Is It Possible to Track Brand Mentions in AI Answers?

4 min read

AI answers are volatile, ever-changing, and use opaque algorithms for query fanout. This has raised the struggle for digital marketers to measure their performance on such results.

Despite these issues, is it possible to track brand mentions in AI answers?

Yes, to a good extent, but not in absolute terms.

Before this, you need to resolve all ifs and buts concerning this question.

Is It Possible To Track Brand Mentions in AI Answers? The Reasons Behind the Challenge

Tracking brand mentions in AI answers is a hard nut to crack, owing to certain reasons. These are:

Non-determinism: The LLMs don’t give the same result even when you execute the same prompt again.
Shortcomings in Authentic Tools: Google’s Generative AI Performance Report only provides the data from AI overviews and AI mode, that too with no details of clicks received and queries on which pages are appearing.
No Query Data: There is no tool to gauge the traffic and performance of any query over LLMs.
Variations Amazon AI Chatbots: Not all LLMs use the same algorithm to derive an answer. Your brand might get mentioned on a query on one chatbot but might not appear on others.
LLM Recalls: A report by Google titled “Empty shelves or lost keys? Recall is the bottleneck for parametric factuality” by Nitay Calderon and Gal Yona clearly says that AI recognises patterns in a specific way and can’t answer the same thing when the pattern is reversed. It simply means when these LLMs know “A is B” but can’t answer “What is B?” This is called LLM recall. Hence, your brand can appear on one query but might be invisible when the query pattern is reversed.

Also Read: AI Citations vs. Brand Mentions: What AI Search Visibility Really Tells You

How to measure brand mention?

Although there is no concrete or universally accepted and recognised tool or approach to track brand mentions in AI answers, you can try 2 ways to measure your performance.

Firstly, execute certain prompts structured from the perspective of how your customers will search on LLMs. As the results might vary from one AI chatbot to another, go with the ones people use prominently, i.e., ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Gemini (as per Neil Patel).

Now run the same prompts a few times to check if your brand appears constantly, often, or seldom.

Then jot down the results along with the competitor’s performance and implement required strategies.

You can also Benchmark Your Brand’s AI Citations by considering the share of voice and citation rates to understand where your brand stands in the competition.

What Do Digital Marketers Say?

Aleyda Solis has debunked certain misconceptions about tracking brand mentions in AI Answers in her X post. Some crucial experts form here post are:

Vasco Monteiro discussed it in a YouTube video and called tracking brand mentions in AI Answers unrealistic, as one can’t gauge the traffic on the queries made, unlike Google searches where Keyword Planner provides traffic on the particular keywords.

The same opinion was provided by a verified professional on a Reddit discussion when a user asked: “What tools do you guys use to track AI citations for your websites?”

His reply was:

Concluding Remarks

Although many tools have been developed so far to track brand mentions in AI answers, none of them can guarantee accurate figures. Hence, you can rely on your own results derived from specific prompt sets.

Also, you should boost your presence on other domains such as Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Medium, rating sites like Captera, etc to create a buzz while also targeting top place on SERPs.