How To Track Brand Mentions In LLM and AI Search

You should track brand mentions in AI search to understand visibility, spot areas of growth and assess the results of marketing efforts. 

You might be asking why it’s even worth it to monitor mentions. After all, according to the same McKinsey piece, only 16% of brands actually track their AI search performance.

This is a major oversight, as without keeping an eye on your visibility:

• There’s no telling whether or not a brand mention will even be helpful.
• You won’t be able to tell if you’re getting visibility in the right way. 
• You’re missing out on another way to connect with your audience and estimate your reputation. 

You should track brand mentions in AI search to:

• Gauge Brand Visibility: Before even funding efforts in increasing your AI visibility, you need to understand your company’s current status in LLMs. By tracking brand mentions and keeping an eye out for how often you appear, you’ll then be able to appropriately assign your expenses. 

• Analyze Competitive Gaps: If your competitors are smart, they’re no different from you, and they too are trying to catch the eyes of those intelligent lines of code. Continuous tracking can help you with understanding where those competitors are showing up ahead or instead of you, giving you the chance to make haste and fill those holes early.

• Evaluate Reputation: AI engines analyze consensus across the web before making judgements. This means that your brand footprint is taken into account when responses are made, assisting you with seeing how you can better your PR. 

• Verify Information: Tracking brand mentions in AI gives you the massive aid of stopping misinformation. Since AI models scour the web for info, they may come across 

• Assess The Impact Of Outreach Efforts: Say you hired a brand mention service provider, and want to rest easy at night knowing that your investment is actually providing results. If you track your mentions at a consistent rate, you’ll see whether or not the resources being poured into AI visibility are paying off.

Brand mentions made by artificial intelligence fall into three categories, plain text, linked, and ghost. 

Say you tracked your brand mentions in AI, and saw that the numbers are quite encouraging. Certain tools out there give you a snapshot of the amount of times an AI uses information from your pages or states your name, outputting blank numbers. 

However, these numbers can be deceptive, as they may not detail what kinds of brand mentions you’re receiving. There is an important distinction to make here, as though a chatbot could be citing you, they may not be outright naming you.

The following are the types of brand mentions you should keep tabs on. 

• Plain Text Brand Mentions: These are direct references to your company’s name within an AI response without a hyperlink attached to them. They prove that chatbots value your contributions and content within your industry, as they’re often listed off in the context of being a preferable option for consumers. 

• Linked Brand Mentions: These are brand mentions with a backlink attached to them which point toward the relevant page on your website that’s being referenced in the response. That page could be your main, service or blog page. They also appear at different rates depending on the AI model, as an engine like DeepSeek is more likely to add a hyperlink to a mention than ChatGPT. Regardless, these are the only types of brand mentions that can provide direct referral traffic. 
• Ghost Mentions/AI Citations: These are instances where LLMs utilize information provided by your company/website, but do not outright name your brand. Instead, you appear in the footnote section or on the AI’s sidebar as a source. Though these types of mentions can still carry some value, they don’t raise awareness like the other two.

How To Change AI Citations to AI Brand Mentions

According to Semrush, across 3,981 site appearances, 61.7% of brand mentions were ghost citations, with the brand name never appearing in the answer itself. Though any mention is inherently helpful, such a staggering number can be an opportunity. If you’re able to flip these ghost citations into actual brand mentions, your name will see a lot more time in the limelight.

To change citations into direct brand mentions, you should:

• Insert Brand Name Into Content: After recognizing the specific content that is being used as a source by chatbots, try to find that content within your site. Afterwards, update those pages and sections to feature your brand, product or service name specifically near the spots that are being pulled by AI.
• Optimize Directory Appearances: Niche specific directory websites can be scanned and acknowledged by AI engines as a vote of confidence. Adding your brand’s name to quality directories helps to cement your identity further than before. 
• Improve Site Bio: Add an FAQ on your main page, improve your “About Us” sections, and fine tune your site’s identity and perhaps LLMs will build a better picture of your identity.

The primary metrics you should track have to do with the amount your brand appears in AI search, the position of your appearance, and the context of your appearance. 

The next step is to understand which metrics matter when tracking your brand mentions. There’s tons of different statistics and attributes that you can pay attention to, but not all of them are going to provide you with any valuable insight. When tracking or using one of the top AI visibility tools, you want to make sure that you’re getting the right information. 

The following are the most important metrics you should be paying attention to: 

• Mention Rate: Perhaps the most important metric of all is the count of your mentions. At the very least, you should prioritize counting an estimated number for how many times your name gets spelled out by AI engines. It’s the base of your tracking and will help you assess your visibility in its simplest form. 

• Citation Rate: You should avoid hyper focusing on mentions exclusively, as citations give you the opportunity to understand which sections of your site are being used as sources for AI. Ensure that you’re keeping an eye on your citations/ghost mentions as well. 

• AI Share of Model: Of course, you shouldn’t stick to just one AI model, as each engine has its own system. As such, it’s key for you to monitor your visibility across the most popular models out there. Not every chatbot can be someone’s cup of tea, and you’d like to appear in every possible source out there. 

• Mention Position: This is where you conduct competitor analysis, as most chatbots provide lists of a handful of options when making recommendations. See which option your company is listed as and analyze what your competitors are doing which is leaving you out of the top spot. 

• Prompt Coverage: There’s a distinct difference between your company appearing when you ask an AI engine for a description of it and it showing up as a recommendation for a niche-specific query. Try out various prompts and see how your brand stacks up against competitors across those prompts. 

• Third Party Site Placement: AI models take advantage of forums like Quora and Reddit, and even when mentioning your brand could cite something like a social media post answering the user’s request. Monitoring the frequency of your brand being pulled from third party sources can act as a roadmap of your digital reputation. 

• Sentiment Analysis: Gauge whether the AI presents your company in a positive, neutral or negative light to ensure that the visibility you are receiving is actually beneficial. 

• Description Analysis: Chatbots are infamous for their tendency to hallucinate. When viewing how your organization is appearing in responses, go over your descriptions to fact-check them.

To track brand mentions, you should form a list of buyer prompts and present them to AI engines in order to gauge your visibility, or you should utilize online software that performs the procedure for you.

Tracking brand mentions on Ai engines is far simpler than you might think. Sure, there’s a lot to jot down and pay attention to, but overall, the process is fairly straightforward. All you need is to know what customers might ask, and provide those questions to chatbots. Alternatively, if you’re running low on time and can’t afford to execute the process manually, relying on online tools can be a profitable pivot. 

Here’s a step by step guide on tracking brand mentions:

1: Choose Appropriate Models

Pick the right AI models to track, including more industry specific ones. 

There’s dozens of AI engines out there which either fulfill general needs or are specialized for a specific field/niche. Potential customers use a myriad of them, and you can’t be tunnel visioned onto just one or the other.
For best results, make sure that you’re tracking responses from at least the following AI models:

• ChatGPT

• Claude

• Perplexity

• Gemini

• DeepSeek

• Grok 

• Copilot

• Google AI Overview

• Industry Specific Chatbots (if available)

2: Form Your Buyer Intent Prompt List

Formulate a roadmap of prompts potential customers would ask in order to track responses in which your company name appears. 

Though chatbots are used in hundreds of thousands of ways, potential customers do mostly ask similarly structured questions for their recommendation requests. Nevertheless, small changes could potentially skew AI response results. As such, building a comprehensive catalogue of prompts that would logically be used by customers is essential for tracking. 

To find prompts that customers would use, you can:

• Use Online Tools: Tools like Scrunch, Evertune and AnswerThePublic provide information surrounding user prompts and their volumes. Taking advantage of these tools and prioritizing prompts that constantly get asked is beneficial.

• Analyze SEO Search: Looking through Google Search Console query data and Google Ads Search Terms reports can allow you to turn high-traffic keywords into more natural conversational questions for AI. 

3: Provide Prompts & Collect Data

Ask your selected AI engines the queries you’ve collected and analyze the information that is provided.

Finally, you actually deploy those AI prompts that you’ve researched and collect the appropriate data for your organization specifically. This is where you track the aforementioned metrics and jot them down in order to categorize your visibility and understand in what areas you’re lacking for AI search visibility. 

When collecting data, always keep the following in mind:

• Device Location: Something important to note here is that AI models do provide different answers depending on your location. So, always ensure that you’re getting responses from the location you want.
• Account Familiarity: Most AI models personalize responses based on past conversation. For example, if you’ve previously mentioned your own company in conversation, the chatbot could unnaturally frame your own brand as a top option. As such, try to keep fresh conversations when collecting prompt data.

Looking for a simple to use tracker which gives you a quick snapshot of your brand’s visibility? You’re in luck! We at GoPeak have built an AI visibility checker tool which locates the top prompts in your industry, sees whether or not you’re an answer to those prompts, and lists the sources that build answers for those prompts. 

Nowadays, there’s dozens of tools available which trivialize the whole process of tracking brand mentions for AI search. Of course, they’re not perfect, but they do mostly get the job done. An effective one like GoPeak’s checker provides recommendations of high-use prompts which you can pick and choose to evaluate, and scans through AI responses to analyze your brand’s appearances within those answers. 

Pros of GoPeak’s AI visibility checker:

• Time Saving: Tools like this clear up the massive amount of time investment required for manual tracking.
• Ease Of Use: The checker is provided with a clean UI and is easily navigable, cleaning up the otherwise complicated process.
• Gap Analysis: The tool provides you with the third party sources that drive the top brands that do get mentioned. This gives you to conduct outreach or give viable targets when outsourcing the process.  

Cons of AI visibility tools:

• Estimated Data: Oftentimes, the data collected is far from exact. As opposed to your manual tracked information, these types of tools give you an estimate of all intel. 
• Extra Expense: While GoPeak’s checker is free, alternative tools can be pricey, and do add on to the expense list for your company. 

Here’s a step by step guide for how to track brand mentions using GoPeak’s AI visibility checker:

• 1. Enter Your Brand Information: Type out your company’s URL, industry, and the keyword you’d like to show up for into their appropriate spots, this is how the tool will know which specific mentions it should be keeping an eye on. For our example, we’ll be using the email marketing platform sender.net.
  
• 2. Enter Your Target Prompts: This is where you consider the questions your buyers might ask, to see whether or not you show up in the prompts for them. After you’ve filled out all the necessary details, the tool will run through some of the top prompts commonly used by customers of companies like yours, giving you the option to pick the ones you’d like to track. You can pick up to 3 prompts, so choose wisely.
  
  
• 3. Select Desirable Data: Pick which types of metrics you’d like to view. That includes country, language, and the model where your mentions will appear.
  
  
• 4. Observe Results: The checker will not only give you the number of times you appear in AI prompts, but also the competitor rankings, citations, and even sources from which models pull their information. Using this data, you can tailor your outreach and content strategy to maximize the likelihood of appearing in AI search.
  

Tracking brand mentions in AI search is crucial for visibility in the modern digital landscape. AI’s are becoming increasingly more relied upon by the general public, and being trusted by those AI models enough to show up as an answer for them can be a massive boon for your organization. Whether it be manually, outsourcing to a third party or by utilizing an online tool, tracking your brand mentions and conducting thorough due diligence is a key part of the visibility process.