Who Should Companies Hire to Improve Their AI Visibility and Build Brand Mentions?

Improving a brand’s visibility in Google and in AI generated answers is best entrusted to a partner who combines competence in SEO, AISO and GEO, content marketing, digital PR and analytics. The choice of a specific provider, though, should depend on the problem you are facing.

Understanding that problem is crucial, because visibility in AI simply cannot be handled with one service. When we talk about visibility in the AI ecosystem, in practice we are thinking about several completely different outcomes:

• appearing in direct AI answers,
• having your site cited as a source,
• having the brand correctly associated with a given category of products or services,
• being present in comparison roundups generated by bots.

According to Google’s most recent guidelines (Optimizing your website for generative AI features, from May 2026), SEO fundamentals still matter enormously. Google AI Overviews are built on the same quality systems as classic search. What is more, Google warns outright against artificially scattering brand mentions at scale: it simply does not work.

ChatGPT Search, meanwhile, can search the web and show the user links to current sources. That is why both the quality of your own site and the brand’s presence in external material matter, since that material can be found during a search.

The partner you choose has to look at your business more broadly than through the number of links alone.

You now know which partner to choose in order to improve your company’s visibility in AI and build valuable brand mentions. One question remains: what exactly should each of them be doing so that, together, you achieve the results you want?

An SEO agency will be the right partner when the core problem is weak site visibility and insufficient quality in the brand’s own resources.

The scope of work should include:

• A technical audit and verification of indexing, without which Google does not see your site.
• Analysis and rebuilding of the information architecture, to make navigation easier for bots.
• Building topical authority and developing expert sections.
• Creating content that answers user intent.
• Expanding and optimizing offer pages.
• Implementing and improving structured data, which helps crawlers understand context.
• Optimizing internal linking.
• Ongoing analysis of visibility against competitors.

You choose this path when your own website and its content are not yet ready to serve as a credible source of answers.

Digital PR delivers what you cannot achieve on your own site alone: independent, external confirmation of your brand’s authority. Those publications in trusted media are exactly what systems such as ChatGPT or Perplexity find appetizing.

Work in this area should be built on creating things like:

• Industry reports and market research that naturally attract media attention.
• Data driven stories that use your internal, unique company statistics.
• Expert commentary positioning specialists from your company as thought leaders.
• Rankings, indexes and data analyses that get cited widely in the industry.
• Campaigns built on current events, along with recurring trend summaries.
• Substantive material for journalists.
• Publications prepared jointly with a partner.

Research into generative search systems indicates that external editorial material plays a key role in the pool of sources AI Search draws on. Analyses of the citations generated by different AI systems indicate that a significant share of the sources used comes from earned media and external publications. The exact share depends on the model studied, the type of prompts and the classification of sources applied.

You hire digital PR when you have valuable knowledge and great data but lack reach in independent, external media, which AI algorithms treat as proof of your credibility.

Source: Machine Relations

In the context of brand building and AI visibility, working with a link building agency should cover a great deal more than simply acquiring a link. What counts is not the number of publications so much as their quality and their fit with the brand.

An effective link building campaign for AI, and the brand mentions it builds, should guarantee that publications:

• Appear on topically matched sites with real authority.
• Bring real value to the reader.
• Describe the brand correctly and connect it with the right category.
• Contain a natural link leading to a substantively matched subpage.
• Are public, indexable and remain current.
• Have a clear editorial or commercial character.
• Form a coherent element of the brand’s broader SEO and content strategy.

Classic PR has great value for a brand’s image, but from an SEO and AI perspective one challenge appears here: these activities have to leave a lasting, indexable trace online.

The scope of work should include:

• Building relationships with media and stakeholders.
• Corporate communication and positioning of company leaders.
• Preparing experts for appearances and organizing interviews.
• Communicating important events such as launches, rebrands and mergers.
• Crisis management.
• Making sure event activity translates into text publications (articles, transcripts, reports, expert profiles).

A partner specializing in GEO and AISO will be the right choice when a company needs both improved visibility in Google’s generative features (GEO) and presence in the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot (AISO).

The scope of a good AISO and GEO service should include:

• Creating a benchmark (an AI Audit): establishing the current citation rate, the brand’s share in AI answers, and identifying the sources being cited.
• A technical audit.
• Preparing a set of representative prompts for your industry.
• A detailed competitor analysis.
• Research into the associations and sentiment LLMs attribute to your company.
• Developing a content and digital PR strategy aimed at the domains AI likes to cite.
• Developing presence in reviews and comparison roundups.
• Measuring changes in AI visibility and analyzing the traffic acquired from these tools.

Work with ORM begins where your control over what is said about the brand ends. On comparison queries, AI systems frequently bring old negative reviews, content from past image crises or forum opinions from 2015 back into the light.

The work of an ORM team in the context of AI comes down above all to:

• Continuous sentiment monitoring and checking whether AI connects the facts about your brand correctly.
• Actively responding to opinions in the sources that matter to AI.
• Catching and correcting hallucinations or incorrect information repeated by bots.
• Creating crisis procedures.
• Tidying up the company’s profiles online and keeping the data consistent.
• Systematically developing new and credible sources.

AI answers are dynamic and changeable. The key is systematic, continuous measurement of results and continuous work.

Building visibility in this new, distributed ecosystem requires combining many competencies: classic SEO, AISO and GEO, digital PR and content marketing. Not every e-commerce business needs all of them from month one, though.

The choice of the right cooperation model should follow directly from an audit of your company’s current condition. Diagnose your store using the overview below:

At Delante we combine SEO, GEO, AISO, content and AI Authority Link Building within a single strategy. We start with an AI Audit and an analysis of prompts, competitors and cited sources. We then develop the site, the content and the brand’s presence in the places AI systems draw on.

The effectiveness of this approach is confirmed by our clients’ results:Culligan Water:+100%traffic from AI toolswithin 6 months+38%Brand Score in ChatGPTwithin 6 months+21% increase in Share of Voice in ChatGPTwithin 6 monthsGiacomo Conti:+300%increase in AI citationswithin 6 months+42%increase in Brand Scorewithin 6 months