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Maximizing AI Visibility: How to Win Mentions & Citations in Answer Engines
What happens when visibility becomes the primary SEO KPI? What actually drives brand visibility in AI answer engines? Are you optimizing for AI-generated citations, or just hoping to be mentioned? đ Learn what actually influences AI visibility right now. AI search experiences are replacing traditional rankings, and the rules for visibility have changed. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews. These platforms are reshaping how people discover brands. How To Get Seen & Cited By Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT, & Perplexity In this webinar, Pat Reinhart, VP of Services & Thought Leadership at Conductor, and Luiza Shahbazyan, Sr. R&D Product Manager at Conductor, will walk you through: Youâll walk away with clarity and confidence on: -How to maximize your brandâs AI visibility across answer engines -Key factors that influence AI citations, from content authority to digital PR -Practical content and technical strategies to boost mentions -How to adapt your SEO workflows for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) This is the perfect time to get ahead of your competition in the race to AEO. Register now to get actionable tactics to boost your search visibility. đ Canât make it live? Register anyway and weâll send the recording right to your inbox.
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Maximizing AI Visibility: How to Win Mentions & Citations in Answer Engines
- 2. Maximizing AI Visibility Howto Win Mentions and Citations and Answer Engines?
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- 5. Next 10 years HowCustomers Used to Make Purchase Decisions AI Search How Customers Will to Make Purchase Decisions In the Next 3 Years, AI Will Own 95% of Customer Interactions The Old Way The New Way Last 10 years AI Surfaces Websites Search (SEO) Brands That Donât Adapt Will Disappear âAI is becoming the primary gateway to the web. To stay visible, brands must rethink digital marketing for an AI-first worldâ optimizing for discovery, engagement, and conversion across AI surfaces.â - Director, Digital Marketing & Demand Generation COE, Ernst & Young
- 6. Time Consumer Visibility LLM Discovery Digital Ads Unlike Traditional Search, BrandsCan't Buy AI Visibility. "In the past, companies could get by without mastering SEOâ they could always just buy traffic. AI is different. Those who fail to make it a core competency wonât survive." - Edelman
- 7. Changing Your ContentStrategy
- 8. Traditional Search AISearch VS. Matching Meaning Matching Keywords Broad Match Phrase Match Exact Match Keyword = interior paint Dog Cat Prompt: âKittenâ Banana Apple Wolf
- 9. Understanding Search Intent& Personalization Educational Comparison Cost Analysis Recommendations Purchase Support Topic: Office Setup Remote Worker âHow to set up a office if you work long hours?â âWhat are the best ergonomic chairs for remote work?â âPrice of Herman Miller vs H1 Pro?â âShould I buy Herman Miller or H1 chair?â âWhere to buy a black Aeron chair delivered today?â âOffice furniture assembly services near me?â Business Owner âHow to create an inspiring workspace?â âWhat are the best computers for office?â âWhat's the price of Dell versus Lenovo?â âIs a dell or lenovo better for office use?â âWhere to buy 20 Dell Inspirons with installation?â âLocal tech support for office equipment nearbyâ Student âWhat do you need for a good study area?â âWhich small desks are best for a dorm and cheap?â âAre Wayfair or IKEA desks a better deal? âWayfair or ikea desks for students?â âI want a white ikea desk and free shipping to meâ âI need someone to repair the leg of my ikea desk todayâ Intent Stage Persona
- 10. The New Worldof Infinite Prompts Awareness Evaluation Setup Research Cost Analysis Community Feedback Purchase Support Freelancer âHow to create a distraction-free home office on a budget?â +11 more prompt variations âIs a foldable desk good for daily freelance work?â +7 more prompt variations âHow to assemble an IKEA desk without power toolsâ +8 more prompt variations âBest minimalist setups for freelancers with limited spaceâ +16 more prompt variations âAffordable standing desks under $200 for freelancersâ +8 more prompt variations âFreelancer desk setup inspiration on Redditâ +8 more prompt variations âBest place to buy budget ergonomic chairs onlineâ +13 more prompt variations âMy desk is wobblyâhow do I fix it?â +11 more prompt variations Office Manager âAre we missing something in our office setup?â +13 more prompt variations âBest chairs for 10-person office under $5000â +7 more prompt variations âDo vendors offer assembly services for 50 desks?â +11 more prompt variations âHow to plan ergonomic workstations for a 20- person officeâ +3 more prompt variations âBulk pricing on Herman Miller vs Branch chairsâ +16 more prompt variations âReviews from other office managers on large ordersâ +16 more prompt variations âWhere to order 50 adjustable desks with deliveryâ +8 more prompt variations âFixing cable management in a shared office spaceâ +16 more prompt variations Gamer âWhy does my current desk feel too cramped?â +8 more prompt variations âIs Secretlab Magnus desk better than IKEA?â +13 more prompt variations âHow to mount a 49â ultrawide monitor on a desk with no wall accessâ +8 more prompt variations âWhatâs the best desk for triple monitor gaming?â +11 more prompt variations âGaming chair pricing: budget vs premiumâ +8 more prompt variations âStreamers' desk setups on Twitch and YouTubeâ +16 more prompt variations âWhere to buy an RGB height-adjustable desk todayâ +11 more prompt variations âMy gaming chair keeps squeakingâhow to fix?â +8 more prompt variations Parent âHow do I work from home with toddlers around?â +13 more prompt variations âIs a wall-mounted desk safe with kids in the room?â +8 more prompt variations âHow to anchor a standing desk so it wonât tip overâ +7 more prompt variations âHow to share a home office with a toddlerâ +11 more prompt variations âAffordable kid-safe chairs under $150â +7 more prompt variations âParent forums for home office safety ideasâ +8 more prompt variations âWhere to buy childproofing desk accessoriesâ +13 more prompt variations âHow to remove crayon from my wood desk?â +7 more prompt variations Developer âWhy is my desk setup giving me back pain?â +8 more prompt variations âUplift vs Jarvis for multimonitor setups?â +11 more prompt variations âHow to mount 3 monitors securely on my deskâ +7 more prompt variations âWhich desks support multiple monitors + a docking station?â +8 more prompt variations âStanding desks under $400 that support triple monitor setupsâ +11 more prompt variations âBest dev setups shared on GitHub and Redditâ +8 more prompt variations âWhere to buy a programmer desk with fast deliveryâ +7 more prompt variations âMy monitor arm is saggingâhow to fix?â +13 more prompt variations 23 Words Avg Length of ChatGPT Prompt vs. 3-4 on Google . Topic: Office Setup . More Buyer Personas More Journey Stages âHow to create a distraction- free home office on a budget?â +11 more prompt variations âIs a foldable desk good for daily freelance work?â +7 more prompt variations âAre we missing something in our office setup?â +13 more prompt variations âBest chairs for 10-person office under $5000â +7 more prompt variations âWhy does my current desk feel too cramped?â +8 more prompt variations âIs Secretlab Magnus desk better than IKEA?â +13 more prompt variations
- 11. Rise Of "Trusted"& Partnered Sources
- 12. How Do YouWin? Machines Are the Primary Arbitrator of Content, Trusted to Act on Customersâ Behalf ? Agents Brand Content / Data User-Facing Surfaces AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT AGENT
- 13. Creating High-Quality Contentat Scale Using AI Must Be Core Competency for Brands Content Quantity Traditional Search AI Search âFor marketers, failing to adapt to generative AI- driven search means risking loss of visibility and influence; content must provide depth, context, and authority to thrive in AI- driven search environments.â - Forrester Content Quality Why does AI cite Reddit 30% of the time? Not because it has the highest quality content. Because quality content is scarce.
- 14. Yesterdayâs Content Process Isn'tGoing to Work
- 15. Enterprise Content TeamTime-to-Publish: 5-7 Weeks, 6 Parties Involved, 6+ Iterations, 8+ Tools Used
- 16. Evolving Marketing Metrics& Telemetry New Metrics for AI LLM Visibility Understand How People Are Searching Knowing Diverse User Intents & Persona Classify Conversational Prompt Variants Understand How Your Brand Appears in AI Semantic Relevance to Topics (Topical Authority) Brand Mentions & Sentiments Citation Frequency & Ownership Understand End to End Funnel Metrics AI Crawler Traffic, AI Search Referral Traffic, Organic Traffic, & Conversion Metrics
- 17. Tracking Your Impactin an AI-Driven World
- 18. Mentions & Citations MaximizingAI Visibility A Mention is when the AI refers to your brand or product by name. There's no link. You are simply part of the conversation. A Citation is when the AI uses your website as a verifiable source for its information, often with a direct link or footnote right back to your site.
- 19. Optimizing for Mentions MaximizingAI Visibility Show Up in Recommendations Become Category Leader Build Brand Recall
- 20. The "How-To" ofMentions Traditional SEO vs AEO Maximizing AI Visibility Primary Goal Key Metric Core Tactic Focus Rank a specific URL for a target keyword. Backlinks, keyword density, technical site health. Building links and optimizing on-page content. How can I get Google's crawler to rank my page? Make your brand/product a dominant entity in the online conversation. Volume, velocity, and sentiment of mentions across diverse, authoritative sources. Building relationships, generating stories, and fostering community. How can I get journalists, reviewers, and real users to talk about my product? Traditional SEO AEO
- 21. Optimizing for Citations MaximizingAI Visibility Own a Specific Solution or Answer Establish Verifiable Expertise or E-E-A-T Drive Direct Traffic and Conversion
- 22. The "How-To" ofCitations Traditional SEO vs AEO Maximizing AI Visibility Primary Goal Key Metric Core Tactic Focus Rank a specific URL for a target keyword. Backlinks, keyword density, technical site health. Building links and optimizing on-page content. How can I get Google's crawler to rank my page? Become the citable, primary source of truth for a topic or data point. Direct attributions in AI answers, source credits in media, backlinks referencing a specific fact. Publishing original research, proprietary data, and definitive guides. How can I create data so valuable that AIs and journalists have to cite my website as the source? Traditional SEO AEO
- 23. Benchmarking and CapabilityAssessment
- 24. Listen to theMarket Maximizing AI Visibility
- 25. The Built-In Foundation MaximizingAI Visibility
- 26. Key Insights Maximizing AIVisibility
- 27. Capability Assessment Maximizing AIVisibility
Editor's Notes
- #1Â SEJ
- #2Â Shannon
- #3Â Shannon then Steven
- #4Â Shannon
- #5Â that VISUAL: consumers spend their time to make decisions in a pie chart looked like this for hte last ten years....30% ads, 20% websites, 30% search/organic discovery.... company website traffic 85% from organic.... That in the next ten years is going to look dramatically different. Ads shrink, time on sites shrink, time on traditional search. New piece= AI discovery.
- #7Â Shannon
- #8Â "The other critical difference is how these AI systems understand queries. Traditional search historically relied heavily on matching the keywords in your search to keywords on a webpage." [CLICK] "AI search, however, is about matching meaning. LLMs convert text into essentially GPS coordinates, capturing semantic meaning and context. Instead of exact keyword matches, they find answers by identifying content whose meaning is closest to the meaning of the prompt. [CLICK]Think of it like finding the closest concepts in a multi-dimensional space [CLICK] like 'kitten' being semantically close to 'cat'." "This allows AI to understand nuance and intent far better than simple keyword matching ever could." (Estimated Time: 60 seconds)
- #9Â The 1st pillar of our vision revolves around understanding and harnessing âevery search signalâ. Tracking and curating âkeyword listsâ have been the common practice of SEO in the last 10 years, historically they were the closest thing that represented users' search intent. AI LLM based search focuses on understanding the semantic meaning behind search queries and the relationship between them rather than keyword matching. To understand search signals in AI, (click x 3) we need to be thinking about topics and the corresponding queries, which are increasingly personalized and reflect a diverse set of intent stages. (click) Another aspect of the vision here is that we can now finally expand search signals to also include multi modal inputs such as voice. For a long time SEOs wanted to access voice search data as assistants become more popular but it has been clunky to integrate this data because we needed special transformers to go from speech data to text data, but thatâs no longer the case now as voice and video data can occupy the same AI vector embedding space as textual inputs. We have started to shift our data model to prioritize topics, their nuanced intent stages, and audience specific queries. We believe Enterprise will slowly tuck away their keyword ranking list, in favor of topic, audience and search intent market share.
- #10Â The 1st pillar of our vision revolves around understanding and harnessing âevery search signalâ. Tracking and curating âkeyword listsâ have been the common practice of SEO in the last 10 years, historically they were the closest thing that represented users' search intent. AI LLM based search focuses on understanding the semantic meaning behind search queries and the relationship between them rather than keyword matching. To understand search signals in AI, (click x 3) we need to be thinking about topics and the corresponding queries, which are increasingly personalized and reflect a diverse set of intent stages. (click) Another aspect of the vision here is that we can now finally expand search signals to also include multi modal inputs such as voice. For a long time SEOs wanted to access voice search data as assistants become more popular but it has been clunky to integrate this data because we needed special transformers to go from speech data to text data, but thatâs no longer the case now as voice and video data can occupy the same AI vector embedding space as textual inputs. We have started to shift our data model to prioritize topics, their nuanced intent stages, and audience specific queries. We believe Enterprise will slowly tuck away their keyword ranking list, in favor of topic, audience and search intent market share.
- #11Â Rise of "Trusted" and Partnered Sources: AI engines are increasingly forming partnerships with trusted content platforms to enhance the credibility of their responses. This further causes potential traffic decline to brand websites. For example - citations from AI engine answers almost always include sites like Reddit, NYtimes, Guardian etc. For different industries - there is often a very prominent but finite list of trusted sources. Answers from OpenAI on who their âcontent partner sitesâ are. Domain and Topical Authority: Backlinks and link building has been a cornerstone of traditional SEO, however in this new world, AI engines behave differently. It has the ability to naturally ingest large amounts of content from trusted sources. Itâs increasingly important to be building domain/website authority with these trusted sources in addition to your own website. Backlinks at the specific pages level will not be as important as AI has the ability to understand all of your website content and its relations without explicit external link navigation. However building internal links can help raise topical coverage within your site once domain level authority is achieved. Together they can boost your AI engine visibility.
- #12Â The way to win is to build content for agents
- #17Â Shannon
- #18Â A Mention is when the AI refers to your brand or product by name. There's no link. You are simply part of the conversation. A Citation is when the AI uses your website as a verifiable source for its information, often with a direct link or footnote right back to your site. Think of it like this: A mention makes you famous. A citation makes you the authority. You need both, but you optimize for them in very different ways. Let's start with fame." Optimizing for mentions is about making your brand a 'known quantity.' You're building your reputation so that the AI considers you an indispensable part of the conversation on a given topic. This is your top-of-funnel, brand-building strategy. So, when do you focus on this?
- #19Â You focus on mentions when you want to build Brand Recall. You want people to see your name over and over. You also optimize for mentions when you want to become a Category Leader. The goal is for your brand to be so tied to a concept that it's impossible to talk about the subject without naming you. And finally, you need mentions to show up in those all-important Recommendation prompts
- #20Â So how do you do it? It's not traditional SEO. It's about generating buzz In essence, you are shifting from a purely technical discipline to a hybrid of PR, community management, and brand marketing. You are not trying to rank a single webpage for "best noise-canceling headphones." You are trying to make your product so synonymous with quality in that category that any intelligent synthesis of the internet must include it in the answer.
- #21Â But being famous is only half the battle. What happens when the userâs query isn't about opinions, but about facts? That's when you need to be the authority. Optimizing for citations is about establishing your website as the definitive source of truth. This is a powerful, traffic-driving play. You foYou also focus on citations to Establish Verifiable Expertise, what Google calls E-E-A-T. This is the ultimate signal of trust. And critically, you use citations to Own a Specific Support or Educational Prompts.
- #22Â How do you get citations? By creating citable assets. This means publishing original research, industry reports with unique data, and the most comprehensive, in-depth guides on the internet for a specific topic. You then use Digital PR to get that content referenced by journalists and bloggers, building a history of being used as a primary source. So, now we have a clear understanding of the two key outcomes in AI search: Mentions, which build your fame, and Citations, which build your authority.
- #23Â The natural next question is: 'Okay, so what do we do about it?' Knowing the difference is one thing, but acting on it requires a framework.
- #24Â Before you can win the conversation, you have to understand it. How You Understand the Conversation The modern way to understand the conversation is to use AI to develop empathy at scale. Itâs not about chasing high-volume keywords; itâs about deeply understanding the people behind the conversations. Hereâs how it works:
- #25Â The Built-In Foundation
- #26Â Your Benchmarking is primarily focused on understanding and improving your mentions. You need to ask questions like: Share of Voice: In the conversations happening right now about our category, how often are we mentioned compared to our competitors? Sentiment: When we are mentioned, is the context positive, negative, or neutral? An AI understands the difference between fame and infamy. Competitive Gaps: Where are our competitors getting mentioned or cited that we are not? What parts of the conversation do they own? The goal is to create a clear, data-backed map of the entire battlefield. It tells you where you are strong and where you are weak.