@tjrobertson52

I wanna talk about what I think brands are gonna start doing in 2026 to get recommended more often by ChatGPT and Google's a I mode. I wanna share one simple way that you can take advantage of this. Now, I believe by the end of 2026, pretty much all searches will involve a large language model.

And when these models are trying to help someone find a product or service, they search the internet for recommendations. The entire game with AI visibility is to have as many recommendations found for your brand as possible. I've talked about a lot of ways to get recommendations for your brand on the internet, but I want to talk about one that I really think is gonna start taking shape in 2026.

So new, it doesn't really have a name yet, so I'm gonna call them recommendation networks. These are networks of websites that all publish content recommending each other or recommending brands from outside the network in exchange for payment. Now, if you know anything about SEO, you might be thinking right now, whoa, whoa, whoa, TJ, this sounds like a PBN or a link exchange.

Isn't this kind of dangerous? Couldn't you get penalized for this? But here's the difference.

For this to work in s. E. O, you need a link to your website.

However, to influence large language models, you just need the content to recommend your brand. Text recommendations for your brand are Much harder to track algorithmically than a hyperlink to your website. Also, even if you're building links like this at scale these days, it's rare that Google would give you a penalty.

Typically, their algorithm will just notice them and ignore them. Text recommendations are easier to get than links. There's virtually no chance they'll be ignored or penalized.

And when done right, they're far more effective. But you don't need to join or follow a network to get the benefit of this tactic. These markets haven't even taken shape yet.

And by the time they do, I think the market will adjust and their prices will go up dramatically. But you can already do this yourself for free. Just think of all the companies that are related to your industry but aren't a direct competitor.

If you're a real estate agent, think of home staging companies. If you're an event management company, think of photographers or trade show booth builders. Or it might even be companies that do what you do but in a different area or for a different demographic.

Reach out to them or just share this video with them and say, hey, would you be willing to post an article on your blog talking about how we're the best option? And in exchange, we'll post a similar article on our blog. You could also offer to write both blog posts.

The important thing is that the title says something like the best X in y or How to choose the best X for Y. If you reach out to multiple companies, you could create a listicle and list them all in one article. And as long as you're not doing this at scale, you could also include a link to each other.

So now you're getting a handful of relevant backlinks and building recommendations. We create articles like these on our clients websites and they're incredibly effective. This method lets you multiply that effect across multiple websites.

When you do it this way, there's no risk of penalty. And now is the time to do it. I fully expect tactics like this to start to become common place by the end of 2026.

But if you can start showing up in large language models now, then when people create content with large language models, you will be showing up in that content more often, which means there's a big first movers advantage.