Get AI to Recommend Your Brand, Not Your Competitors

Are you noticing users increasingly turning to AI like ChatGPT or Perplexity for answers and even product recommendations? If so, you might also be wondering: is the AI recommending *your* brand, or are you losing potential leads and sales to competitors who get mentioned instead?

With the global market for LLMs projected to surge into the tens or even hundreds of billions by 2030 and users increasingly seeking direct answers from AI rather than sifting through links, influencing these AI recommendations is becoming critical. Unlike traditional search where you aim for the top link, influencing AI recommendations requires a different approach. It's about ensuring your brand is well-represented, authoritative, and easily understood within the vast datasets these LLMs learn from. This post explores why AI might recommend others and how you can improve your brand's position.

Why Does AI Recommend Certain Brands?

AI doesn't have personal preferences. Its recommendations are based on patterns, frequency, and context learned from its training data. A brand might get recommended more often if:

  • It's Frequently Mentioned: The brand appears often in relevant online discussions, articles, forums, and documentation used for training.
  • It's Associated with Authority: Mentions on high-quality, trusted websites or positive associations contribute to perceived authority.
  • Its Content is Easily Parsed: Well-structured websites, clear product descriptions, FAQs, and comparison articles are easier for AI to understand and extract information from.
  • Competitors Have Stronger Signals: Sometimes, it's simply that your competitors have generated more of the above signals in the AI's training data.
  • RAG Models Find Relevant Content: For models using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (like Perplexity), they might pull in recent, well-structured comparisons or articles where your competitor is featured prominently.

Beyond Traditional SEO: Optimizing for the AI Summarization Layer

It's crucial to understand that optimizing for AI recommendations isn't a replacement for traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but rather an essential layer built *on top* of it.

Traditional SEO focuses on signalling relevance and authority to search engines primarily to rank *links* to your pages. This involves keyword research, link building, technical site health, and optimizing meta descriptions to encourage clicks from a list of results. These activities are still vital because they help search engines (and often the foundational models for AI) discover and index your content in the first place. If the AI can't find your page, it can't recommend it.

However, with LLMs increasingly providing direct, summarized answers, a new optimization target emerges: the AI's *understanding* and *synthesis* of your content. The AI acts as a summarizer, digesting information from various sources (often found via traditional search methods) and generating a new response. Your goal shifts from just ranking a link to ensuring the AI accurately extracts, interprets, and represents your brand, products, or information within its generated summary.

This requires a focus on content clarity, structure, and factuality, as outlined in the next section. You need to make it incredibly easy for the AI to parse your key messages, features, benefits, and comparisons, ensuring the "summary" it creates reflects positively and accurately on your brand. Think of traditional SEO as getting you invited to the party, and optimizing for AI summarization as ensuring you make a great impression once you're there.

How to Improve Your Brand's Position in AI Recommendations

Influencing AI requires a focus on clarity, authority, and ongoing monitoring. Here's how to approach it:

  1. Create Clear, Factual, Structured Content: This is paramount. Think like the AI – make your information easy to digest.
    • Use clear headings (H2s, H3s) that ask and answer specific questions.
    • Employ bullet points and numbered lists for features, benefits, or steps.
    • Develop comprehensive FAQs addressing common user queries.
    • Publish direct comparisons (Your Brand vs. Competitor) with factual data.
    • Ensure product descriptions are detailed, accurate, and clearly structured.
    • Consider creating an llms.txt file to guide AI directly (see our other post!).
  2. Build and Maintain Authority Signals:
    • Ensure brand name and core information are consistent across your website and other online profiles.
    • Encourage reviews on relevant platforms.
    • Seek high-quality mentions and backlinks from reputable sources in your industry.
    • Engage constructively in relevant online communities (where appropriate).
  3. Monitor the AI Landscape Actively: You can't improve what you don't measure. Assumptions aren't enough.
    • Track which brands (yours and competitors) are mentioned for specific keywords across different LLMs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, etc.).
    • Analyze the context of these mentions – is it positive, negative, neutral? What features are highlighted?
    • Identify which of your content pieces (if any) are being implicitly referenced or cited.
    • Compare your mention frequency and ranking relative to competitors over time.

Using Sellm for Actionable Insights

Manually checking multiple AI platforms for various keywords is time-consuming and inefficient. Tools like Sellm automate this process, providing the critical data needed for step 3 above.

Sellm allows you to:

  • See exactly how often your brand is mentioned vs. competitors across leading AI platforms.
  • Track trends over time to see if your content optimization efforts are working.
  • Understand your relative brand ranking within the AI's generated responses.
  • Gain actionable data to refine your content strategy for better AI visibility (Generative Engine Optimization - GEO).

Take Control of Your AI Narrative

Getting recommended by AI isn't about secret tricks; it's about providing clear, valuable information consistently and understanding how your brand is currently perceived within the AI ecosystem. By creating structured content and actively monitoring your presence with tools like Sellm, you can stop losing opportunities and start improving your position in this critical new channel.