Getting cited by AI is a brand problem, not an SEO one
Fame brings SEO
So the good news is that the way to win in SEO is something marketers know a lot about - fame strategies. The bad news is that fame strategies are hard.
Every few weeks someone declares SEO dead and sells you its replacement.
The current narrative goes like this. Search has split in two. There’s the old game, backlinks and Google rankings. And a new one running alongside it: get your brand mentioned across the web, even without a link, and AI models start citing you in their answers.
The number doing the rounds comes from Ahrefs, who looked at 75,000 brands suggest that brand mentions correlate with AI visibility about three times more strongly than backlinks, 0.66 against 0.22.
The top things are brand mentions, brand anchors (your name used as the words in a link), and brand search volume. Brand search volume is the number of people who type your name into a search bar - a count of the people who already know you exist and go looking for you. They measure - who gets talked about, who gets named and who gets looked for.
That isn’t about SEO optimisation. Nope. It’s about fame.
An AI answering “what’s a good running shoe” isn’t grading your website. It’s reaching for what the internet repeatedly says about running shoes. Repetition reads as credibility coming up across reviews, forums and videos, so the model treats you as worth naming.
It’s the same reason you trust a restaurant three separate people mentioned without being asked. Nobody showed you a backlink audit. You just kept hearing the name. So the thing that gets you cited is the thing that was always hard - getting talked about.
Asking brands, websites and owners of tools to mention your brand (even with no link) probably works at the margins, and there’s no harm in it. And the page-work still matters. If a model can’t read your site, or your claims are vague, or there’s no clean sentence to lift, you lose even when you’re known. Making your pages easy for a machine to read is worth doing. It’s probably table-stakes though.
When Ahrefs extended the study to ChatGPT and Google’s AI, the important signal wasn’t connected to website optimisation. It was youtube mentions. People talking about you on camera because you were worth the airtime.
You have to earn that the hard way - by being interesting enough that someone wants to talk about you for free. Purple Cow stuff (for Seth Godin fans).
None of this is new. Get known. Stay easy to find. Be worth mentioning. Peter Field and Paul Feldwick have been saying this for years. AI didn’t create a new discipline. It rewards the brands people already talk about, and it dragged brand fame into a spreadsheet the SEO folks are now forced to read.
Lovely to see marketing work coming together instead of being sliced and diced into a hundred different teams.