Transcript for "Why AI Picks your Competitors: How to Benchmark your Brand's AEO": Hello. Hello. How is everyone doing? I see that you guys are already active in the chat. Welcome to the new platform that we're using for HRF's live sessions. And this is the reason why, things are a little bit different. I was a little bit delayed. I just wanna do some final checks. The goal is that, the overall experience for you guys is, significantly improved when we do all these future live workshops, roundtables, like master classes. Anything that we do live in the future, we'll be using basically this platform. So this is the first time that we are using the new platform. You can see that it's no longer Zoom. I think from the feedback that we have with, other, attendees in the past when we did some small round tests is that overall, the experience is nicer. But, of course, if there is any feedback that you can share with the current experience, from, like, when you guys registered to basically at the end when the session ends, we'll be so happy to hear from you guys. Okay? Because this will be a iteratively, improving experience. So for today's topic, I... This was a topic around, like, AI search where a lot of people are asking, okay, so now that I have all this data about whether, like, AI answering questions related to my industry or about me and my competitors, what do I do with this data? Like, why do I find it... Why is it useful in any ways? How can I actually act on the data to to, like, make changes? Okay. So this is the... This is basically what today's session is all about. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. Alright. So, if there's any questions, you will see, that, like, I will bring it up in the q and a. George said that it's a bit laggy so far. Is anyone else experiencing any sort of lag, or is it just, like, my camera lagging? That's maybe expect... Alright. Yeah. Sorry, George. Maybe it's just you. Alright. Cool. Then, the q and a, is... Like, if you guys have any questions while we go along, I am most likely going to answer them at the end because I'm alone here today in today's session. So I hope that is okay. So without further ado, because we already started late, let's already... Let's begin. Okay? So this is how I see on average, and you guys can, agree or disagree with how the average person checks if AI cites their brand. They prompt some simple question like, what's the top five vitamin... Multivitamin brands in Canada, in Google, or their favorite AI platform? And this is, like, particularly scary if this is your boss doing this or your C suite executives that are doing this because they don't really know how AI search works. Most of the time, they just do this and they go, boom. Our brand's not there. You're screwed. Go back to drawing board. You need to answer why your brand is not being, showing up. Our brand is not showing up in any of these answers here by AI. Let's go back and and get some work. Okay? Your your job, you're useless. That's how it works. Right? Not really. If you, like, monitor your AI search visibility this way, not just for your brand but, of course, against your competitors, you'll be missing out a much bigger picture of how AI is recommending brands. And I'll explain my point first by looking at the studies, like the data studies about, well, how we know brands get mentioned in AI search and then talk about how you should be doing this for your brand and competitors specifically. Okay? The first is... That I wanna cover is about the general, like, how how frequently AI changes its mind in in certain senses, about the kind of brands they want to recommend. Sparko released a study, like, about how often an AI tool shows the same brand showing up, for the same prompt. So type in the same prompt, exactly the same, to any platform and do it a 100 times, and there's less than 1% chance that two of the responses will show the same list of brands. Right? So if I ask AI what are the top things to do when... Top 10 things to do when traveling to Japan, AI will certainly give you a list, but they don't always give the same 10 things back. Alright? And just like search, AI changes its answer regularly and often. We studied 43,000 keywords, with at least 16, recorded AI overviews, like, for the same prompt across a long time period. And we just wanted to see how much of that content that AI produces actually changes over time. 70% of the content changes, and it usually changes, every 2.15 days. And in terms of entities, only 54% of the original entities show up again and again. Right? And then that's just, like, specific platforms. Every LLM prefers to cite different websites. So, and most of the time, they do not overlap much at all. You see, like, there's a significant distribution across the different kind of, domains that are considered, like, sources of information that are worth citing for for good answers. This also depends between different LLM model versions. So GPT four is not the same as GPT five and like, and things like that. So, like, all these things will change over time. I believe chat GBT used to site Reddit a lot more in the past, and now it cites it a lot less. So these are kind of the the fundamental problems that every brand has to deal with when trying to find what are the factors that would influence a brand, like visibility in AI. So let's just get the bigger picture about how... What are the factors that influence AI search... I mean, brands specifically in AI search. The... When we did a study of 75,000 brands trying to look at all the different factors that could affect, its visibility and correlatively, the top brands get 10 times more mentions than the next percentile. So, like, a small number of prompts made to AI may show your brand, but across many other prompts, maybe even across other time periods and stuff, topics, questions, or angles, your competitors could be showing up more. And then the bottom 26% of brands get zero mentions in AI overviews, compared to, you know, the very top. We looked at... So these are the different factors that we analyzed all 75,000 brands against. And YouTube is consistently at the top across chat, GPT, AI mode, and AI overviews, but brand web mentions is, like, right after that. So, the idea with these top three, you can argue even the top four factors here, is that the more other people relevant to your niche or that are authoritative in your niche, the more that other people are willing to talk about your brand, ideally in a very relevant way, the more likely AI is going to pick up on that and then start mentioning you as a brand in different, like, contexts and and suggesting and recommending a brand in such ways. Okay? So if everyone has done a large scale data studies, what's the point of me doing one just around my small brand? I'm just gonna quickly check the chat here. Lorena asked if anyone knows if we're getting a recording afterwards. Yes. You will. So, yeah, what's the point? You just showed me a bunch of different studies that Ahrefs has done or, like, other companies have also done. Why do I need to do this monitoring myself? Let me just go follow all these, top tips that I shared by other people, right, based on the big data studies across millions of AI responses. Well, what a big data study concludes will not always be true for your brand or industry. Here, I am searching. So I'm actually a relative. Like, I have a very small child, and we look at very... Baby carriers a lot. So these are the, like, the harnesses. Basically, you put your small child inside and you can carry them around. And I looked at the, you know, four brands and how they compete. The top, like, your, like, websites for this. Sure. You can see that there's YouTube and there's Instagram. But in Indonesia, Tokopedia is a huge source of, information that people... That AI is relying on. Also, things like mothercare.co.id, these are all, like, local websites that would have higher authority then... And this would completely change in a different country, or even a different language. So, like, if you only follow what are the top recommended tips, the top branded, the top, domains that are cited every time, like Reddit. You can notice here that actually Reddit is not even there at all. So, you you would be basically wasting a lot of effort, for... In... When your brand doesn't rely on it. Right? When when your industry is not sourcing from that area. Okay. So now let's talk about how to set up, how to choose what prompts to track both about your brand as well as your competitors. Put them, like, roughly into three categories. So the first is what problems do I solve? So how do I fix task? How do I fix... How do I do... Sorry. How do I do task or how do I fix problem? And you can you can replace this with specific things within your niche. What's my positioning? So a lot of times, if you see AI, answers, you empirically looking into what AI says and you try to ask AI, what's the best brand for, I don't know, toothbrush, like, the best toothbrush brand? And AI's typical response is there is no best toothbrush brand. It depends on your use case. It depends on if you are a young child or you're, like, an elderly person or you come from this country. And then you say, if you are, you know, having these issues, you can try these, these, these to brush in stuff. So these are positionings. AI is actively trying to understand what different brands, different products do based on, like, the related entities that are constantly talked about those brands. And that's how it positions and answers, people about what different, when when they ask a question about what something is best at. So that is directly relevant to how you're being mentioned around the web. Right? And that's true also for comparative, like, queries, like, you know, how good is one brand versus another and how good is one brand at a particular category. Like, maybe how good is this CRM for small start ups? How good is this CRM? What are the best free CRMs available for so and so kinds of businesses, like, nonprofits, for example? And then you look at prompts that are around different facts, so things like pricing, things like availability, things like, how to do x with a particular product. And then you see whether or not the the information around those products about how they're being used or how much they would cost and how much it would take overall, for example, to solve a problem using one of your products versus a, you know, one of your competitors' products. So all of these are just areas in which you can find, prompts that you can, ask AI to see generally what is the visibility about your brand versus a competitor. Alright. Places to find prompt ideas. You... Like, a lot of people do start... When when they start from the very beginning, they definitely try to make up these general questions. Like, the ones that I provided earlier are ones that you can probably just start putting into AI. But there's also other places that are grounded in data that would also be useful. And the reason why they're useful is because these are usually questions asked by your real customers, and they are, like, very, very likely to cover angles and questions and... Or using terminology that you would never think to use. You know, you gotta match your customers' language on these different areas. So these are organic keywords, people, what they're typing into search. These are threads on discussion forums. Again, definitely source from the forums that are, you know, cited as answers, in AI answers for your niche, and don't just take it, like, from Reddit just because all the studies, like, say, oh, Reddit is cited a lot. Real customer questions. So you can check with your customer success or sales team to hear from the different, different things that your real customers will be asking that are likely not going to be, you know, on the web of in any form, but they're probably going to be typing it. Right. So these are these are information that you probably have that you should be using a lot. And then these are and then last suggestion is like titles of guides or review articles, especially ones that get cited a lot where your products or your competitors products are being mentioned. And of course, in the age of AI, make use of MCPs. So if you're a customer support platform like at Atrius, we use Intercom, it has MCP. Then this is a way that you can query the conversations that, that we have, for example, on live chat, to collect these questions that people consistently ask. Now because of this platform, we use Goldcast. But even previously when we used Zoom for all these live sessions, I could pull out, like, the questions people have asked in q and a and use that for prompts. I also use these, you know, these are all sources of information that I can... Of real questions from you guys where people are asking, us, like, relevant questions or even very specific, niche questions that would be useful to see whether or not Ahrefs gets recommended or not. Right? So make use of AI, make use of MCPs. After you've done all this sort of collection of different prompts, check to see if they cover all these specific areas, which is general recommendations for products and brands. So examples would be like best so and so tools or top so and so software or alternatives to your competitor's name, specific use cases. So like in the case of Ahrefs, we want to see if Ahrefs shows up for best keyword research tools, Google Analytics alternatives, best local search SEO tools, or AI visibility tools, things like that. These are use cases. And then jobs to be done. So that's similar to what I mentioned earlier about how to do x. So if you apply that to Ahrefs, we look at how to do keyword research, how to build backlinks, how to create content, like... And how to, you know, etcetera, etcetera, how to fix technical SEO issues. Reputation criticism. So, like, you should look at why is, why is brand expensive or why is brand, why is competitor brand cheaper than, like, your brand or, like, bad reviews and things like that. And then see what AI says. And then competitor comparisons, of course, like, the main category of today's presentation is looking at start... You should have prompts that do mention your competitors' names because they they will exist. You basically just take the same rule from earlier and apply to your competitors. Right? So, like things like pricing and like how to do products and tasks and see, how you get recommended versus a competitor. Sorry. Let's go back. Okay. All right. So let's move on. You can then tag these into different parts of the customer journey and then analyze all these prompts, like, on a step by step basis. In this case, like, it's not just journey. These are also, like, specific niches that, Ahrefs' tools cover. Our tool... Our platform is very big. We cover a lot of different use cases, and yours may not be the case, and that's totally fine. You can then maybe cover areas where, like, the same product is used to solve different problems or for different markets. Right? So that's something you can also do. Aside from custom prompts, of course, I have to mention the brand radar indexes, which is, like, 470 plus million prompts that we analyze monthly across all these, like, six different AI platforms. And it... And it's a really good place, a, to find brand mentions from these unknown unknowns, places you never even think where your brand could be showing up or a competitor brand can be showing up. And the second advantage also is that because we refresh this analysis on a regular basis, you don't have to wait to get this data. You can basically start doing analysis for any brand, day one. The goal here is to source from a database of, like, relevant AI answers and then uncover patterns in a data because, like, as we mentioned earlier, AI is not consistent. So what we want to see is patterns about how your... How the... How certain brands are showing up and how their... Which pages get cited more regularly over others and things like that. And fun fact, this is basically how we do our data studies about AI search. We like from all the data that we keep collecting. We look at the different ways in which the certain... Either certain brands show up or certain pages show up or how fan out queries work and things like that. Alright. Now that we talked about how to get the data, let's get to benchmarking. So the following slides will have a lot of different screenshots from BrandRadar. Some of these features, I think, we literally only post... Like, published or re released in, like, the last month or so. So these are, like, fresh out of the Atria's oven. Not this one, though. This one is a classic where you get to see share of voice. Like, in general, you want to see how this share of voice has changed over time. The numbers here, because like all of you guys are, most of most of the time are using custom prompts. So like these numbers will depend on like, how many custom prompts you have added in and things like that. That's not too important. What we want to see is visually what happens. Sorry. Is anyone having issues looking at the screen or is it just Agata and Maitri? Alright. Just wanted to double check. Alright. Let's keep going. So these numbers, absolute numbers, are not as important as the overall dominance because we're trying to see, like, the mentions overall rather than, like this... Like, the gap between the the brands rather than, like, oh, you know, 77 versus 49. You're not so important. And then once you have... So, like, this gives you a general idea of, like, what is the mind share or, like, the, like how often one brand is showing up versus another. So that's the first way of benchmarking. The second is you want to see the comparative visibility across intent and funnel stages. This is one of the newer features we've pushed out on BrandRadar. Honestly, highly requested. It looks at intents is related to your standard like informational, navigational, transactional, commercial. But also we we split for things related to like how to and comparison because it's such a common thing that people use to ask, not just in search, but also to AI. And then funnel stage is like when people are trying to learn about something versus, actually trying to make a decision across different brands. Okay. So we've done the analysis for you. If you were to do this yourself, you can from, like, AI answer, data. But, like, in my practice, in my experience, I find that doing this across a lot of answers is super expensive. Like, you just spend a lot of tokens doing it even if you're on a cheap LLM. So just having something like this set up, for the brands you already monitor is super useful. And I believe this is something that will work with custom prompts as well. Yeah. So that's also a good thing. Monitor branded search as a proxy for increased brand demand. So everyone knows by now, hopefully, that people have stopped clicking. And if you didn't know that, you probably would have noticed that you yourself have stopped clicking on answers or or links in Google search. But that doesn't mean people have stopped searching. I think generally everyone has problems in their life that they want to solve. And so when you have problems, you search for answers. A good a good proxy of whether or not you have brand visibility is, do people actually search your brand or maybe one of the names of the products in your brand. Right? Brand demand, and, like, you can say, but that's not just with AI. That could be from, like, a social media campaign that we pushed or stuff like that. This is... I mean, it is all the factors of your brand visibility combined that contribute to whether or not people are searching about your brand at all. And in a way, that's also how AI search functions. It's taking all these factors. They can take in YouTube. They can take in LinkedIn. They get cited. They can take in, you know, Reddit and, like, Quora and all these different, like, ways in which customers talk about brands or or have discussions about different products and stuff. So it's very similar in that way. So use branded search. This is a report in BrandRadar. And, actually, all of you guys who have a light or higher plan, you probably, not probably, you definitely have access to this report already. So you can see, you can compare the branded search against your your brand versus a competitor's brand and just see the gap. Is it increasing? Have you if you launched a campaign recently or if you're a competitor, you notice that they have started to put out more PR release and stuff like that, does that reflect the overall increase in branded search or not? This is like a very good proxy to monitor that. Find gaps in positioning or topic coverage. So, what I used in in this particular report, of course, Ahrefs has created a platform, if you don't know, to help you develop AI agents. So what I have done, and it's called the title, what I have done here is I've taken data from BrandRadar, all these AI, answers and prompts. And I looked into... I asked AI to create a report that analyzes what each brand is good at and terrible at. Right? Because that's how AI tends to make its answers. So then, that's how I use it to find positioning gaps. Like, if you're constantly... If a brand is constantly being shown as, better for these particular categories and have no mentions about specific tools that actually also exist or like features that actually also exist in your toolset, those are your gaps. And then those are the missing areas that you should then look into, like creating campaigns about or increasing content creation around. Right. So and if visibility is weak across an entire category or subcategory, then the problem is definitely bigger than one missing page. So you need to see, like, low mention rates. You need to see that, like, it hardly gets recommended as a solution for a certain category or where you see so many other competitors show up instead. Okay. And in Brand Radar, you can also see now our new ability to see sentiment. So like it's a new standalone report on its own to see whether or not it's rated generally positive or negative. And you can see this by brand, but also by aspect and by platform. Platform being like AI platform, things like that. Then you can you can see at the top here that there is a filter. So you can filter down, for a specific sentiment that you're gonna see. So filter for all the negative ones across, like, certain aspects, and you get to analyze, like, what are the common patterns of what a brand is considered negative at. Okay. And then another thing you can look at is the most cited sources and formats for your niche to target. So this is within cited pages. You can now see like the page type. So like, for example, like articles tend to show up a lot across different categories that I've seen, like different comparison reports in BrandRadar. But take note of like listicles, take note of videos, landing pages like listicles, I believe is under listing collections. So... Or like even user content. So sometimes you will see that a lot of forms show up again and again. So this is something that you can immediately use even with your custom reports... Custom prompt reports. So everyone with a, lighter hire plan should definitely be able to see this and just see what are the kinds of content you should be creating or they can cite it. So, like, not just what you create, but also if you partner with influencers or, like, maybe do PR and stuff like that, what are the formats that they have to take as well? Okay. Again, you can do this against your competitors. Like, you can see what is what is the case for your competitors versus your own brand, and then fluctuation. So as mentioned earlier, like AI doesn't always cite the same thing from one day, even for the same prompt, from one one day to the next. And then this is even crazier across, different AI platforms. This particular report, I believe, looks at all the platforms. This is like... So you can see that platform is not selected at the top, which means that it gives a more overarching view of, like, what are the top pages and how regularly they get cited versus some other pages that maybe get cited now and then they just... They immediately drop or, you know, they go up and down a lot. This is especially important if you created pages or optimized pages specifically for AEO. A page that gets cited several times in one day is encouraging, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have lasting visibility. Again, a reason why a single search doesn't tell you the whole story. Okay. And the same would also be true for like a competitor page, like pages of competitor websites. If you see those pages get cited very consistently, it's probably something that you have to create a competing page to sort of, like fight against in order to improve your visibility in that area. As an example, not all pages that get cited should be prioritized. Of course, as we just mentioned, it should have a lot of AI citations, not just consistently over time, but also across different niches, different categories. There are some pages that just get cited so much more across all these subcategories. And those are super important for targeting, for either making sure that you have good brand mentions on them or you have to consider making similar page formats that of of those that get cited a lot. It could be, and then, yes, stability I talked about, but also relevance to important prompts. So like sometimes, like it would be prompts that are a lot more critical to your business. For example, something specific to if you are if you are HubSpot, a prompt, AI's answer to the prompt best CRM software for small businesses would be more important, like more important than what is the CRM just because of like the like the business opportunity there. High like strong domain rating and high organic traffic. Despite the fact that if you saw earlier with the number of different brand factors affecting whether or not a brand gets mentioned or not, not showing domain rating is a high reason that you should necessarily choose a page to focus getting brand mentions on. A strong domain rating tend to have more authority and backlinks and generally search visibility. So like even though they don't automatically make it influential in AI answers, they tend to have just being mentioned in all those websites in a relevant way helped improve your brand visibility in multiple ways. And of course, when AI tries to answer questions about within your niche, it's going to do reg. So it's going to search for websites using normal search, organic search to ground the answers. And brand mentions on these higher domain authority websites tend to get like... And show up more often and get picked more often by AI. Okay. What else? So then there's also like pages that are of your competitors or there are pages that you cannot easily influence, like Wikipedia. Those are like some of these pages, like they really are just not worth bothering to to prioritize just because they have no access. Just just a reminder that you shouldn't be chasing after those. Okay? Your competitors have no interest in helping you. So now that we know the gaps in brand positioning, let's talk about the ways to close these gaps. Right. So, when we had to do a EO efforts of our own, one of the main things that we did is like outreach. Outreach for two things. The first is to look into collaboration opportunities for our brands to get mentioned more. And the second thing is that Ahrefs has changed a lot over the years. Like any brand, most brands would have you know, either new products or they have maybe expanded in different markets or they're doing, like, different things. And... But all of the older brands, older websites that would have been mentioning you probably have not changed that information. And if they get cited by AI and they get used by AI to generate answers, they're gonna give the wrong information. Alright? And that's especially gonna hurt your positioning when you pushed out all these new, like, try to push out all these new products to solve, like, problems that made you uncompetitive to your competitor brands at the time. So you should... Like, a part of it that we did in our outreach here is that we said, hey, there were certain things that were wrong. The prices that you mentioned on your blog were wrong. Could you please help to update them and stuff like that? And then, of course, you have to be very grateful and very thankful when you write to them because they have no pressure and they have no reason to make the change and put in that effort generally when they do so. In our experience, when we went through this whole, like, outreach thing, we contacted 26 authors about inaccurate information about... In their articles about our brand. 10 of them replied. Only four of them updated their content. And this is for, like, a brand that already has some very strong authority where they generally put in this extra effort because they liked us. You know, like, we have some amount of, like, a brand where people care about us and they... They're happy to do things for us. This is going to be so much harder if you're a smaller brand. So just keep in mind that when a lot of people out there are saying, okay, you should be doing outreach to change these things, I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying keep in mind this is the amount of effort that we'll take to make any sort of incremental improvement. Right? Expect that people will ignore you, basically. So outreach is not always the answer, but like a lot of times for for certain influential pages that keep getting cited, you probably don't have any choice. Otherwise, consider other options like publishing your own useful content or working with creators or industry experts. Oops, exports, experts. And then like you can partner with publishers and communities to create new new content in those ways. So these are all different ways in which not only you're building more information about your brand on your website, but also all these third party brand mentions where they matter a lot in whether AI... When AI is trying to find information about whether to recommend your brand or not. And content can be like things like how to guides, original research, proprietary data, free tools, comparison articles and firsthand experiments. And then like like, remember that of the one thing that you can control the most are all the surfaces that your brand exists on. So this is not just only your website, but also like your social media profiles. Also like, maybe secondary blogs that you have been handling, things like that. All of these need to have consistent... Clear, consistent answers to basic fundamental questions about what your brand does. What does your products do? Who is it for? Which problem does it solve? How are you different from competitors? So, like, the more reliably you make sure these problems are fixed, the more AI can consistently recommend your brand in certain ways against your competitors. Right. So that's that's how you make sure that old messaging and like wrong recommendations or even like, what are these campaigns called when they when competitors try to smear campaigns? Like if your competitors... If you're in an industry where, like, competitors like to make smear campaigns and stuff like that, make sure that you focus on on the surfaces you control first, and don't just... Don't don't immediately get into the fire of your competitors and, like like, try to fight them on that basis. Okay? So the more consistently your brand has the right messaging around it, like, about what exactly your company does and what your products do and who it's for, the better you will get recommended consistently across questions in your industry. And of course, freshness trumps authority. So, one of the... I know, like, this is taking information about the history of how Atriov grew as a brand from, like, first principles like ten years ago. But a lot of the things that Atrievs did when they when we first started out as a brand is just to consistently publish blogs. We didn't focus. I think, like, we've built a reputation about having really good quality content on our platform. But the main thing that really moved the needle is to just keep publishing. So, like, this rule still matters. And I don't mean generate a bunch of crap and push it out there in the web because every AI platform and search engine platform has every, you know, like they really want to, they want to penalize such kinds of behaviors. So but like still, if you create quality content and you do things like we do in terms of pushing out things, guides or like experiments that are useful, we made sure to do it consistently. We made sure to check if there are certain things that we have done in the past that was useful to people but are outdated, we updated them and we republish them again. So this is like such an important strategy that if you're not doing, especially if you have a lot of old website content, it is important to review what pages probably need a new life, like a new updating that can be done. And don't just change the date. Okay? Actually actually update the content from, like... If you have some guide from 2022, now it's time to bring it to 2027, for example. It's almost the end of the year. So... Okay. If you have new tools and features and like, you know, at Ahrefs, we also have a similar problem sometimes where we have a lot of cool stuff because we keep releasing new features all the time. We don't talk about it enough. You're probably also not talking about it enough as well, about the new things that your, either your product or, like, the new problems that your company is able to solve. You really have to talk about it. And like, if it's not on a web somewhere, like AI has nowhere to pick it from. So... And that's just not your own website, but also, you know, other people's websites. So make sure that you get the message out there. And then general tips for UGC. So this is like Reddit, Acora, or trying to engage communities that are naturally talking about how to solve problems using certain products and stuff like that. Someone ask a technical question that you can answer. You can help. Just try to be helpful. Don't immediately insert a brand. Try to help people and give something useful and solve a problem for people within the thread where the conversation is going. You can also come in if you're and there's like a factual mistake that people don't realize is wrong. You can go in and correct them. There is even misleading competitor information. Again, this is another thing that you can do to sway against competitors that get mentioned in all these UGC content and try to look at where you can add something useful and not just a product page. Finally, I just wanna mention that how AI perceives you is how the entire web perceives you. So you have to... This is actually a quote directly from Tim's recent presentation when we presented HRS Evolve San Diego. All of... It's it's like... It has always been good marketing practices to look at. Like, if you are trying to market your brand, you should be appearing in all different surfaces and you should have a consistent message about what your brand is good at. That's just good marketing. And with AI search, this has made it painfully obvious that this is, like, where everyone has to go in order to position their brand, like, not just in AI, but just in general, like in the online world. Okay. So that is it for today's presentation. This particular QR code goes to our webinars page. If you would like to check out more that is happening coming up soon, you can sign up in our opt in list in order to get more notifications of future webinars. I will... And here I have linked... Like everyone will get... Since you guys attended live, I will give you guys a copy of all the articles and tools that are being mentioned here or like even the dashboards that I shared earlier. You can get a copy of this. So for now, I will help to answer questions that were being asked. Let's let's check it out. Oh, yeah. There was also that catch up feature that Goldcast has. Like, for those that came in late and they were able to use it, please also, like, let us know, like, if it actually helps or not. Any questions? I think there were some, some parts. Yeah. So does anyone have any questions about, like, today's content at all? So I think some people have asked, talked about, like, the problem of content creation. I think we've had a study where we surveyed a bunch of different content creators about content, creating content with AI or assisted AI and stuff like that. And after a while of using it, you start to find that AI is still not very good at creating really, really, really good content where you can just sort of give it a few prompts and then let it run on itself. Like, AI is not very good at that still. And I think it's very reflective in a way of the care that you put into content creation in general. If you have something cool to share, the first part is, like, bringing your thoughts together about what is what is so cool about the thing that you want to talk about. And a lot of times, you just have to do it manually first. So I find that a lot of initial work that goes into content creation, like, this is just a personal experience. But if I want to write about something cool, a lot of times the first thing I do is, like, open a book with pen and paper, and I write down exactly what I want this, like, article to cover and stuff like that. And then after that, I give something structured to AI and I still don't take, everything the AI gives me as a write up. And I hardly do that, actually. Okay. Zane, I believe I can pin this... Push this to q and a. There you go. What is the most important thing to structure the strategy for a new brand. Okay. So this is gonna be so relevant to... It will always be relevant because everyone's always creating new brands. Aside from this whole AI visibility and search visibility and, you know, technical issues and stuff like that, I actually think the most important thing you should do as a new brand as part of your strategy is positioning. I talked about it kind of in some parts here, today's presentation, but positioning means... So when you collect all these AI prompts and you're noticing all the different ways in which competitors are mentioned as good at, What is your brand good at that is better than all these brands? And fortunately, unfortunately, as a brand, you need to be... Can I pick to answer particular? I should be able to. I forgot how to do it. But that's that's my that's my general thing. Like, you should be able to answer this question. Your brand should be able to answer this question. Your brand needs to be able to be so good at one thing that all your current competitors cannot beat you at. That's positioning. If you can crystallize that, be able to communicate that so that your customers understand that, then it's then it's great. That messaging goes directly into your website, your socials, your campaigns, talking about how great it is, why the other competitors suck. So, like, this this is... It should at least be one thing. It's great if you have more, but the one thing is so important for a new brand to start. So that's the first thing that is important, I think. Yeah. So this is answered. Let's move on to the next question, which is, how can I share this? There you go. We can share answers, you guys. Isn't that cool? Marky's question is how often should you update your articles to keep them fresh? Okay. As a general rule... Okay. Here's a here's a... Like, we we have a whole blog that talks about, like, how you should refresh content like a whole, like, workflow. But I think here's a general rule. Look at the websites that get cited by AI like often. Like, you know, that priority list I shared earlier about which pages you should be prioritizing to get, you know, making sure your brands get cited and, or, like, your brands get mentioned on those pages, check what date they were recently published or recently updated. If it's within, like, the year or within two years, like, that's around that benchmark, that's your indication of, like, how often your article should get, you know, updated. So if you see an article on your own website, for example, that would be really useful for AI answers in your niche but are older than that, then you should update it. So that's a general rule for, like, how to go about things. A lot of times, AI tends to cite, pages that I made within the year. So, not just as a general rule across, you know, different, AI answers that we've seen, but also the fan out query. So when AI tries to, you know, answer a question, it will make additional searches and that are related to your original prompt. And many of them can also be like, what are the best tips for 2026? So they're actively trying to find fresh content in that ways. Right. So that is that is a good place. Where are all the Q and As? It's running around. All right. So I think this is done. All right. Let's feature another one. How do you... How would you describe Reddit and its credibility towards AI citations? Just look at what the data says. So I think very, very recent studies show that Reddit is being cited less in AI answers for for a number of reasons. Like, sometimes it's just ChatGPT is getting cut off by Google by not being able to find certain websites or, like, results more often than not. So, like, and then for other platforms, they don't have as bad of an issue or never really use Reddit a lot in the first place. So it depends on that specifically. But people use Reddit. So does... Is your audience on Reddit or not? Like, these are... You're still trying to sell to people. Right? You're... It's just that, like, people are using AI search. But if they see a Reddit thread and if they are active users of Reddit, then outside of AI search, it's not a bad idea to be there. So look at it as at first principles. Is your audience on Reddit or not? Sometimes you're not. Then you don't have to care. Yeah. I hope that helps. Okay. I'm going to release a survey. I know, like, a number of you guys are still in the in the chat. And this will take over the engagement panel while I answer more questions. I hope that's okay. So, like, this survey helps me get an understanding of how much you enjoyed today's session. But also, like, I would also like to hear any, like, points you guys have about the platform as a whole, like new things that we have done in this new approach and what you like to... What you think needs to be improved. Meanwhile, I'm gonna continue answering questions. Okay? So, Bruce asked, I have a, New Zealand domiciled... Sorry. I don't know how to say this word. Client who is a gravestone manufacturer. They have five showrooms and one Auckland. Will BrandRadar help with testing AI prompts for this client? For specific locations in New Zealand, no. For overall New Zealand visibility, yeah. Sure. Why not? This is also relevant to, like, local search sort of situation. So definitely use Rank Tracker alongside BrandRadar because Rank Tracker is able to target specific locales, like cities or even zip codes. So like that's that's one way to help and then just check for things like local pack and AI overviews showing up and things like that. Okay. So that's how that should help. But within BrandRadar specifically, it's only at the country level. Okay. So this is done. Let's answer some of the earlier questions that people have. Deborah just said, Hey, really nice pace. I wish I could stay. Is there a way to reach out if I have any questions? Yeah. When... From the email that you get... You will receive tomorrow, you can reply to it and I will get, like, any emails from you guys. Or you can reach out to our live support chat and say, I attended this webinar and I have a question. These are two ways which you can reach me or the team in general. Okay? There you go. Nathan asks, based on the research you have done on most cited sources and formats, would you still suggest that the majority of brands continue focusing on blog content along form written website pages for their strategy? So you saw earlier in one of my screenshots, maybe I can go back to it. Here. You see this? You guys see the screen? So in BrandRadar, it shows you the formats, right? I think generally we still see articles getting cited more, but it's not so much. It's not always just the content. It's also... I mean, the format is also what kind of topics you are covering in those content. I think the best overall recommendation I can make because it's... It really does depend on your niche and it depends on, like, what kind of business you are, is that you should have... You should create content on your website that... Where people want to read the original source. So these are, like, cool, like, data studies that go into detail, you know, if your if your audience will find it useful, rather than so that an AI overview, like summarized AI overview will not be able to be enough like it will not be satisfactory alone for people to read. They'll have a reason to click on your website. It could also be like a like a free tool or like interactive reports, or it could be a video people watch and things like that. So try to look at it in that perspective where, like, AI becomes the way you get discovered. But, eventually, AI, like, people will want to look... Like, give a reason for people to wanna click on that article you've created or that, you know, free, like, cool page that you guys created to interact with it as a human being. Okay. Some of these I'm just going to go through. So we have about five minutes left, so I'm going to try and answer as many as I can right now. I'll try to look for questions where I have not really talked about. So if... Alright, this one by Darko. If AI assistants consistently recommend my competitors instead of my company, how can I identify the exact reasons behind this and what actions should I prioritize to change it? Okay. Let's look at this. I think you guys can see it. In BrandRadar, there is a very helpful filter on every single report where you can click for AI answers that... Where your brand... Where competitors' brands are mentioned but not you, and where competitors' websites are cited but not you. Those are across all the different reports that I showcase today. Filter for that. Okay. It's at the it's at the top where you can pick sites that are not cited, your brand versus your competitors. It's at the very top there. So filter that first and then see what are the topics where you're not covered, where you're not mentioned, what are the, like, talking points where you're not covered, like different mentions of things, jobs to be done, as I mentioned earlier. And then look at which are the... Look at the pages that get cited. Sometimes these are... There are certain angles where it's not competitive to have content that you can create, to be able to beat those pages. You can use that as a positioning to say, Okay, I'm going to create content for these specific angles where my competitors are not as strong or when my brand is particularly weak. Right. So it's very relevant to the very first question I answered around what is the first thing a new brand or a small brand should do, which is positioning. So it combines those two things. It's a it's all those places where competitors are being mentioned, but you are not. And B, where it would be super advantageous for your brand specifically to be mentioned because presumably your brand is better at one area versus like all the other brands. Okay. It could be like you target. You can serve a specific area better, like specific audiences better or solve one part of the problem much better than other parts. So those are, those are the kind of content that you should be prioritizing, not just on your own website, but also getting mentions on other particular websites. So that's that's where I think that you should target first. Okay. Is there a reliable metric like search volume for prompts? We know that most prompts are unique, so we can use prompt volumes for the same way as we do for classic SEO. Okay. So this is such a contingent topic. I think this will also be the last question I can answer today. There are many other questions that are not answered today. I will help to follow-up with that in our email to all of you guys. But particularly for this question, it's a complicated conversation. 95% of the prompts that ever get entered into prompts roughly, across all AI platforms are not the same at all word by word. It's it's it's, like, so, so different. And it depends on the earlier context where you're talking to AI and stuff like that. So it's very hard to get something that's like consistently true about like any particular prompt. That's just not, you know, like people don't search in AI the same way they search on Google. It's very, very wide. It's very inconsistent. It's very specific to the person that is searching. So, like, I think that's the reason why we have search demand as a way to roughly guesstimate the demand for any particular topic that is used as a prompt and not prompt volumes right now. But we are experimenting with using prompt data as well to to have some kind of rough estimate or to add to that estimation. It's not going... It's like a... It's even more imperfect science like search demand. Search volume was already estimation was already like kind of like a difficult thing to do, and this is even, like, harder. So we're certainly looking to it, but I would not use it as a way to, like, definitely say, you know, like, 700 people are searching about this. Don't use these volumes in this way. Just give it... Use it as a, like, a rough way of estimating, the search across... Like, the the demand for a particular topic across certain topics. Okay? So I've answered these questions. Now there's so many other questions you guys have. It's, like, super awesome. But I think that is it for today for now. I hope you guys found it useful. Post the Ahrefs live session feedback submit button. Didn't work. Did submitting the feedback work for everyone else or did everyone struggle to... Just let me know before you guys leave. Okay. It worked for you guys. Alright. Darko. If you I will follow-up on with tomorrow's email with another link to a survey form so you can enter it there. If you are so kind to give spend some time to just quickly answer those questions, Daria will be helpful. All right, guys. This is it for today. I hope you find it useful. I'm so thankful you guys spent the time to ask these questions or, you know, have like covered this very important topic with me. And I hope that you can improve, you know, use like competitive benchmarking to figure out where all your gaps are and like, and just brand positioning in general and help you increase your AI visibility. Okay. Best of luck to all of you guys. And again, you'll be getting an email with copy of the slides as well as the recording sent to you guys. So you can always come back if you have any, like, come back to today's recording if you have any questions. And of course, you can always email me if you have any questions as well about the topic. Don't tell me... Don't ask me questions about, like, you know, best coffee or something like that. Alright? Okay. Have a good rest of your weekend. I'll see you guys in the next live session, I guess. Take care. Have a good day, guys. Bye bye.