Promote Your Business with ChatGPT and Monitor Your Brand’s AI Mentions

Introduction: Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) have been revolutionary in helping brands to better understand key search terms and their customers, yet what if we could perform this same reverse search but for AI mentions? 

With the number of AI searches growing exponentially, we cannot ignore the possibilities and opportunities to get our brand names into these answers. There are several AI-based competitive analysis tools already available such as Spyfu, Semrush, SE Ranking, Ahrefs, and many more, but we will take an overall look at these to explain how they work and how they can help you and your business get seen by more potential customers.

How do these tools differ to ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful and useful tool for brainstorming ideas or finding summarised answers to questions that Google may not sufficiently provide, however, tools such as those listed above allow you to see questions that people ask which you may never have thought to ask.

Marketers generally may take SEO keyword searches for granted, as we research the terms that potential customers are using and subsequently optimise our website pages so they show up more prominently in search results. Now, with the power of AI competitive analysis tools, we can find gaps in our knowledge of customer searches by seeing what customers are asking AI chat engines.

Using AI Search Operators and Tools for more direct answers

AI competitive analysis tools allow users to search through millions of responses on the likes of ChatGPT to provide you with the most commonly asked questions. You can search for questions which specifically compare you to your competitors, or even search for what customers are asking about your competitors specifically and see what you could be missing out on.

For example, you can create a multitude of search combinations to get different answers based on your comparison combinations in your search. Below is a table to illustrate this:

Using a combination of one of two competitors minus your brand will tell you which questions your competitors are being promoted in and which ones you aren’t. Once you have this valuable knowledge, you can then optimise your platform so that your brand is more likely to show-up in these questions.

Removing branded questions

When potential customers use ChatGPT to answer a question, they will often refer to a specific brand name. For example, when using one of the aforementioned AI competitive analysis tools to search for a specific brand like Windex, we are then presented with results showing a multitude of questions and answers which include the brand name.

This allows you to gauge which open-ended questions you could try to get your brand promoted in, as AI tools like ChatGPT will still promote branded names even in some more open-ended or obscure questions. As an example, the question of “How to get a ring off a swollen finger?” mentions “Windex or soap: Apply a small amount of Windex…”. 

Optimising your site to get more AI mentions

So, now that you’ve found out what questions potential customers are asking…what’s next?

The easy answer; optimise your page for AI mentions. As a general rule of thumb, this generally follows good SEO, however, AI optimisation has an additional factor in that an AI mentions of your brand also come from pages outside of your own. Ensure you answer your targeted questions outside of your website in other places such as YouTuube videos, Reddit forums, blogs, and social media platforms. The more connections with a wider reach, the more likely you will be to close those AI gaps where your brand is not mentioned.

DON’T SPAM!

While it’s tempting to start blasting every social media and blog website with content about your brand, you need to ensure that your content actually has substance. You need to create content that’s valuable, shareable, and engaging; something that inspires people to have conversations about your brand. 

Delving into conversation hubs such as Reddit and Quora can help provide you with insight into where people are discussing ideas within your product/brand niche. See which areas get the most traction and which are the most active, and this will help you to pinpoint where to publish and contribute to the conversations. As a result, when AI gathers information from all corners of the Internet, it will be more likely to view you among the main trusted sources in conversations.

Maintain your strong SEO practices

Even with this additional optimisation for AI, do not change your existing SEO practices, as they create the best foundation for acquiring AI mentions. Ensure that you’re actually being helpful and providing useful answers to questions that people want to know. Offer thorough explanations to questions in these online conversations and through your website. That doesn’t mean you should add ridiculously long answers on your FAQ page. Just provide a more long-form answer to peoples questions (e.g. in a blog, in social posts, etc.) as this will provide additional context for AI to learn from. 

Use these three key ingredients:

• Write clearly: ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview have been sharing concise clips to provide the end user with a helpful amount of information without being too overwhelming. Ensure that your answers are similarly packaged, so get to the point, and use direct statements along with your longer descriptions.

• Add authority: Use your expertise to share your ideas and opinions in online discussions. This will demonstrate to your audience that you are confident about your stance, and it is this authority and trustworthiness that makes you more shareable.
• Build links: Build your connections via internal and external links to other sites to increase the chances of your content being found. It also helps to build credibility with AI models and signals your site as a reliable source for information.

Ultimately, AI algorithms are built to provide answers that feel authoritative and relevant to the context of the question. This means that your brand’s presence and contributions need to reach multiple audience touchpoints.

In Summary

Closing the gaps in AI mentions about your brand will be a long-term plan but will yield greater results in future. We fully expect to see the realm of AI search optimisation quickly evolve over the next few years, so it’s best to get a head start in ensuring maximum reach for your brand. We are confident of the approaches we have outlined above, although we will inevitably adapt this approach as AI continues to adapt and change exponentially. 

To help your brand, in the short term, closing your content gaps against your competitors will help boost your SEO. A healthy SEO leads to a healthy AI presence, so adding full and detailed supporting ideas to your content will help it to grow more helpful and authoritative. 

AI competitive analysis tools can identify important pages that bring your competitors more traffic, so use these tools to challenge your competitors with your own ideas and content, along with digging deeper into essential keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t.

Some of these analysis tools also find pages that outrank your page and analyses what you can do to surpass them instead. They focus on questions that you don’t answer, including in subtopics that maybe you haven’t covered yet. 

In the long-term, closing these content gaps will help to get your brand mentioned more often as AI models gradually learn that you’re a reliable source of information. It will help the likes of ChatGPT and other AI chat models to promote your product, so make sure you answer the important questions in your content.