What should you do when AI ignores your brand?

Before you take action, you need to understand the root cause of the problem. Very often, the reason is simply too few mentions of your brand online. We can see this clearly from the data – even brands with high SEO visibility have a very low presence in the models. Their AAI (AI Awareness Index) can be as low as 0-2%. Why?

Because generative models don’t have enough data to talk about a given brand. When selecting brands to mention, models like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT rely primarily on:

• The quality of links leading to the website,
• Citations,
• publications on authoritative domains,
• brand mentions, especially on thematically related portals,
• data from the open internet.

Conclusion? You may have a lot of content that demonstrates your expertise, but as long as it is only on your own website, AI is unlikely to see it.

If you notice that LLM models point to your competitors in their responses and ignore you, first analyze what specific links are cited as sources in the responses. AI likes specific content formats, such as rankings, comparisons, and guides, and models often use them as their Knowledge Sources in their responses. Therefore, it will be crucial to conduct appropriate research and create valuable AI content. However, it is not enough to just put it on your website – you will need an AISO strategy to support your brand’s presence across many places on the internet.

The second challenge arises when a brand operates online but lacks a distinct digital identity. Many recognizable brands, for example, in their local area or industry, no longer place importance on emphasizing their expertise online. And without the right signals, all AI tools will not know what you do. 

How does a lack of an expert image manifest itself?

• Inconsistent descriptions across the internet,
• Lack of uniform brand entities,
• Lack of precise semantics, i.e., building content around specific issues.

AI models primarily visit websites to obtain the information they need and learn about various topics to answer users’ questions. Therefore, if your website lacks case studies, research, analyses, data, and answers to specific questions, AI may find no reason to visit your website.

General 300-word service descriptions, optimized for phrases as we did 10 years ago, will be irrelevant to AI. If you have content resources, invest in expert, educational content instead.

LLM models do not need long paragraphs. If you want to create AI-Ready Content, instead of a wall of text, include the following in your articles:

• Tables,
• Calculations,
• Checklists,
• Step-by-step instructions,
• Comparisons,
• Definitions.

AI tools still struggle with knowledge extraction, so the more we serve them ready-made answers and data, the greater the chance they will cite our content as a source.

It is not the form of the text alone that will matter. Technical and on-site elements are also important. Avoid overusing JavaScript, as AI models are not yet fully capable of understanding it. Also, check that your robots.txt file does not block bots from accessing your site. Remember to structure your content correctly and arrange it in the site navigation to make it easier for bots to scan.

The uncomfortable truth may be that your competitors simply reacted faster to changes in the world of search. AI-oriented positioning (AISO) works a bit like the financial market – whoever starts faster wins more at a lower cost. If your competitors in your industry started implementing an AISO strategy as early as 2024, and you only enter the market in 2026, your entry threshold will already be several times higher.

Below, we have prepared a clear, step-by-step plan for what you can do if you suspect your website is not appearing in AI responses.

Step 1: Measure how much AI overlooks your brand

Remember – just because you don’t see your brand in the responses when, for example, you ask for recommendations for products in your industry, it doesn’t mean that other users don’t see it. The starting point for your action plan is therefore to measure your brand’s visibility in AI.

At Delante, we do this as part of the AISO Brand Scan – we check how many times the brand appears:

• In ChatGPT responses
• In Copilot
• In Gemini and AI Overviews from Google
• In Perplexity
• In product and brand contexts
• In comparisons, e.g., “Top X companies in a given industry.”

We know from experience that for most companies, the result is 0-5%. However, knowing this value is fundamental to understanding where you are starting from.

Step 2: Build an “AI-Ready Entity” for your brand

This step refers to the potential problems described earlier – you need to tell AI what your company is and what industry you are an expert in – this is what building a brand entity is all about. How to do it?

• Create consistent definitions and descriptions of your company
• Use explicit claims – e.g., write directly that we are X and we do Y, we have 15 years of experience in the industry, etc.
• Educational content – remember that AI must be able to learn something from you or extract valuable data from your website that can be useful for generating responses.
• Standardizing descriptions on websites and directories is a must! Review all places where your brand is mentioned and which you can edit, and ensure consistency of message.
• Make sure your structured data (schema) is organized.

Step 3: Increase the number of citations and authoritative sources

At this point, AI-Ready Link Building works best, the process of acquiring external links to the website using AI tools. This process should include:

• Expert publications
• Strengthening “brand mentions”
• Presence in comparisons and rankings
• Citations (citability elements)

For AI, all these elements make it easier to select reliable, trustworthy, and quotable sources.

Step 4: Focus on original data and case studies

This step relates to what we discussed earlier regarding your website’s educational value for models. Any elements that are unique to you—original research, surveys, analyses, case studies—will be a very important factor in increasing citability.

When building your expertise, mention your experience directly, e.g.:

•  We supported this data with a 12-month analysis of over 50 projects
• We conducted a study based on 10,000 products
• We asked 60 of our customers to participate in the survey

This way, you give AI a clear reason to trust your content and pass the data on to other users.

Step 5: Expand your presence in Social SEO

LLM models don’t just collect data from company websites. They also like to look at social media, so your presence on these platforms will be an important factor. AI tools prefer to collect data from channels such as:

• Reddit
• Quora
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• TikTok (to a limited extent)

A brand that is not active on social media may appear inactive to AI. Publish new posts regularly, and remember to maintain a consistent strategy and a unified communication message.

Based on our 2025 project data:

• On average, clients saw a +200% increase in AI citations after just 4 months of AISO Off-site, i.e., the acquisition of links to the website.
• 3-7x more frequent appearance of the brand in comparisons of top companies.
• First mentions in AI Overviews after just 30-90 days.
• Brand visibility in generative AI models increased by an average of 5-12 times.

If you suspect your brand may not be visible on AI, start by checking whether that is indeed the case. If you need help with this, at Delante, we can prepare an AISO Brand Scan for you – an analysis of visibility on ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, or AI Overviews. Through our analysis, you will find out why the models recommend others rather than you.

With this knowledge, the next step will be to develop an action plan – we recommend using the strategy we describe in the article. We have tested this approach on many projects across various industries, and we know it works!

Sources:

https://www.capgemini.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Consumer-trends-08012025.pdf