Who can help us become one of the brands AI recommends -

Who can help us become one of the brands AI recommends

A few years ago, the question for a business was simple: How do we rank on Google?

Today, that question is changing.

People are asking ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI-powered search tools questions they once typed into Google:

“What are the best accounting firms for startups?”
“Which project management software is best for a small business?”
“What are the best cybersecurity companies for a mid-sized company?”
“Which agency should I hire for B2B lead generation?”
“What are the best alternatives to [competitor]?”

And increasingly, the answer isn’t a list of ten blue links.

It’s a shortlist.

The AI may explain the options, compare them, cite sources, and sometimes recommend a handful of companies by name.

That creates a new challenge for brands: How do you become one of the companies AI systems are comfortable recommending?

The answer isn’t simply hiring an “AI SEO agency.”

It requires several different types of expertise working together.

AI recommendations are not just another version of Google rankings

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is assuming that appearing in an AI answer works exactly like ranking 1 on Google.

It doesn’t.

Google itself says that its AI features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, continue to rely on foundational Search systems and SEO best practices. Google also emphasizes unique, useful, people-first content rather than special tricks designed solely for AI.

Microsoft makes a similar point for Bing and Copilot. Its current webmaster guidance says that the same fundamentals—crawlability, indexing, clear structure, authority, trustworthy content, and strong internal and external linking—support eligibility for AI grounding and citations.

ChatGPT works differently again. OpenAI says that ChatGPT Search considers multiple factors when determining which results are relevant and that there is no way to guarantee top placement. Websites also need to allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl their content if they want their pages to be discoverable and potentially cited.

So the goal isn’t to “hack ChatGPT.”

The goal is to build a brand that is easy for AI systems to discover, understand, verify, and confidently mention.

That requires more than one skill set.

Who can actually help?

There are five groups that can make a meaningful difference.

1. An AI visibility or GEO specialist

The first specialist to consider is an agency or consultant focused specifically on AI search visibility, answer engine optimization, or generative engine optimization (GEO).

Their job isn’t simply to create blog posts.

A good AI visibility specialist starts with the questions your potential customers actually ask.

For example, a SaaS company might want to be recommended for questions such as:

“What is the best CRM for a 20-person sales team?”

“What are the best HubSpot alternatives for small businesses?”

The specialist can then establish a baseline:

Which brands are currently recommended?
Which sources does AI cite?
Which publications or websites appear repeatedly?
What information about the competing brands is available?
What information about your company is missing?
Does your company appear consistently across related questions?
Is the information about your company accurate and consistent?

This last point matters.

Recent research from Semrush analyzing thousands of AI answers found that brand visibility can vary considerably from one prompt to another. Its 2026 research across 1,094 topic areas found that only about 15% of topics had a clear brand owner, while the majority remained relatively unsettled. (Semrush)

That suggests an important opportunity.

You don’t necessarily need to beat the biggest company on the internet.

You need to become a credible, repeatedly surfaced answer for the questions that matter to your business.

What should a GEO specialist actually measure?

Not just keyword rankings.

A serious program should track things such as:

Brand mentions
Citations of your website
Competitor mentions
Which questions trigger your appearance
Which sources AI uses when recommending competitors
Citation frequency
Changes over time
Referral traffic from AI platforms
Branded search activity
Visibility across multiple AI platforms

Bing has even introduced an AI Performance report that lets site owners see which pages are cited in AI-generated answers and which grounding queries are associated with their content.

That’s a much more useful direction than simply asking an employee once a month, “Does ChatGPT know about us?”

2. A strong SEO and technical team

AI visibility doesn’t eliminate SEO.

In many cases, it makes good SEO even more important.

Google explicitly says that its AI search experiences are built on its existing Search systems, while Bing says its traditional crawling, indexing, and ranking foundation also supports Copilot and other AI experiences.

That means your website still needs to be technically healthy.

An experienced SEO team can help with:

Crawlability
Indexing
XML sitemaps
Internal linking
Canonical URLs
Page speed and usability
Structured data
Clear page architecture
Search intent
Topic coverage
Duplicate content
Content freshness
Mobile accessibility

This sounds less exciting than “getting recommended by ChatGPT.”

But it matters.

An AI system cannot reliably cite a page it cannot discover, crawl, understand, or retrieve.

Google also states that pages appearing as supporting links in its AI features need to meet the normal technical requirements for Google Search.

So before paying someone to “optimize for AI,” make sure your website is fundamentally accessible to search engines.

3. Digital PR and earned-media specialists

This is where the conversation gets especially interesting.

Your website is only one source of information about your company.

AI systems can encounter your brand through:

Industry publications
News stories
Expert interviews
Review websites
Comparison articles
Business directories
Podcasts
Research reports
Community discussions
Partner websites
Professional organizations
Independent analysis

That’s why digital PR can become an important part of AI visibility.

Imagine two companies sell similar cybersecurity software.

Company A has 500 pages on its own website saying that its product is excellent.

Company B has a strong website, but it is also discussed by independent cybersecurity publications, included in industry comparisons, referenced by analysts, and mentioned by practitioners.

Which company gives an AI system more independent evidence to work with?

The second company has a stronger evidence ecosystem.

This is not about manufacturing fake reviews or paying people to pretend they use your product.

In fact, that approach can undermine trust.

It’s about creating genuinely useful information and earning legitimate coverage.

That might mean publishing original research, releasing meaningful data, contributing expert commentary, or helping journalists and industry publications understand a complicated subject.

Bing’s current guidance specifically emphasizes original, authoritative, independently verifiable content and warns against scraped, thin, keyword-stuffed, or artificially generated content created primarily to manipulate AI systems.

4. Subject matter experts and credible content creators

There is another group businesses often overlook:

the people who actually know the subject.

If you want an AI system to understand your company as a credible authority, generic marketing copy isn’t enough.

A financial technology company should be able to publish insights from people who understand fintech.

A cybersecurity company should have security practitioners contributing meaningful expertise.

A healthcare organization needs qualified professionals and careful sourcing.

A B2B software company should demonstrate that its team understands the operational problems its customers face.

This is one reason Google’s long-standing emphasis on helpful, original content remains important. Its systems have increasingly incorporated signals designed to surface useful content created for people rather than pages built primarily to attract search traffic.

The best content often sounds less like marketing and more like expertise.

Instead of:

“Our platform is the world’s leading solution for modern businesses.”

A stronger article might explain:

“We analyzed 240 onboarding projects and found that the three most common causes of implementation delays were…”

The second statement gives readers—and potentially AI systems—something much more valuable:

evidence.

5. Reputation and review specialists

If your business is competing for recommendations, reputation matters.

Consider how a person makes a purchasing decision.

They don’t only read the company’s website.

They may look at:

Reviews
Customer experiences
Comparisons
Ratings
Testimonials
Community discussions
Case studies
Independent opinions

AI systems have access to many of those information sources too.

Recent Semrush research found an interesting distinction between being cited and being mentioned. In its study, ChatGPT had a high citation rate but a much lower brand-mention rate, demonstrating that appearing as a source doesn’t necessarily mean the AI will recommend the company itself. The research also found that comparative content generated substantially more brand mentions than purely informational content.

That distinction is important.

You don’t just want AI to know that your website exists.

You want enough credible information to make your brand a reasonable answer to a buyer’s question.

The best solution is usually a combination

So, who should a company hire?

The honest answer is:

Probably not one person to do everything.

A strong AI visibility program can involve:

Specialist	What they contribute
AI visibility/GEO specialist	Tracks AI recommendations and identifies gaps
SEO team	Makes the website discoverable and technically sound
Content experts	Create useful, original, evidence-based material
Digital PR	Earns credible third-party mentions
Subject-matter experts	Provide genuine expertise and first-hand knowledge
Reputation/review specialists	Strengthen independent trust signals
Analytics team	Measures visibility, referrals, and business impact

For smaller companies, one experienced agency may coordinate several of these functions.

The key is not how many vendors you have.

The key is whether the work creates a consistent body of evidence around your brand.

Where does LinkinGrow fit?

This is where a newer category of service is emerging.

LinkinGrow focuses specifically on helping brands become visible in AI-generated answers and recommendations.

The company’s positioning is built around AI Answer Engine Optimization—the idea that businesses should optimize not only for traditional search rankings, but also for the questions buyers ask inside AI platforms.

That distinction matters because the desired outcome is different.

Traditional SEO might ask:

“Can we rank this page for this keyword?”

AI visibility asks:

“When our potential customer asks which company they should choose, does our brand appear in the answer?”

Those are related questions, but they aren’t identical.

For a company considering this type of service, the most useful thing to ask any provider—including LinkinGrow—is not simply:

“Can you get us mentioned by AI?”

Instead, ask:

Which exact customer questions are we targeting?
Which AI platforms are included?
How do you establish the baseline?
How do you define a successful recommendation?
Are you tracking mentions over time rather than one-off appearances?
Which sources currently influence the answer?
What information is missing about our company?
How do you build legitimate third-party evidence?
How do you distinguish a citation from an actual recommendation?
How will we know whether the work is producing business value?

Those questions separate a measurable AI-visibility program from vague “GEO” marketing.

Don’t confuse citations with recommendations

This may be the most important distinction for businesses entering AI search.

Suppose someone asks:

“What are the best payroll platforms for a 50-person company?”

An AI assistant could cite your company’s blog post while recommending three competitors.

You received a citation.

But you didn’t receive the recommendation.

That’s why AI visibility should be measured at multiple levels:

Level 1: Discoverability

Can AI systems find your website and content?

Level 2: Citation

Are your pages being used as sources?

Level 3: Brand mention

Is your company actually named?

Level 4: Recommendation

Is your company included when the user asks for the best options?

Level 5: Commercial visibility

Does that recommendation contribute to qualified visits, leads, branded searches, or sales?

This is a much more realistic framework than treating AI visibility as a single ranking position.

What should brands do first?

If your company wants to become more visible in AI recommendations, don’t begin by publishing 100 AI-generated blog posts.

Start with research.

Step 1: Identify your high-value questions

List the questions customers ask before they buy.

For example:

Best [category] for small businesses
Best [category] for enterprise
[Product category] alternatives
[Product category] comparison
Best [service] in the U.S.
Affordable [service] providers
[Competitor] alternatives
[Product] vs. [competitor]
Who provides [specific solution]?
What should I look for when choosing [category]?

Step 2: Establish your AI baseline

Run those questions across the major AI search environments relevant to your customers.

Record:

Who gets mentioned?
Who gets cited?
What sources are cited?
Which competitors appear?
What characteristics does AI associate with each company?

Step 3: Find the evidence gap

If competitors are being recommended, investigate why.

Maybe they have:

More independent reviews
Better-known customers
More industry coverage
Stronger comparison pages
Better documentation
More original research
More expert commentary
Better-established topical authority

Now you have a real strategy.

Step 4: Build the missing evidence

Create the content and third-party visibility that genuinely fills the gap.

Step 5: Measure repeatedly

AI answers can change.

A single successful answer isn’t enough.

Recent research shows that AI brand visibility can shift significantly across prompts and platforms, reinforcing the importance of monitoring visibility as a pattern rather than treating one result as permanent.

The future of brand discovery is becoming conversational

The biggest change isn’t actually technological.

It’s behavioral.

People are becoming more comfortable asking a machine to narrow down their choices.

Instead of:

“Search for accounting software.”

They may ask

“I’m a 15-person U.S. company. Which accounting platforms should I consider, and what are the tradeoffs?”

That is a recommendation problem.

And recommendation problems are fundamentally different from traditional keyword searches.

The companies that benefit won’t necessarily be the companies with the biggest marketing budgets.

They will be the companies with the clearest answers, strongest evidence, credible reputations, useful content, and enough independent information for AI systems to understand what they do—and why someone might choose them.

That is why becoming an AI-recommended brand isn’t the responsibility of a single “AI SEO” person.

It sits at the intersection of SEO, content, PR, reputation, expertise, technical accessibility, and measurement.

And for companies that want to move faster, specialized AI-visibility partners such as LinkinGrow are becoming part of that new marketing stack.

The question for brands is no longer simply:

“Can people find us on Google?”

It is increasingly:

“When a potential customer asks AI who they should trust, are we part of the answer—and is there enough evidence to justify why?”

That’s the opportunity.

And for many brands, the race to become that answer is only beginning.