Transcript:

Hey everyone, Chris Long with Nectiv here. In today’s video, we’re going to talk about why brand mentions are actually the new links in AI search.

AI systems are using brand mentions more and more to determine which products or services to recommend for a given search — a little bit less on actual links to an individual website, although those still matter, especially for AI Overviews in Google’s AI mode.

Ahrefs did this study where they said, “Hey, we analyzed the top results in AI Overviews and found that brand mentions were the most correlated with strong presence in AI Overviews.” And the more times your brand is listed, the more likely you are to appear in those results.

This makes a lot of sense if you think about how these systems work. For example, I searched for something like “revenue intelligence software,” and you can see the AI Overview pulls sources right here. It pulls from a list like “Top 10 Revenue Intelligence Platforms” or “What Are the Top Ranked Software Tools?”

It’s going to use those kinds of articles and scour the brand mentions, and whichever brand mentions co-occur the most are the ones that get listed directly in the output. So the brands that are getting mentioned most often across these articles are the ones much more likely to win in AI Overviews — and essentially become Google’s “official answer.”

Same with Google’s AI Mode — if you search for “revenue intelligence platforms” there, it’s going to do the same thing. It will search through a slightly different set of queries or pages, and at the bottom, it’s going to make recommendations. These are often similar to what it recommends in AI Overviews — and again, they’re driven heavily by brand mentions.

So, if you’re looking to improve visibility, improving your brand mentions is one of the best things you can do, especially for systems like AI Mode and Google’s AI Overviews.

These are high-impact activities that help your brand get surfaced when customers are looking for your exact product or service.