Ask ChatGPT to recommend a product in your category and it will name four or five brands. Whether yours is among them has very little to do with how many blog posts you have published. Seer Interactive studied 7,683 pages cited by AI engines and found that 98% of them sat outside the control of the brand being discussed.
That one number reshapes the whole job. AI assistants form their view of your brand mostly from what other people say about it: videos, news articles, forum threads, review sites and comparison lists. Your own website plays a supporting role.
So this list is ordered that way. The first six methods happen away from your site. The last two happen on it. Each is backed by published research, with the numbers shown.
- Mentions and Citations Are Two Different Things
- The 8 Ways at a Glance
- 1. Get Talked About on YouTube
- 2. Earn Press Coverage
- 3. Be Present Where People Discuss Your Category on Reddit
- 4. Get Onto the “Best” Lists AI Reads
- 5. Build Up Your Review Profiles
- 6. Make Your Brand Easy for AI to Identify
- 7. Publish Original Data That Others Quote
- 8. Keep Your Most Important Pages Fresh
- What Does Not Move the Needle
- Each AI Engine Reads Differently
- A 90-Day Plan
- Frequently Asked Questions
Mentions and Citations Are Two Different Things
A mention is your brand name appearing in the AI’s answer. A citation is a link to a source the AI drew on. You can be mentioned without being cited, when the AI learned about you from someone else’s page. You can be cited without being mentioned, when the AI uses your article to recommend a competitor. Mentions are the goal here, because a mention is what puts you on a buyer’s shortlist. If the wider field is new to you, our guide to LLM SEO covers the groundwork.
The 8 Ways at a Glance
| Method | Where It Happens | Key Evidence | Time to See Results |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Get talked about on YouTube | Off-site | Strongest correlation with AI visibility, 0.74 | 2 to 4 months |
| 2. Earn press coverage | Off-site | Earned media is 84% of AI citations | 1 to 3 months |
| 3. Be present on Reddit | Off-site | Most-cited domain across 30 million sources | 2 to 6 months |
| 4. Get onto “best” lists | Off-site | 43.8% of page types ChatGPT cites | 1 to 3 months |
| 5. Build review profiles | Off-site | G2 and Yelp cited in recommendation queries | 3 to 6 months |
| 6. Fix your brand’s identity | Off-site | Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s most-cited domain | 3 to 6 months |
| 7. Publish original data | On-site | Quotes, statistics and sources lift visibility by up to 40% | 1 to 3 months |
| 8. Keep key pages fresh | On-site | 75% of cited pages were updated in the last year | Weeks |
1. Get Talked About on YouTube
Ahrefs measured which signals line up with AI visibility across 75,000 brands. Mentions on YouTube came out on top, with a correlation of about 0.74, ahead of mentions on the wider web and far ahead of backlinks or domain rating. The reason is plain once you know that both OpenAI and Google trained their models on YouTube transcripts, and that Google’s AI Mode cites YouTube more than any other domain.
The word that matters is mentions. Your own channel helps, but the signal comes from other people saying your brand name in their videos. Breadth beats size. A product reviewed by twenty small creators can do better than one that appears in a single viral video.
How to do it:
- Send your product to small and mid-sized creators in your niche and ask for an honest review.
- Appear as a guest on podcasts and interview shows that publish to YouTube.
- Make sure your brand name is spoken clearly and spelled in the title or description, since transcripts are what the models read.
- Publish your own tutorials and comparisons as well, following sound YouTube SEO so they surface for product questions.
2. Earn Press Coverage
Muck Rack’s May 2026 study of more than a million AI-cited links found that 84% were earned media, meaning coverage a brand did not pay for or publish itself. Journalism alone made up 27%. Paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3%. Sponsored articles, in other words, are close to invisible to these systems.
Recency matters too. More than half of the journalism cited was published within the past 12 months, and citations fall away sharply after six months. One burst of coverage three years ago does little for you now. A steady trickle does a lot.
How to do it:
- Give reporters something to report: survey results, internal data, a clear expert view on breaking news.
- Answer journalist requests on source platforms every week.
- Aim for trade publications in your industry, where the competition for space is lower and the audience is exact.
- Plan for at least one piece of coverage a quarter so there is always something recent.
3. Be Present Where People Discuss Your Category on Reddit
Peec AI analysed 30 million sources cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. Reddit was the most-cited domain overall, followed by YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Forbes. Gemini cites Reddit more than any other source, and Perplexity leans on it heavily.
AI engines treat Reddit threads as a record of what real users think. That makes them powerful and also hard to fake. Accounts that turn up only to promote get removed, and the removal itself becomes part of the record.
How to do it:
- Find the threads that already rank for questions in your category and read what people say about you and your rivals.
- Have a named person from your company answer questions under their real role, with useful detail first and the product second.
- Fix the complaints that keep recurring. A thread where a founder solves a problem in public is the best mention you can earn.
- Encourage happy customers to share their experience when the topic comes up naturally.
4. Get Onto the “Best” Lists AI Reads
When Ahrefs examined 750 buying-stage prompts, “best X” list articles made up 43.8% of all the page types ChatGPT cited. Nothing else came close. Brands placed higher in a list were more likely to be recommended. The lists were also fresh: 79.1% of those cited had been updated in 2025, and 26% within the previous two months.
If an AI assistant is asked for the best tool in your category, it is mostly reading these pages. Being absent from them means being absent from the answer.
How to do it:
- Search your main category terms and list every comparison article on the first two pages.
- Contact the authors with a short pitch, a free account and a reason their readers would care.
- Publish your own comparison of the category, with honest strengths and weaknesses for every option, your own included.
- Revisit both sets of pages every quarter, because recently updated lists are the ones that get cited.
5. Build Up Your Review Profiles
Review platforms appear again and again in answers to recommendation queries. Peec AI’s data shows G2 featuring strongly in Perplexity’s answers for business software, while Yelp shows up in Google’s AI Mode and Gemini for local services. These sites give AI engines something they value: many independent voices saying similar things about the same brand.
The text of reviews matters as much as the star rating. When customers describe what they use your product for, they supply the exact phrases that connect your brand to a use case.
How to do it:
- Claim and complete your profile on the two or three review sites that matter in your field.
- Ask for reviews at the moment a customer has just had a good result.
- Invite customers to mention what they use the product for, in their own words.
- Reply to every review, good and bad. The replies are read as well.
6. Make Your Brand Easy for AI to Identify
Wikipedia is the single most-cited domain in ChatGPT, according to Muck Rack, and LinkedIn ranks third across all engines in Peec AI’s data. Both serve the same purpose for an AI model. They establish what your brand is, what category it belongs to and who is behind it.
A model that is unsure what you are will leave you out. Confusion usually comes from inconsistency: a homepage that calls you a platform, a LinkedIn page that calls you an agency and a directory listing with a five-year-old description.
How to do it:
- Write one sentence that says what you are and who you serve, and use it everywhere.
- Keep company and founder LinkedIn pages complete and current.
- Create or correct your Wikidata entry, and pursue a Wikipedia article only once independent coverage supports one.
- Add Organization schema to your site with links to your official profiles.
- Make sure your name, category and description match across directories and data sources.
7. Publish Original Data That Others Quote
Researchers at Princeton and partner universities tested which content changes made a page more visible in generative engine answers. Adding quotations, statistics and cited sources produced the largest gains, up to 40%. Keyword stuffing made visibility worse.
There is a second benefit. Original numbers get repeated. A statistic from your survey ends up in news articles, videos and list posts, and each of those is a brand mention on a page AI already trusts. This is how on-site work feeds the six off-site methods above, and why brand mentions now carry weight that backlinks alone do not.
How to do it:
- Run a small survey of your customers or audience once or twice a year.
- Publish anonymised figures from your own product or service data.
- Put the key number in the first paragraph, in a sentence that makes sense when lifted out on its own.
- Name your brand in that sentence, as in “a 2026 study by [Brand] found”, so the credit travels with the quote.
8. Keep Your Most Important Pages Fresh
In the Seer Interactive study, three-quarters of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity had been updated within the past year, and 88% within two years. Gemini was the strictest at 78%, then ChatGPT at 73% and Perplexity at 65%.
The useful detail is that updating beat publishing. Only 42% of those fresh pages were new. The rest were older pages that had been maintained, and more than a quarter were first published over two years earlier. Pages cited month after month had a median update age of six months. An established page that is kept current has staying power that a new page lacks. Our guide to content pruning and content decay explains how to decide which pages deserve the effort.
How to do it:
- Pick the ten pages that describe your product, pricing and main use cases.
- Review them every six months and update figures, screenshots and examples.
- Show a visible “last updated” date and keep the date in your schema accurate.
- Change the substance, not just the date. Engines compare versions.
What Does Not Move the Needle
| Tactic | What the Research Shows |
|---|---|
| Publishing large volumes of content | Correlation with AI visibility of only 0.19 in the Ahrefs study |
| Chasing a higher domain rating | Weak correlation, 0.27 to 0.33 |
| Sponsored articles and advertorials | 0.3% of AI citations in Muck Rack’s data |
| Keyword stuffing | Reduced visibility in the Princeton tests |
Several of these were sound advice for search rankings and are still repeated for AI. Our round-up of AI SEO myths covers more of them.
Each AI Engine Reads Differently
| Engine | How Often It Cites Sources | Favourite Sources | What That Means for You |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 96% of answers, about 5 sources | Wikipedia, Reddit, editorial sites such as Forbes | The most open to newer brands. Press and lists pay off fastest here |
| Gemini | 82% of answers, about 8 sources | Reddit, Yelp, marketplaces and comparisons | Reviews and community presence matter most |
| Perplexity | Cites on nearly every answer | Reddit, LinkedIn, G2 | The strongest case for review profiles in business software |
| Claude | 55% of answers, about 13 sources | Research sources such as PubMed Central | Rewards well-sourced, evidence-led content |
| Google AI Mode and AI Overviews | Varies by query | YouTube, established high-authority sites | Traditional authority still counts most here |
Google’s two AI surfaces behave differently from each other as well, which we break down in AI Overviews vs AI Mode.
A 90-Day Plan
| Period | What to Do | Methods Covered |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 15 | Write your one-sentence brand description and apply it to your site, LinkedIn, directories and schema. Record how AI engines describe you today. | 6 |
| Days 16 to 30 | Update your ten most important pages. Complete your review profiles and start asking customers for reviews. | 5, 8 |
| Days 31 to 60 | Run a survey and publish the results. Pitch the findings to trade press. Contact the authors of the top comparison lists in your category. | 2, 4, 7 |
| Days 61 to 90 | Send your product to ten small YouTube creators. Start answering questions in two relevant subreddits. Measure mentions again. | 1, 3 |
For the measuring, a set of 20 to 30 buyer questions checked each month across the main engines is enough to see a trend. The AI visibility tracking tools we have reviewed automate that and show which sources each answer drew on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is an AI Mention?
It is your brand name appearing in an answer from an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude, with or without a link to your site.
How Long Does It Take to Increase AI Mentions?
Updating your own pages can show results within weeks on engines that search the live web. Off-site work such as press, reviews and YouTube coverage usually takes two to six months to change what AI says.
Do Backlinks Help With AI Mentions?
Only a little. In Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands, backlinks and domain rating had a weak link to AI visibility, while brand mentions across the web and on YouTube had a strong one.
Can You Pay to Be Mentioned by AI?
Not in any reliable way. Paid and advertorial content made up 0.3% of AI citations in Muck Rack’s 2026 research. Earned coverage made up 84%.
Which Platform Matters Most for AI Mentions?
YouTube has the strongest measured link with AI visibility. Reddit is the most-cited domain overall, and Wikipedia is the most-cited source in ChatGPT.
Does Publishing More Content Increase AI Mentions?
No. Content volume had the weakest correlation with AI visibility of the factors Ahrefs tested. Fewer pages with original data, kept up to date, do more.
Can a Small Brand Get Mentioned by AI?
Yes. ChatGPT in particular shows the weakest tie to traditional authority signals, which makes it the most reachable for newer brands that earn mentions across several independent sources.
