AI Mentions: How to Track & Increase Them in LLMs?

Search is evolving faster than ever. With millions turning to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of Google, the rules of search have changed. Brands aren’t just fighting for blue links anymore. They’re competing for AI mentions inside conversational answers and summaries generated by large language models (LLMs). These are the places where you can get cited, making it crucial to monitor how and when your brand appears.

These AI mentions are becoming the new currency of digital authority.

Let’s unpack what they are, why they matter, and how to get more of them!

• Having your brand mentioned in AI-driven content is essential for increasing recognition and authority.
• They’re a new layer of brand visibility, similar to organic search impressions, but within AI systems.
• Tracking them requires specialized tools like Chatbeat, Semrush, Brand24, or Peec AI (see below).
• Optimizing for AI mentions blends classic SEO, entity optimization, and E-E-A-T credibility.
• Brands that master this early will own visibility in the AI-driven web.

As AI continues to shape the digital landscape:

Staying visible across AI-driven platforms is key to maintaining brand recognition and ensuring your brand is consistently found by potential customers.

What are AI mentions?

In simple words, an AI mention happens when an AI model references your brand, product, or content within its answer, even if it doesn’t provide a clickable link.

For example, when ChatGPT answers :

“What are the best social listening tools?”

and includes:

“Brand24 is a popular choice among marketers”

– That’s an AI mention.

Unlike backlinks, these mentions exist inside AI-generated text, and their frequency and context can influence how often LLMs surface your brand in future answers.

To monitor these, you’ll need specialized tools.

An AI tracker is designed to track how often and where your brand is mentioned across AI-generated responses from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews.

Fact: AI search could drive more web traffic than traditional search by 2028 (Source: Semrush AI search study)

Do you know where you are mentioned?

It’s crucial to use tools that track mentions across different AI platforms to gain insights into your brand’s awareness.

Importance of AI mentions in 2026:

AI mentions are more than digital vanity metrics. They’re signals of authority in the age of generative search.

Why are AI mentions important?

AI mentions are important because they highly impact users’ buying decisions and directly affect your brand’s visibility. In both ways – good and bad.

AI can omit your brand, recommend competitors by default, or compress your features into the wrong story. That’s why it’s important to monitor and improve your brand’s visibility in AI tools.

Especially now, when more and more people turn to AI instead of Google when looking for information.

Fact: Google’s AI Overviews have been shown on 13.14% of search results pages already in March 2025 (Source: Semrush AI Overviews Study).

Google’s AI Overviews are a great example of how new search result formats are changing the landscape.

AI tools now dominate search results, pushing organic results further down the page:

Here’s a quick list of why AI mentions (and tracking them) is important:

1. LLMs enable visibility beyond Google.
   Among Gen Z, for simple information searches, only 47 % use traditional search engines, while 28 % use AI chatbots and 23 % use AI search engines. (source: SMK study)
2. AI Overviews now dominate SERPs
   In 2025, Google reports that AI Overviews appear for approximately 30% of all searches and nearly 75% of problem-solving queries.
3. Trust is gained through repetition
   The more an LLM “knows” and repeats your brand, the more users perceive it as credible and trust it.
4. Data is king (as always).
   Monitoring brand mentions in AI reveals how models interpret your expertise and niche, and helps you shape your brand image in LLMs. According to a Semrush analysis, AI models include brand mentions in 26% to 39% of responses. Do you know where you are mentioned?
5. AI optimization is a new thing, so you might win against competitors.
   Brands optimizing early can dominate AI answer ecosystems before others catch up, leading to greater success in digital branding.

AI tools now shape buying decisions from start to finish with their AI-generated responses.

They help users research, compare, and choose… So, bypassing ads, emails, and other marketing channels entirely.

What impacts your AI visibility?

Your brand’s visibility inside AI-generated answers depends on three key factors:

1. How your brand appears in the model’s training data – the information the AI has already “learned” from past content, citations, and digital footprints.
2. How your brand shows up in live or supplementary data sources – such as web results, recent articles, and online discussions that the model can access in real time.
3. How the AI interprets the user’s intent and context – meaning the way a prompt is phrased, and whether your brand fits naturally into that answer.

Together, these elements shape when, where, and how an LLM decides to mention your brand.

Pourquoi est-ce important ?

Because this knowledge enables you to switch a few things in your efforts and shape the way you’re perceived by the LLM.

For example, did you know that with just a few clicks on your YouTube channel settings, you can enable AI models to train based on your content?

Paramètres → Chaîne → Avancé → At the very bottom, there is a switch.

This can make a huge difference!

Here’s what Michal Sadowski, Brand24 CEO, highlights:

“As AI models start analyzing video transcripts, they’ll gain a clearer picture of your content and brand. Result? You can expect to see more referral traffic flowing from AI platforms like Gemini and other emerging models – not only to your channel but to your website as well.”

Michał Sadowski

AI Mentions vs. AI Citations

En bref :

When LLMs like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews pull information, they can either mention your brand or cite your source.

While both improve your digital footprint, they work differently under the hood.

In traditional search, being at the top of Google results was driving organic clicks.

Now, these are being replaced or overshadowed by AI-driven answer formats like AI Overviews.

1. What are AI mentions?

Un AI mention occurs when a model references your brand, product, or expert name within its response, but without linking back to your site. For instance:

“Popular social listening tools include Brand24 and Sprout Social.”

Here, Brand24 is mentioned but not cited. There’s no link, yet the brand gains exposure, trust, and recall in the reader’s mind. These mentions often come from a model’s training data ou contextual understanding built over time.

Monitoring your own brand in AI-generated content is crucial to understand how often and in what context your brand is being referenced compared to competitors.

They matter because:

• They boost the semantic association between your brand and key topics.
• They influence future responses (the more you appear, the more often you’ll resurface).
• They reflect how LLMs “think” about your brand in relation to others.

2. What are AI citations?

A citation, on the other hand, is more like a reference, a clickable URL or visible source credit that the LLM uses to support its statement.

“According to data from Brand24, social media mentions can predict brand crises before they escalate.”

This is an AI citation, and it functions much like a backlink in classic SEO: it confirms source reliability and passes “authority signals” into the model’s reasoning layer.

Citations are rarer but more powerful. They often appear in AI Overviews, Perplexity, or ChatGPT responses, and tools where source attribution is a UX feature.

AI citations can be especially useful, as they can encourage more people to click through directly to your website and simplify the acquisition process.

	Meaning	Exemple
AI Mentions	A brand or product referenced in an LLM response without a visible source link.	“Brand24 helps marketers track online mentions.”
AI Citations	A linked or attributed source (URL, domain, or author) used to support an LLM answer.	[Source: brand24.com]

AI Mentions vs. LLM responses

These two terms often get blurred.

Un AI mention is when an AI model names or references your brand within its answer, for example, “Brand24 helps track online mentions.”

Un LLM response, on the other hand, is the entire answer the AI generates in reply to a user’s prompt. It might contain one or several AI mentions (or none at all).

En bref :

• AI Mention → a single reference to your brand inside an answer.
• LLM Response → the full AI-generated output containing that mention (or multiple mentions).

1. What are LLM responses?

Un LLM response is the full block of text a large language model produces in answer to a user’s question.

These responses are tailored to the prompts of individual users, ensuring personalized and relevant information.
It’s the output, a complete narrative that might summarize, analyze, or recommend.

Exemple :

When you ask, “What are the best tools for brand monitoring?”, ChatGPT might generate a multi-paragraph answer listing tools, benefits, and best practices.

That entire block of text is one LLM response.

LLM responses represent:

• How the AI frames knowledge on a topic.
• Which entities or brands does it select as relevant?
• The overall sentiment and context surrounding your brand mentions.

2. What are AI mentions?

Within that broader answer, each reference to your brand is an AI mention.

Mentions are micro-events, individual data points nested inside the model’s generated response.

Often, these mentions are triggered by the specific phrasing of a user’s query – when a user asks about tools for tracking online conversations, the LLM may mention relevant brands in its answer.

Continuing the example:

“Tools like Brand24, Mention, and Sprout Social help track online conversations.”

Here, the LLM response is the whole paragraph, and the AI mentions are the appearances of “Brand24,” “Mention,” and “Sprout Social.”

	AI Mention	LLM Response
Définition	A single reference to your brand inside an AI-generated answer.	The complete answer produced by an AI model in response to a user’s prompt.
Champ d'application	Micro-level: one mention, entity, or brand reference.	Macro-level: the full context or narrative the AI generates.
How it looks?	“Tools like Brand24, Mention, and Sprout Social help track online conversations.”	Macro-level: the full context or narrative that the AI generates.

Here’s what those terms look like in real life based on the ChatGPT response example:

How to see if AI mentions your brand? 

At the moment, no LLM (including ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity) provides analytics dashboards showing how often they mention brands.

Google Search Console also doesn’t report data from AI Overviews or “AI Mode.”

Ainsi, tracking requires external tools, the same way SEO used third-party crawlers before Google gave us data.

An AI tracker is a specialized tool designed to monitor and report how often and where brands or topics are mentioned across AI-generated responses.

Here’s an example of what it can look like:

Discover how brands use these tools and services to gain insights and achieve success.

And no, asking ChatGPT directly “How many times do you mention my brand?” won’t work… it’ll politely shrug.

SEO tools with LLM tracking:

These platforms help monitor your brand’s presence in AI search and can help improve your AEO efforts:

1. Semrush
   
   Offers AI SEO analysis, mention tracking, and prompts monitoring across the most popular AI platforms. Great for visualizing how often your brand appears in LLM-generated results and comparing your performance with rivals.
   
2. Surfer SEO
   
   Focuses on AI SEO and optimization to improve your content’s visibility in AI-generated answers. It shows when, where, and how often top AI tools mention your brand across their prompts.
   
3. Ahrefs
   
   AI search monitoring, useful for identifying which pages are cited or referenced by LLMs and how your page performs within them.
   
4. AccuRanker (Accu LLM)
   
   Suivez votre réputation des entreprises by monitoring visibility across prompts. You can learn which sources are cited and benchmark your performance against competitors.

Outil	Domaine d'intervention	Key AI-related features
Semrush	AI SEO & competitive insights	Tracks AI mentions and prompts across major LLMs; compares visibility vs. competitors.
Surfer SEO	Optimisation du contenu	Identifies when and where AI tools mention your brand in generated responses.
Ahrefs	Page & link visibility	Detects which pages are cited or referenced by LLMs; monitors AI-driven visibility.
AccuRanker (Accu LLM)	Brand reputation & visibility	Measures visibility across prompts, analyzes sentiment, and benchmarks against rivals.

Conseil : Combine traditional rank tracking with AI mention monitoring to see the full picture of your brand’s digital visibility – in both LLMS and Google or other search engines.

Media monitoring tools with LLM tracking:

If you want to track how LLMs or AI summaries mention your brand and take care of your online presence, these outils de suivi des médias can help:

1. Brand24
   
   The platform detects how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses. It shows où your brand is mentioned and ce que source got you that attention. This helps you understand the topics LLMs associate with your company.
   
   Combined with its “classic” média mentions monitoring, Brand24 gives you a full picture of how AI systems and online audiences perceive your brand in real time.
   
2. Chatbeat
   
   This tool enables you to monitor how your brand appears in responses generated by AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity).
   
   It tracks which prompts lead to your brand being mentioned and how often it appears. Plus, it provides competitive analysis in the AI search.
   
3. Peec AI
   
   It offers real-time tracking of brand mentions, analyse des sentiments, visibility scoring across multiple LLMs, prompt-level insights (which user questions trigger mentions), and competitor benchmarking.
   
4. LLM Brand Monitor by Serpstat
   
   A dedicated tool for tracking how your brand is represented across large language models, including prompt-level analysis, citation detection, and competitor benchmarking.

Outil	Focus	Key AI-related feature	Meilleur pour
Brand24	Media monitoring, Prompt monitoring & AI visibility	Detects how often and where LLMs add your brand mentions in AI responses (across LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini). Includes competitor benchmarking and context.	Medium to large teams, enterprises
Chatbeat	Prompt & Context Monitoring, AI Visibility	Tracks that prompt trigger your brand mentions in major AI chatbots, and how frequently they occur in the AI search.	Medium to large teams, enterprises
Peec AI	Real-Time LLM Visibility	Provides live monitoring of AI search, sentiment, and visibility. Includes prompt-level insights and competitor benchmarking.	Medium teams, agencies
LLM Brand Monitor (Serpstat)	Visibilité de l'IA	Analyzes how your brand is perceived across various LLMs. Offers citation tracking, prompt analysis, and competitive visibility insights in AI search.	Medium to large teams, enterprises

Conseil : Select a tool that combines traditional media monitoring and AI monitoring in a single platform.

How to get more AI mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Mode? 

Getting more AI mentions isn’t luck… It’s a strategy.

Here’s how to increase your brand’s presence in AI answers:

1. Optimize for entities, not just keywords.
   Use consistent brand, product, and expert naming conventions across all content.
2. Publish content with clear E-E-A-T signals.
   Include author bios, credentials, and trustworthy sources that LLMs can identify as reliable. Highlight your services in detail to improve mention rates and help AI systems connect your offerings with relevant queries.
3. Be quoted and cited by other authoritative sites.
   LLMs are more likely to add brand mentions that are frequently referenced elsewhere.
4. Feed LLMs through structured data.
   Implement schema markup, FAQs, and knowledge graph optimization.
5. Engage in PR and thought leadership.
   Appear in industry roundups, interviews, and trend reports that LLMs scrape or learn from.
6. Use conversational content.
   Write in the natural, question-answer style that aligns with AI prompt patterns. Target informational queries, such as how-to guides or definition searches, to increase the likelihood of being mentioned in AI-generated answers.
7. Track and refine.
   Use monitoring tools monthly to analyze shifts in Visibilité de la marque AI et le sentiment.

I honestly think that getting mentioned by an AI tool is today what getting a top-3 Google ranking was before AI – an early-mover advantage that compounds over time.

FAQ

Does the sentiment of the mention impact AI visibility?

Not directly. However, positive sentiment across multiple contexts helps strengthen brand authority signals that LLMs pick up during retraining.

Can I track AI mentions using an LLM?

Not reliably. Current LLMs can’t access their own citation logs or external databases. Use third-party tools like Semrush or Brand24 for accurate data.

How to make your content accessible to LLMs?

Make sure the pages you want indexed meet these criteria:

• Utilisation server-side rendering instead of relying solely on JavaScript.
• Aren’t blocked by your robots.txt file or meta robots tags.
• Sont publicly accessible, not hidden behind paywalls, logins, or registration forms.
• Sont listed in your XML sitemap so search engines can find them easily.