highly visible to your target audience because AI responses are becoming more widespread:

And AI mentions are highly prevalent within AI-generated responses.

AI models include brand mentions in 26% to 39% of responses, according to a Semrush analysis of 1 million varied, non-branded queries across five LLMs.

Here’s a breakdown of AI mentions’ prevalence by LLM:

LLM	AI Mentions’ Prevalence
ChatGPT	26.07%
ChatGPT Search	39.36%
Google AI Overview	36.93%
Perplexity	30.55%
Gemini	31.14%

You can get a feel for the prevalence of AI mentions for all brands in your niche by using LLMs for yourself.

How to Get More AI Mentions

Based on our current understanding of how AI systems work, there are two main ways to get more AI mentions for your brand:

Get brand mentions in context-rich content
Publish in-depth content about your brand

Get Brand Mentions in Context-Rich Content

Getting brand mentions in context-rich content means motivating people to talk about your brand within substantive and topically relevant online content. Such as blog posts, news articles, social media posts, Reddit comments, and Quora questions.

This can lead to more AI mentions because LLMs may cite this content when searching the live web.

Plus, the content may be used as LLM training data in the future. More frequent, context-rich mentions make your brand appear more prominent and help LLMs understand your relevance to user needs. Which can lead to you getting more AI mentions.

How to Get Brand Mentions

You can generate brand mentions that may be valuable for LLM optimization by:

Writing guest posts for reputable sites in your niche
Responding to relevant media inquiries
Contributing to relevant online communities and social discussions
Listing your brand on relevant, high-quality directories
Creating useful and engaging content that people want to share or cite
Using affiliate marketing and influencer marketing to generate buzz around your brand
Launching campaigns, events, and products that get people talking
Pitching your brand, product, or content for inclusion in relevant blog posts

Use a tool like Brand Monitoring to track your brand mentions across the web.

Where to Get Brand Mentions

Pursuing brand mentions on relevant websites and webpages that LLMs already cite could be the most effective way to get more AI mentions.

For example, if ChatGPT recommends products from an industry listicle, you could benefit from getting your product featured in that listicle.

Just bear in mind that LLMs can cite different webpages depending on the user, the conversational context, and other factors.

You can discover the most commonly cited websites and webpages in your niche with Semrush Enterprise AIO. The tool identifies and submits prompts relevant to your brand, then analyzes the responses for mentions and citations.

If an enterprise tool isn’t right for you, manual research can give you some basic insights to work with.

Generally, aim to get your brand featured on reputable websites that may have more influence on LLMs, search engines (which LLMs may retrieve information from), and users.

Publish In-Depth Content About Your Business

Publish diverse, in-depth content about your business, products, and services to give AI systems more information to learn from and use.

This content can lead to more AI mentions by making it easier for LLMs to associate your business with individual users’ needs, which can be highly specific.

For example, Semrush’s content may help ChatGPT understand our products’ relevance to highly specific prompts like this one:

The prompt asks for a list of tools that meet certain criteria, and AI mentions Semrush first.

What Type of Content to Create

You can give AI systems more nuanced information about your brand by:

Creating custom-made content for each target audience
Covering product specifications in-depth
Providing direct comparisons between different solutions you offer
Describing specific use cases for your products and services
Writing detailed guides about your unique selling points
Publishing content about your brand values
Making specific landing pages for each product, service, or location

For insight into the kinds of prompts your target audience uses in LLMs, use the Semrush AI Toolkit.

The toolkit identifies relevant prompts from a vast prompts database and categorizes these queries based on intent.

Just bear in mind that these prompts aren’t exhaustive. Many people use highly specific and unique prompts in AI tools.

How to Make Your Content Accessible to LLMs

If you want your content to influence LLMs, make sure it’s accessible to AI crawlers and search engine crawlers (since LLMs can sometimes retrieve information from search engine databases).

Check that the pages you want to be crawled and indexed:

You can check your website for potential crawlability issues by using Semrush’s Site Audit tool.

How to Improve the Sentiment of Your AI Mentions

You may be able to improve the sentiment of your AI mentions by improving and protecting your brand’s reputation with the following activities:

Strengthen your brand messaging. Clearly and consistently communicate your brand’s unique value propositions (UVPs).
Manage online reviews. Solicit reviews from happy customers or clients and respond to your reviews tactfully.
Create case studies. Publish content that proves the success of your products or services, using data to back up your claims.
Plan a crisis management strategy. Determine how you’ll respond to any negative stories or comments about your brand—just in case.
Gather and act on feedback. Collect feedback from your target audience and use it to improve your business practices.

You can monitor the sentiment of AI mentions with the Semrush AI Toolkit. As we’ll discuss in the next section.

How to Track Your AI Mentions

To track AI mentions for your own brand and competitors’, use a third-party tool like the Semrush AI Toolkit.

(A third-party tool works best because none of the generative AI providers have native tools for tracking AI mentions. And manual tracking can provide misleading results due to the way LLMs personalize their responses.)

The Semrush AI Toolkit works by:

Searching its vast prompts database to find prompts relevant to your brand
Running these prompts through LLMs, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini
Analyzing the AI responses for brand mentions and sentiment

You can find your results in the toolkit’s dashboard and focused reports.

The “Market Share” metric shows what percentage of all AI mentions in the dataset are specifically for your brand.

In the “Brand Performance” report, you can compare your Market Share by AI platform. And see how your share of AI mentions compares against your chosen competitors’.