@tjrobertson52

If you want your brand to be recommended in AI search like ChatGPT or Google's AI mode, then you need to be mentioned on third party websites, websites other than your own. Getting these mentions is commonly referred to as mention building, but people often get a few things wrong. So I'd like to take some time to talk about which mentions actually help you get recommended by large language models.

First of all, it's important to understand that these large language models are not scouring the internet trying to find every mention of your brand. Instead, when someone goes to ChatGPT or Google's AI looking for a recommendation about the kind of product or service you sell, the model performs a real time search. It might retrieve 100 webpages and then look at about a dozen of them.

So ultimately, it really only matters if you're mentioned on those dozen webpages. Now of course, the websites and pages that it sites will differ depending on the prompt. However, if you track a large set of prompts across these models, you will find that there tend to be a set of pages that are cited over and over again.

These frequently cited websites and pages will differ greatly based on the industry. So you really need to be tracking the kinds of prompts that your customers are typing. The second thing to understand is that a large language model is not going to recommend you simply because You were mentioned on a website.

The mention actually has to be a recommendation for your brand. Often the recommendation can be implicit, like you're showing up at the top of a listicle. This is the main reason third party reviews are so important.

They help you rank at the top of these listicles. However, as I was saying before, you don't need to be getting reviews on every directory. There's probably one to three directories that large language models really like for your industry and you should focus your efforts there.

For many industries, discussion forms like Reddit and Facebook groups are often cited, but again, it's typically the same threads and posts that are cited over and over again. So instead of just randomly spraying recommendations for your brand, you want to take a surgical approach. Leave helpful comments on those few threads that are actually being cited.

And then in most industries, articles are going to be a big source of citations. This is typically the hardest place for you to get a recommendation. But I do think it's worthwhile to reach out to the author of these highly cited articles and ask what it would take for them to recommend you.

Some of them are happy to do it for a hundred bucks or a reciprocal mention, and I think it's well worth it. This is the No. 8 AI search visibility factor from Kevin Index Growth Memo Newsletter.

I recommend you go back and watch No. 1. We have three more to go.