You've built a great product, earned customer trust, and established your brand—yet when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity about solutions in your space, your company name is nowhere to be found. This isn't a glitch; it's a visibility gap that's costing you leads every single day.
As AI-powered search becomes the default way people discover products and services, being absent from AI recommendations is like being invisible on Google a decade ago. The difference? AI models don't just rank your content—they actively choose whether to mention your brand at all when answering user queries.
The good news? You can fix this.
This guide walks you through seven actionable steps to diagnose why AI models aren't mentioning your company and, more importantly, how to get your brand into their training data and recommendation patterns. Whether you're a SaaS founder wondering why competitors keep getting recommended, a marketer tracking declining organic discovery, or an agency helping clients navigate this new landscape, these steps will give you a clear path forward.
Step 1: Audit Your Current AI Visibility Across Major Platforms
Before you can fix your AI visibility problem, you need to understand exactly where you stand. Think of this as your diagnostic phase—you're gathering data that will inform every decision you make moving forward.
Start by testing your brand mentions across the major AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. The key is to use prompts that mirror how your potential customers actually search. If you're a project management tool, don't just ask "What is [Your Company]?" Instead, try prompts like "What are the best project management tools for remote teams?" or "Recommend software for agile project tracking."
Here's where it gets interesting: document which competitors ARE being mentioned. When you ask these AI models for recommendations in your category, which brands consistently appear? What do they have that you don't? Are they being described with specific features, use cases, or customer testimonials that make them memorable?
Create a simple tracking spreadsheet with columns for the AI platform, the prompt you used, whether your brand was mentioned, which competitors appeared, and any notable patterns. Run at least 10-15 different prompts across each platform to get a representative sample. You might discover that Claude mentions you occasionally while ChatGPT never mentions your company, or that you appear in technical queries but not in beginner-focused ones.
This is also the perfect time to use AI visibility tracking tools that can automate this process and provide deeper insights. These platforms can establish a baseline AI Visibility Score, track sentiment patterns in how you're described, and monitor changes over time without manual testing.
The goal isn't to feel discouraged by what you find. It's to get a clear, objective picture of your starting point so you can measure progress as you implement the remaining steps.
Step 2: Analyze Your Digital Footprint Through an AI's Lens
Now that you know where you stand, it's time to understand why. AI models don't randomly choose which brands to mention—they draw from patterns in the data they've been trained on and can access. Your job is to evaluate your digital presence the way an AI would.
Start with your website's crawlability. Can AI crawlers easily access and understand your content? Check your robots.txt file to ensure you're not accidentally blocking important pages. Review your site structure—is your navigation logical? Can a crawler easily find your key pages about what you do, who you serve, and why you're different?
Next, evaluate your content through the lens of AI comprehension. AI models prefer content that answers questions clearly, provides specific information, and cites sources. Look at your product pages, blog posts, and documentation. Are you using vague marketing language like "revolutionary solution" and "game-changing platform," or are you providing concrete descriptions of features, use cases, and benefits?
Here's a practical test: read your About page out loud. If someone heard it without context, could they explain exactly what your company does, who it serves, and what problems it solves? If not, you've found your first content gap.
Pay special attention to your presence on platforms that AI models heavily reference. Wikipedia remains one of the most authoritative sources for AI training data. Industry publications, review sites like G2 and Capterra, and established tech blogs carry significant weight. Search for your brand name and your category—where do you appear? Where are your competitors appearing that you're not?
Create a gap analysis document. On one side, list where your competitors have strong presence. On the other, mark where you're absent or underrepresented. These gaps become your roadmap for the next steps.
Step 3: Optimize Your Website for AI Comprehension
Your website is your owned media—the one place you have complete control over how your brand is presented. Making it AI-friendly isn't about manipulation; it's about clarity and structure.
Start with schema markup, the structured data that helps AI models understand exactly what your pages contain. Implement Organization schema on your homepage to clearly define your company name, logo, description, and contact information. Add Product schema to your product pages with specific details about features, pricing, and reviews. Use FAQ schema to mark up common questions and answers in a format AI models can easily parse.
Next, create an llms.txt file—a relatively new but increasingly important standard for communicating with AI crawlers. This file lives in your website's root directory and provides structured information about your company, products, and key pages in a format specifically designed for large language models. Think of it as a README file for AI.
Your llms.txt should include your company description, main products or services, key differentiators, target audience, and links to your most important pages. Keep it factual and specific. Instead of "We're the leading solution," write "We provide AI visibility tracking software that monitors brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI platforms."
Now audit your critical pages: About, Products, Services, and FAQ sections. Remove ambiguous marketing language and replace it with quotable, factual statements. AI models prefer content they can confidently cite. "Our platform helps marketers track brand mentions" is better than "We revolutionize how brands think about visibility."
Add a comprehensive FAQ section if you don't have one. Answer the questions your customers actually ask, using the same language they use. When AI models encounter clear question-and-answer formats, they're more likely to reference that content when responding to similar queries.
Step 4: Build Authority Through Strategic Content Creation
AI models gravitate toward authoritative, comprehensive content that they can confidently reference. Your goal is to create resources so valuable that they become natural citation sources.
Start by identifying the definitive guides that don't yet exist in your space—or exist but are outdated or incomplete. What would the ultimate resource on your topic look like? If you're in the email marketing space, maybe it's "The Complete Guide to Email Deliverability in 2026" with original testing data. If you're in project management, perhaps it's "The State of Remote Team Collaboration: Data from 500+ Distributed Companies."
Original research is particularly powerful. AI models are trained to value primary sources and novel data. You don't need a massive research budget—even a well-designed survey of your customer base or an analysis of industry trends using publicly available data can establish you as a thought leader.
Create comparison content that positions your brand alongside established players. Write honest, balanced comparisons: "Tool A vs. Tool B vs. Your Company: Which Is Right for Your Team?" When you provide fair, detailed comparisons, AI models are more likely to include you in their own comparative responses.
Focus on GEO principles in your content creation. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, emphasizes the elements that make content AI-friendly: clear structure with descriptive headings, cited statistics and data points, expert quotes and perspectives, and specific examples over vague generalizations.
Every piece of content should answer a real question your audience has, provide actionable information, and include verifiable facts and examples. The more your content serves as a reliable source of truth, the more likely AI models are to cite your website.
Step 5: Expand Your Third-Party Presence and Citations
While owned content is important, AI models place significant weight on third-party validation. Your brand mentioned by others carries more authority than your brand mentioned by you.
Start by targeting industry publications and authoritative websites in your space. Pitch guest posts, expert commentary, or original research to established blogs and media outlets. When TechCrunch, Forbes, or a respected industry publication mentions your brand, that signal carries exponentially more weight than a mention on your own blog.
Reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot serve dual purposes: they provide social proof for human visitors and they create structured, third-party data points about your product that AI models can reference. Actively encourage satisfied customers to leave detailed reviews. Respond to reviews—both positive and negative—to show you're engaged and customer-focused.
Wikipedia presence matters more than most brands realize. If your company meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines, create or improve your Wikipedia page. If you're not yet notable enough for your own page, look for opportunities to be mentioned in relevant category pages or industry overview articles.
Pursue podcast appearances, webinar partnerships, and conference speaking opportunities. Each creates another touchpoint where your brand is discussed by third parties. The key is choosing platforms and partners that are themselves authoritative and likely to be referenced in AI training data.
PR opportunities that generate press coverage create verifiable, citable mentions. Product launches, funding announcements, significant customer wins, or original research all provide hooks for media coverage. The goal isn't vanity metrics—it's creating a web of authoritative mentions that AI models can discover and reference.
Step 6: Accelerate Content Discovery with Technical SEO
Creating great content doesn't matter if AI crawlers can't find it quickly. Technical SEO practices that speed up discovery give you a competitive advantage in the race for AI visibility.
Implement IndexNow, a protocol that allows you to proactively notify search engines and AI crawlers when you publish or update content. Instead of waiting for crawlers to discover changes organically, IndexNow pushes updates immediately. This means your new blog post, updated product page, or fresh case study can be indexed within minutes instead of days or weeks. Learn how to set this up with our guide on IndexNow implementation for websites.
Maintain a comprehensive, up-to-date XML sitemap that includes all your valuable pages. Your sitemap acts as a roadmap for crawlers, ensuring they don't miss important content. Update it automatically whenever you publish new pages, and submit it through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. If you're struggling with this, check out our article on automated sitemap updates for SEO.
Monitor crawl errors regularly. Use Search Console to identify pages that return 404 errors, have redirect chains, or are blocked by robots.txt. Each crawl error represents content that might be invisible to AI models. Fix these systematically to ensure your entire site is accessible.
Page speed and mobile optimization affect crawl prioritization. Crawlers have limited resources and tend to prioritize well-optimized sites. If your pages load slowly or don't work well on mobile devices, you might be getting crawled less frequently or less thoroughly than competitors. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix performance issues.
Internal linking helps crawlers understand your site structure and content relationships. Link from high-authority pages to newer or less-discovered content. Use descriptive anchor text that helps both human readers and AI crawlers understand what they'll find when they click.
Step 7: Monitor, Measure, and Iterate Your AI Visibility Strategy
AI visibility isn't a one-time fix—it's an ongoing strategy that requires consistent monitoring and adjustment. The AI landscape evolves rapidly, and your approach needs to evolve with it.
Set up systematic tracking to measure your AI mention frequency and sentiment over time. Run the same set of test prompts across major AI platforms weekly or biweekly. Track not just whether you're mentioned, but how you're described. Are AI models highlighting your key differentiators? Are they recommending you for the right use cases? Learn more about how to track what AI says about your company.
A/B test different content approaches to identify what drives AI recommendations. Try publishing two similar guides with different structures—one with heavy use of data and citations, another with more narrative storytelling. Monitor which gets referenced more often in AI responses. Experiment with different schema implementations, FAQ formats, and content depths.
Track competitor mentions alongside your own to benchmark progress. If you're being mentioned 20% of the time and your main competitor is at 60%, you have a clear target. Monitor what they're doing differently—are they getting more press coverage? Publishing more authoritative content? Building more third-party presence?
Pay attention to which AI platforms show the most improvement. You might discover that your strategy works exceptionally well for Perplexity but hasn't moved the needle for ChatGPT. This insight helps you refine your approach and potentially double down on what's working while investigating why other platforms lag. If you're seeing issues with specific platforms, our guide on brand not showing up in Perplexity can help.
Create a feedback loop between your tracking data and your content strategy. If you notice AI models frequently mention competitors when discussing a specific use case you also serve, create definitive content addressing that use case. If sentiment analysis shows you're being described inaccurately, update your website copy and structured data to provide clearer information.
Putting It All Together
Getting AI models to mention your company isn't about gaming the system—it's about ensuring your legitimate brand presence is visible in the places AI draws its knowledge from. By auditing your current visibility, optimizing your digital footprint, creating authoritative content, building third-party presence, and implementing technical best practices, you're not just chasing AI mentions; you're building a stronger overall brand foundation.
The beauty of this approach is that each step reinforces the others. Better content makes you more attractive to third-party publishers. Third-party mentions increase your authority, which makes your owned content more credible. Technical optimization ensures all this work gets discovered quickly. It's a virtuous cycle that compounds over time.
Start with a quick-start checklist: Run visibility audits across four or more AI platforms to establish your baseline. Implement schema markup and create your llms.txt file to improve AI comprehension. Publish two to three definitive guides in your space that establish thought leadership. Secure mentions on five or more third-party authoritative sites through PR, guest posting, or partnerships. Set up IndexNow for faster Google indexing and content discovery. Establish weekly brand monitoring in LLMs to track your progress.
You can complete your initial audit in under an hour and have a clear picture of where you stand. From there, tackle one step per week. By the end of two months, you'll have implemented all seven steps and should start seeing measurable improvements in how often AI models mention your brand.
The AI search landscape will only grow more important. Companies that establish strong AI visibility now will have a significant advantage over those who wait. Your competitors are already working on this—the question is whether you'll lead or follow.
Stop guessing how AI models like ChatGPT and Claude talk about your brand—get visibility into every mention, track content opportunities, and automate your path to organic traffic growth. Start tracking your AI visibility today and see exactly where your brand appears across top AI platforms.
