LLM Brand Visibility
Adapt brand strategy for AI-first brand awareness
The digital customer journey is changing fast. One prompt in an AI assistant like ChatGPT or one AI-generated snippet in Google’s AI Overviews can collapse the entire buyer journey into a single touchpoint.
According to this Wall Street Journal 2025 article, 80% of consumers now resolve 40% of their online queries without clicking any links, thanks to AI-generated summaries and LLMs.
According to another recent study, there’s a staggering 81.10% chance that at least one URL from Google’s top 10 SERP results will be cited in an AI Overview.
SearchEngineLand reports that, according to a 2025 survey, 68% of organisations are changing their search strategies right now in response to AI search.
In the age of large language models (LLMs), brands must understand:
How LLMs process and present brand information: Read my previous post on Generative AI and LLMs here: how do they work, what limitations do they have, and how are they trained.
How to improve and track brand visibility inside AI-driven environments. Let’s dive deeper into AI-first brand awareness in this blog post.
Why LLMs matter to growth marketers?
We’re now entering the “agentic internet.” This is a fundamental shift from the classic “type a keyword into Google” model to something radically different. Customers are increasingly outsourcing the entire discovery journey to AI assistants.
Whether it’s through ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, people are increasingly asking AI agents to research solutions, compare products, make recommendations, and even decide which brand to trust—all within a single chat.
This has big consequences for digital marketing. Early data shows:
Declines in organic search traffic for many industries
Lower clickthrough rates on search result pages
Fewer customer visits to websites during the decision process
LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini are becoming trusted digital advisors. That means they can influence:
Which brands does a user become aware of
Which brands are recommended during consideration
Which brand is chosen for the final decision
LLM brand visibility: how LLMs "know" your brand
Here’s how LLMs gather and synthesise brand information:
1) Pretraining data:
Most LLMs are trained on a large swath of the public internet, including websites, forums, reviews, press releases, Wikipedia, and news articles.
If your brand has a strong, widely available online presence, it’s more likely to be “known” to these models.
2) Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG):
Tools like Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and some versions of ChatGPT/Gemini use live web search to enhance answers.
If your brand ranks well, has schema markup, or appears in top-tier content, it may surface here.
3) Plugin & custom GPT ecosystems:
Some brands can build their own AI plugins or custom GPTs, creating direct brand experiences inside LLM platforms.
4) APIs and integrations:
Some AI tools pull data from brand APIs (e.g., Expedia in ChatGPT) to give real-time branded responses.
How to increase brand visibility inside LLMs
If marketers want their brands to show up in LLMs, they need to stop thinking like SEO experts and start thinking like AI strategists. LLMs are optimising for relevance, not clicks.
Think like an AI-First marketer:
If someone were to ask ChatGPT a question in your niche, how likely is it to recommend you—and what would it say?
How LLMs interpret information
LLMs generate responses based on patterns of language and associations between concepts. When LLMs are answering a prompt like:
“What are the best running shoes for marathon training?”
They’re not looking for brand slogans (“Just do it”); they look for topical relevance, consistency across multiple sources, and authority signals (e.g., linked studies, structured data, use case fit).
To be visible in AI-powered conversations, your brand messaging must clearly answer:
Who is this for
What problem or real user need does it solve? Answer the “job to be done”.
Why is it the right fit in this situation?
What evidence supports this claim? References of expertise and authority (e.g., studies, reviews, testimonials).
The more clearly you tie your product or service to specific needs of your target buyer, the more likely LLMs are to surface your brand in relevant chats.
Example: SaaS / B2B Software:
❌ “We provide intuitive project management tools.”
✅ “Our platform helps distributed teams reduce project delays by 27% through real-time task tracking, AI-powered prioritisation, and integration with tools like Slack, Jira, and Google Drive.”
This means that ICP research and understanding deeply your key prospects and customers is even more important than ever. Know your buyers, their needs, challenges, pain points, emotional drivers, buying motivations, buying objections, decision criteria.
How to track your brand visibility in LLMs?
Current challenges:
There are not yet widely used “dashboards” showing how often LLMs mention your brand. There are, though, many solution providers for this.
AI-generated responses vary based on AI tools, context, prompting, and model updates.
It's non-deterministic and private—users have individual experiences.
Ways to track your brand visibility in AI
1. Test out new emerging AI-tracking dashboards
Many solution providers, such as Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs, and Semrush, are developing offerings for tracking and optimising brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity.
2. Manual testing: Prompt-based auditing & customer feedback
2.1. Regularly ask questions related to your brand category and see if your brand appears. Use variations across different tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) and log the responses over time. Examples:
“What’s the best [product type] for [use case]?”
“Top alternatives to [competitor name]?”
“Can you recommend a [industry] solution for [pain point]?”
2.2. Ask new won customers how they found out about your brand: Did they find you first in an AI chat?
Track:
Does your brand appear?
How is it described?
Is sentiment positive, neutral, or missing?
3. Brand mentions monitoring tools (Updated for AI)
Some reputation tools are adapting for the AI age:
Mention, Brand24, or Meltwater are starting to explore LLM integrations
Set up alerts for indirect mentions (e.g., “best CRM for startups” without naming your brand)
4. Custom GPT or assistant embedding
Create a branded GPT (if your audience is using ChatGPT Plus) that teaches users about your product or service. It’s part awareness, part conversion tool.
Conclusion
LLMs like ChatGPT are becoming the new front doors to customer discovery. To stay relevant, marketers must adapt brand strategy for LLM visibility.
1) ICP and customer understanding more crucial than ever
AI highlights brands that answer user-specific, detailed questions.
Tie your product or service to specific needs of your target buyer.
2) Optimise for conversational prompts, not just keywords.
Tie the product to broader use cases and long-tail prompts.
3) Increase brand authority signals:
Produce quality content that aligns with E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) signals.
Publish accurate, helpful, and well-sourced content.
Link to expert sources, studies, and customer outcomes.
Become the source for your niche audience.
Publish on authoritative domains (like guest posts or features in known publications).
4) AI SEO
Ensure your site and content use schema markup (Product, Organisation, FAQ, etc.). This helps LLMs trained on web data recognise your content with more context.
Create FAQ-style content in your niche.
Use lists, tables, and examples to feed LLM-friendly formats.
Optimise technical SEO for AI crawlers.
Having good SERP (search engine results page) positions for your content maximises your chances to be highlighted by AI tools.
5) Audit your AI-first brand visibility:
Manually audit your brand visibility in AI tools regularly to track presence and sentiment.
Explore partnerships with platforms offering plugin or integration opportunities.
Test out emerging dashboards for tracking and optimising for AI-brand visibility.
