How SEO professionals, digital marketing teams, and PR professionals can take control of their brand's presence in AI search engines
Today, we're announcing the launch of our new AI Search platform. It's something that has been in development for many months now and that we're really excited about.
But, before we get into the features and the software, I want to first talk about why it's important now for marketing teams to be on top of tracking their performance in AI search engines and the kind of use cases that we all face today as the Search market shifts to AI.
I don't know about you, but I finally feel after 25 years in the SEO game that Google is finally going to have some serious competition, and that our role as SEOs and marketing professionals is going to get way more complicated and interesting.
The search landscape has fundamentally changed. While you've been optimising diligently and focusing on Google's traditional SERP rankings, your competitors have already started to take a lead in the AI-powered search results that are increasingly shaping a small but growing percentage of consumer decisions for users of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini and others.
Let's take a reality check for a second: Isn't AI Search traffic to websites relatively small today when compared to Google?
Review your referral data to your website in Google Analytics, and you'll probably see that only a tiny percentage of referrals are coming from AI search engines right now. Although you might find that they are converting reasonably well. The point is, it's small today, but the growth rate has been phenomenal, and it looks like it's showing no signs of abating.
Two-thirds of consumers believe AI will replace traditional search within five years according to research from Search Engine Land and Fractl. Google AI Overviews (and now AI Mode in the US), ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are already answering millions of queries daily - and if your brand isn't being mentioned in these AI-generated responses, you're invisible to a rapidly growing and increasingly important segment of your audience.
It's worth noting that this was a small-scale US study which included marketers, so it may overstate what reality looks like in 5 years' time. In any event, although there is more competition from OpenAI and the rest, I still feel it's hard to be bet against Google continuing to dominate the search market given its obvious strengths in AI and its current dominant market position (despite the DOJ's and other regulators best efforts to rein Google in.
Why Traditional SEO Tools Are Failing You in the AI Era
Your current SEO stack is built for yesterday's search landscape. While tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs excel at tracking traditional rankings and backlinks, they're blind to the interactive AI-generated results that are increasingly replacing those blue links your customers used to click. Yes, they have created some AI Search Visibility tools, but clients are telling me that they cannot create custom views of their market and that they don't really understand (or cannot see) the questions behind the analysis and results that they're seeing.
Here's what's happening right now:
- AI search engines are pulling information from sources that may not even rank on page one of Google or Bing
- Brand mentions in AI responses don't necessarily correlate with traditional SEO metrics
- Competitors with weaker domain authority are getting cited more frequently in AI answers than you would expect
- Misinformation about your brand can spread through AI responses without you knowing
- There's emerging evidence that being referenced positively on the LLM's most popular sources in your industry correlates with strong AI Visibility
The Four Critical Gaps Every Marketing Team Faces with AI Search
Gap 1: Audience Research
The Problem: You're using AI chatbots yourself, so you know your customers are too. But you don't know what they're searching for, how big the demand is and what types of queries they have.
The Solution: We've built an AI generation flow that allows you to use AI to generate a structured series of relevant unbranded questions that consumers may search for across AI search engines. You can break this down by product category and subcategory, which is excellent for ecommerce. You can also use an LLM to try and understand the key factors that are important to consumers when they're buying products and services in each of these categories. The cherry on top is that you can also create custom AI prompts to focus on any specific angle you like, e.g. Top of the funnel informational style queries, branded queries, negative queries for reputation management, different languages and locations and much more.
You can dive into buyer personas. You can dive into questions across the buyer journey. This allows you to create a systematic approach to analysing Ai Search.
It's not just about SEO keywords anymore. It's much more about answering the questions consumers have. SEO keywords still have a part to play. For example, we have a bulk FAQ Explorer tool which allows you to take all your head terms with search volumes and find the most commonly occurring People Also Ask (PAA) questions in Google. Then from here you can see which questions come up most frequently and assess search demand and this gives you a great starting point for understanding and answering the most important questions consumers are asking in your niche.
Here are some examples of this AI-guided prompt generator in action.
Create a comprehensive set of questions for your e-commerce brand broken down by category and subcategory:
Create great set of informational style top of the funnel research questions consumers have in your market:
Need to understand what LLMs are telling consumers about your brand? Then use a custom prompt to generate brand-specific questions to see how LLMs answer and represent your brand:
A lot of the new breed of AI Search tools either don't show you all the questions their market analysis is based on (I'm looking at you SEMrush and Ahrefs), or they don't give you much granularity and control over the different types of questions you want to ask. It's not all about unbranded share of voice you know - there's so much more you can learn to your advantage!
Having the ability to create custom prompts is really powerful. You can pretty much use this to create anything you want. A good example would be negative questions. Which is very helpful to understand all the sources across AI engines, which have something bad to say about your brand so that your PR team can get on the case:
You can use these custom AI prompts to create sets of questions in different languages and from different locations so you can get a multinational or even local perspective on AI Search. You can tailor your analysis to different markets but approach it with the same structured, robust methodology across markets.
Gap 2: The Visibility Blind Spot
The Problem: You're optimising for search engines, but AI models are learning from different sources and using different ranking factors.
The Solution: Our platform tracks your brand's "AI Share of Voice" across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews (AI Mode is coming soon too) and Bing Copilot, giving you complete visibility into how AI models actually talk about your brand.
You need to be able to compare your performance for your structured set of questions across different AI models and engines, including via their APIs. Compare things like share of voice, mentions, and sentiment.
We also show you all the responses that we get from the LLM so you can dig into each one.
AI Search - Share of AI Search% - Comparison across AI platforms and AI Models
AI Search Brand Mentions - Comparison across AI platforms and AI Model
AI Search Brand Sentiment - Comparison across AI platforms and AI Models
This type of multi-factor cross-model analysis allows you to easily see if you've got a problem with a particular AI platform.
Gap 3: The Competitive Intelligence Vacuum
The Problem: You don't know which competitors are dominating AI-generated responses or which sources are influencing these mentions.
The Solution: Get side-by-side competitive analysis showing exactly which brands AI models prefer to cite and identify the third-party sources that are driving these citations.
Here is an example screenshot that allows you to look at how the most popular brands are referenced by the most popular sources LLMs are using. If you look at a few of these examples, you'll notice a pattern that isn't rocket science. The brands that are performing well are the ones that are cited most often by the top publications that the LLMs use. Which means you just need to understand what type of content the LLMs prefer to get your own content ranking.
At this stage of optimising your presence in AI search engines, it is clear to me, having analysed a number of markets, that this pattern holds true and I think it will mark a renaissance in link building, outreach, and PR services, as we strive to increase the prominence of our brand mentions on the critical sources that LLMs are relying on to formulate their answers.
Gap 4: The Reputation Risk
The Problem: AI models can perpetuate outdated information, competitor talking points, or even misinformation about your brand - and you have no way to monitor or respond.
The Solution: Real-time sentiment analysis and reputation monitoring across all major AI platforms, which highlights negative responses. You can even tackle this head-on by generating a set of negative-framed questions across every aspect of your business that you ask the large language models so you can leave no stone unturned and find all the negative mentions of your brands or products that are likely to surface in AI answers.
AI Guided Prompt Generation for understanding the reputational risk of AI Search responses for your brand
Track negative sentiment across your industry vs competitors
Check progress: Track negative sentiment trends across your industry vs competitors
Collection of negative responses from LLMs for your brand and competitors
Which sources are the LLMs relying on for all this negativity?
Actionable Strategies for SEOs and Marketing Pros
"How do I optimise for ChatGPT?"
"How do I rank my brand in AI Answers?"
These are the million-dollar questions we are all asking right now and at this stage, it may even be a little bit premature to say exactly what works and we know this is surely going to change by AI platform and even AI model time. But for me, the SEO best practices that we've been following for years still hold true.
I don't subscribe to the GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), AIO (AI Optimisation), or whatever you want to call it next, narrative that somehow optimising for AI chatbots and AI search engines is fundamentally different to SEO. I don't buy it.
The underlying guiding principles are the same no matter what you call it:
- Be authentic
- Write the best possible content you can for your audience
- Try and get it covered in as many relevant places as possible
I've set out briefly some of these principles below, primarily to put a stake in the ground so I can revisit it in a year's time and see how things have changed.
1. Implement AI-First Content Optimisation
What to do:
- Shift from keyword-focused content to writing comprehensive, authoritative pieces that answer complete user intents.
How to execute:
- Create content that addresses the full customer journey, not just individual keywords
- Use structured data markup to help AI models understand your content context
- Focus on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals that AI models prioritise
- Optimise for conversational queries and natural language patterns (mine People Also Ask, Quora, Reddit and your support desk to see what questions clients are asking
- Include multimedia content (images and especially video) if you can allocate the time and budget. YouTube is one of the most cited sources, both in AI (Google's AI Overviews) and in AI search
Measure success:
- Create a synthetic database of representative questions
- Research what LLMs believe your audience is interested in and is important when purchasing products and services in your niche
- Track how often your content gets cited in AI responses for relevant queries in your industry - and break this down by category to understand your strengths and weaknesses
2. Master AI Crawlability
What to do:
- Ensure your content is discoverable and interpretable by AI models, not just traditional search crawlers.
How to execute:
- Implement comprehensive schema markup for all content types
- Create clear content hierarchies with descriptive headings
- Use natural language that AI models can easily parse and understand
- Ensure your robots.txt doesn't block AI crawlers (many sites accidentally do this)
- Add LLMs.txt to your site - Well, this is a common piece of advice I see banded about on LinkedIn and X but personally, and perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom, I don't really see the point of this right now. I would advocate concentrating on things like MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to really make your content accessible to LLMs - but let's save that for another blog post!
Measure success:
- Monitor your brand's mention frequency across different AI platforms and track improvements after optimisation
- Google is not going to give you much useful information in Google Search Console - they've made that pretty much clear. I'm not sure we will get much information out of the AI engines either. The best thing you can do is track referral data from Google Analytics as well as tracking AI search visibility in a platform like ours.
3. Build Source Authority for AI Citations
What to do:
- Position your brand as a go-to source that AI models want to cite.
How to execute:
- Create comprehensive resource pages that become definitive sources in your industry
- Develop original research and data that other sites will reference
- Build relationships with high-authority sites that AI models frequently cite
- Ensure your "About" pages and author bios establish clear expertise
- Analyse the types of pages that are popular in LLM citations in your niche - e.g. Product round-ups and product comparison articles seem to do very well in AI platforms and they don't seem to mind that you are writing about your own brand as well as your competitors (for now at least)!
On this last point - Ask yourself, "What type of pages are they? How are they structured? What types of content and layout do they use? What can you learn?" e.g. Anecdotally, I have noticed that top performing pages often talk around specific use cases of products (i.e., Who are they for? What's their application?). So, rather than just listing say "the 10 best lawnmowers", try breaking it out into the best for large lawns, small lawns, eco-friendly conscious consumers etc.
Slightly more advanced: (I plan to cover this in an upcoming blog posts), but you can also inspect the JSON that AI search engines use when they initiate a Web Search. This can give you valuable clues as to how the AI Platform is thinking and the types of related queries that they are searching behind the scenes to get web results. For example, if a user searches for, "what are the best lawn mowers?" on ChatGPT, behind the scenes OpenAI initiates a query to Bing's index for articles with these queries; "What are the best lawn mowers 2025?" and "What are the best lawn mowers in June 2025?". So, updating key content regularly can be beneficial.
Measure success:
- Track the percentage of AI responses that cite your brand as a primary source vs. competitors
- Evaluate the top performing pages in LLM responses for your site, your competitors and the most important 3rd party publishers
- Check whether publishing companies that own important websites in your niche have licensing deals with AI platforms - I think this will become increasingly important
On this final point - I have already recently seen ChatGPT start to include news results from the FT who they have a licensing deal within my personal responses. For this reason, we are building and maintaining the first independent database of AI search engine to publisher to website deals, and of course we have integrated this in the AI search platform already.
Keep track of Licensing Deals in your market: AI platform: Publisher: Websites Database
Actionable Strategies for Digital Marketing Teams
1. Redesign Your Customer Journey for AI Search
What to do:
- Map how AI search affects each stage of your customer journey and optimise accordingly.
How to execute:
- Identify the questions prospects ask at each funnel stage
- Understand what the LLM thinks are the most important things consumers or purchases of your products and services want in each category or subcategory
- Create content that positions your brand favourably in AI responses to these questions
- Develop attribution models that account for AI search touchpoints (difficult I know)
- Test how different queries about your industry position your brand vs. competitors
Measure success:
- Track conversion paths that include AI search touchpoints and measure brand lift from improved AI visibility.
2. Launch AI-Powered Competitive Intelligence
What to do:
- Use AI search data to identify competitive advantages and market positioning opportunities.
How to execute:
- Monitor which competitors get mentioned most frequently in AI responses
- Identify gaps where no brand dominates AI responses (opportunity zones)
- Track how AI models describe your competitive advantages vs. how you position them
- Use insights to refine messaging and identify new market opportunities
Measure success:
- Increase your brand's mention rate in competitive comparison queries by x% within n days.
3. Optimise Campaign Performance with AI Search Data
What to do:
- Use AI search visibility as a leading indicator for campaign performance and brand awareness.
How to execute:
- Correlate AI mention frequency with brand awareness survey results
- Use AI search data to identify which campaigns are driving the most brand authority
- A/B test different content approaches and measure impact on AI citations
- Create feedback loops between paid campaigns and AI search visibility - yep Advertorials could be making a comeback!
Measure success:
- Establish AI Share of Voice as a KPI alongside traditional metrics like GSC Impressions and Clicks.
Actionable Strategies for PR Teams
1. Implement Proactive Reputation Monitoring
What to do:
- Monitor and manage your brand's reputation across AI platforms before issues escalate.
How to execute:
- Set up alerts for sentiment changes in AI-generated content about your brand
- Create a response protocol for when misinformation appears in AI results
- Regularly audit AI responses to identify outdated or inaccurate information
- Build relationships with sources that AI models frequently cite
Measure success:
- Reduce negative sentiment in AI responses by x% and increase positive mention frequency by y%.
2. Control Your Brand Narrative in AI Responses
What to do:
- Ensure AI models are telling your brand story accurately and favourably.
How to execute:
- Create comprehensive brand messaging documents that AI models can access
- Develop key message frameworks that work well in conversational AI formats
- Monitor how AI models describe your brand positioning vs. competitors
- Create content that reinforces your desired brand narrative
Measure success:
- Achieve x% accuracy in how AI models describe your key brand attributes and value propositions.
3. Measure PR Impact on AI Search Visibility
What to do:
- Connect your PR efforts to measurable improvements in AI search presence.
How to execute:
- Track how earned media coverage affects your AI citation frequency
- Measure the correlation between press releases and AI mention spikes
- Monitor which types of PR content get picked up by AI models most frequently
- Use AI search data to demonstrate PR ROI to executives
- If you segment your market by category/topic then you can run targeted PR and outreach campaigns targeting the top cited websites in that segment and assess the impact of your PR efforts more clearly
Measure success:
- Show direct correlation between PR campaigns and increased AI Share of Voice within say n days of campaign launch.
How Our AI Search Brand Analyser Makes This All Possible
Comprehensive AI Platform Coverage
Our AI Search platform provides insights across the entire AI search ecosystem:
- Direct API Integration: Real-time data from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek
- AI Search Engine Crawling via the UI to see exactly what users see for Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity and ChatGPT
- Branded vs. Unbranded Analysis: Understand how AI models discuss your brand specifically vs. in competitive contexts
- Custom AI Prompt Builder: Test any questions your customers might ask, tailored to your industry, your buyer personas and buyer journeys
Actionable Competitive Intelligence
Get the insights you need to outmanoeuvre competitors in AI search:
- Side-by-side brand comparisons showing who dominates AI responses in your industry
- Source authority analysis revealing which third-party sites influence AI citations most
- Market positioning trends tracking how brand rankings change over time
- Opportunity identification highlighting queries where no single brand currently dominates
Real-Time Reputation Management
Stay ahead of reputation issues before they impact your business:
- Sentiment analysis of all AI-generated mentions across platforms
- Misinformation detection with alerts when inaccurate information appears
- Tone monitoring to understand how AI models describe your brand
- Historical tracking to identify reputation trends and patterns
Getting Started: Your 30-Day AI Search Optimisation Plan
These are the kind of things I would be thinking about in the first month of optimisation.
I'll revisit this action plans in the coming months as we learn more together on what factors really move the needle for brands in AI search. I'd love to pull together a 30-60-90-day action plan to win in AI Search. Feel free to contact me if you'd love to participate in working on such a plan together.
Why Early Adoption Matters More Than Ever
The AI search landscape is still evolving, which means there's a massive first-mover advantage for brands that optimise now:
- Less competition: Most brands aren't optimising for AI search yet
- Algorithm learning: AI models are still forming their understanding of brand authority
- Source establishment: Becoming a trusted source now influences future AI responses
- Competitive moats: Early optimisation creates sustainable advantages
The window for easy wins is closing fast. As more brands recognise the importance of AI search optimisation, the competition will intensify, and the cost of entry will increase.
Start Your AI Search Optimisation Journey Today
Ready to take control of your brand's presence in the AI search revolution? Here's how to get started:
Free Trial: Test Drive the Platform
- 100 queries across any AI model to see how your brand currently performs
- Competitive analysis comparing your brand to top competitors
- Sentiment assessment of current AI-generated mentions
- Opportunity identification for immediate optimisation wins
Full Platform Access
- Unlimited queries across all AI platforms (subject to package limits)
- Real-time monitoring and alerts for reputation management
- Advanced competitive intelligence with historical trend analysis
- Personal onboarding and strategy consultation
- Ongoing training and best practices workshops
The Future of Search is Already Here
AI search isn't coming - it's here. Every day you wait to optimise for AI search is another day your competitors can establish dominance in this new landscape.
The brands that will thrive in the next decade are those that recognise this shift and act decisively. Traditional SEO will remain important - I find it hard to believe that Google won't be market leader in 10 years' time (despite the best efforts of regulators worldwide and more competition)- but AI search optimisation is now essential for comprehensive digital marketing success.
Your brand's reputation, visibility, and competitive position in the AI era starts with the actions you take today.
Ready to dominate AI search?
Book a meeting with us and we can get you started with a free trial so you can see exactly how AI models currently discuss your brand and more importantly, what you can do to improve your competitive position.
