The question we hear most often about appearing across AI search is pretty straightforward:
How do we actually improve our visibility?
Unfortunately, there is no switch you can turn on. There is also no universal ranking factor for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google’s generative search experiences.
If only it were that easy!
Brands need to be easy to understand, technically accessible, relevant to the questions buyers are asking and supported by enough credible evidence across the web for AI systems to feel confident surfacing them.
Google’s current guidance on generative search makes much the same point. Existing SEO fundamentals still matter. Sites should be crawlable, technically sound and filled with genuinely useful, distinctive content. Google explicitly advises focusing on those fundamentals rather than chasing new “GEO hacks”.
John Mueller at Google has reinforced the importance of getting those foundations right, describing established SEO best practices as “relevant and foundational” to success in generative AI search.
There are, however, several areas we consistently see matter when brands want to strengthen AI visibility.
1. Start with the prompts your audience actually uses
AI visibility is contextual, so being mentioned somewhere inside ChatGPT is meaningless if you are absent from the questions that influence whether somebody buys from you. Start by identifying the commercially relevant questions surrounding your brand and category.
For a B2B business, those could include:
Who are the best providers of X?
What are the alternatives to X?
Which platforms are best for a particular use case?
How does X compare with Y?
What should I look for when choosing X?
Which providers specialise in a certain market, sector or requirement?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of a particular brand?
Then track them consistently.
Surfacd lets teams organise prompt sets around products, services, markets, sectors and other priority topics so performance reflects the questions that genuinely matter to the business. The goal is to understand the decision journeys happening in your category, not to manufacture hundreds of near-identical queries.
2. Make your own site exceptionally clear
AI systems cannot confidently describe a proposition they struggle to understand.
Your website should clearly establish:
What your company does
Who it helps
What products or services you offer
Which markets and sectors you operate in
How individual products differ
Where your expertise sits
What evidence supports your claims.
This is good positioning, good content and good SEO.
Google recommends making important content available in text, maintaining a clear technical structure, and ensuring pages can be crawled and indexed.
If the core facts about your business are hidden in vague brand language, inaccessible JavaScript, PDFs nobody links to or five different contradictory product pages, AI search is simply exposing an existing information problem.
A good place to start.
3. Create content worth retrieving
There is an enormous amount of generic content online, and AI has made producing more of it very, very easy.
That makes genuinely useful material even more valuable.
Google now explicitly recommends creating “non-commodity” content for generative search: such as original information, first-hand expertise, unique viewpoints and materials that add something beyond what could be trivially recreated from the rest of the web.
For businesses, that could mean:
Original research and proprietary data
Expert commentary
Detailed customer evidence
Strong point-of-view content
Genuine product comparisons
Useful technical documentation
Clear answers to complex category questions
First-hand analysis of market changes
The objective is to be a useful source for your own brand, rather than simply adding another filler article to an already crowded topic.
4. Build authority beyond your own domain
Your website is only one source, and AI systems draw information from across the wider web, which means what third parties say about you matters enormously.
Surfacd’s Source Intelligence identifies the pages cited within AI responses, including articles, comparison pages, listicles, forums, product pages, and other third-party sources. It can also show where competitors appear on influential cited pages while your brand is absent.
That creates a much clearer authority-building job.
If AI repeatedly cites a respected industry publication when answering a category question, appearing credibly in that publication may be valuable.
If comparison pages consistently feature three competitors and omit you, that is a visibility gap worth investigating.
If Reddit discussions continue to shape responses, you need to understand the conversation there and respond accordingly in your own output.
This is where PR, digital PR, analyst relations, partnerships, reviews, community engagement and broader brand activity become part of the AI visibility strategy.
You cannot own every source, but you can improve the evidence available about your brand.
5. Strengthen your category associations
AI systems need to understand what you are relevant for, which makes category positioning more important than ever.
If you want to appear when someone asks for the leading providers in a specific area, there needs to be enough consistent evidence linking your brand to that area.
That evidence may come from your own product and service pages, expert content, reviews, media coverage, awards recognition, industry reports and data points, partner pages and directories, comparison content or external expert commentary.
It’s a big job, and there are so many places you need to get your brand showing up if you’re to become a brand recommended by AI search engines, but it’s a job worth doing because when different parts of the web describe your company in completely different ways, it creates ambiguity. LLMs are not hot on ambiguity.
6. Look at who is already winning
Competitors can tell you a lot. When another brand consistently appears ahead of you, investigate why.
Which prompts are driving that advantage?
Which websites cite them?
What type of content is supporting them?
Are they appearing on influential comparison pages where you are missing?
Are they strongly associated with a particular capability or category?
The useful question is rarely “How do we copy this competitor?” It’s:
What evidence exists for their authority that does not yet exist for ours?
That gives you something tangible to work with.
7. Track whether your work changes the answers
AI search moves, models update, sources change. Competitors publish, and so do you. Media coverage lands. Your own website evolves over time.
One manual ChatGPT search every six months will tell you almost nothing, so you’ve got to track your priority prompts over time and connect changes back to your activity.
If you launch a major content programme, does prompt coverage improve?
If you secure authoritative media coverage, does that source start appearing?
If you update positioning across your website, does the way AI systems describe your business change?
If a competitor suddenly gains ground, where does it happen?
AI visibility becomes much more useful when it is treated as a measurable outcome over time rather than an occasional curiosity.
There is no single trick to growing visibility on LLMs
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!
The brands most likely to perform well in AI-powered discovery are those that execute the fundamentals well, consistently.
AI search simply gives teams a new place where the combined effect becomes visible.
See how your brand performs today
Surfacd tracks the prompts, competitors and sources shaping AI-generated answers, helping teams see where visibility is being won, where it is being lost and what to work on next.
Ready to discover how your brand is being surfaced on LLMs?
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