These are highlights from our interview with Despina Gavoyannis. You can learn more about Despina’s work on SEO Meets Design or connect with her on LinkedIn.

How does AI shape brand perception?

Modern AI can understand whether a brand mention is positive, neutral, or negative, and the surrounding context. Those signals directly influence what AI says about your company.

So, you need more than just brand mentions online.

Today, it's no longer just about whether your brand appears in search. It's about how your brand is represented.

That's one of the most exciting frontiers of modern SEO.

We aren't just asking what we're optimizing anymore. We're asking why and how we're optimizing it. That increasingly shapes AI-generated responses.

Quality and quantity of brand mentions

Once enough brand mentions accumulate, AI begins recognizing consistent patterns about your brand. Those patterns help determine how the model describes and represents your company.

Here, volume matters.

But not because there's a magic number, such as 200 or 500 mentions.

You simply need enough mentions to establish a recognizable pattern. The exact threshold depends on your industry and the size of your company.

For example:

• Publicly traded companies naturally receive more mentions because they're discussed in financial news.
• Small businesses don't need the same level of coverage as global SaaS companies.

Another important factor is who is talking about your brand. Ideally, those mentions should come from trusted third-party sources.

How do brand mentions influence AI search visibility?

AI pays attention to patterns.

The overall pattern of your brand mentions across the web influences how visible you become in search. So, to appear in AI-generated responses, you need to build a strong reputation through those patterns.

That can include:

• Positive customer feedback
• Happy users
• Genuine product experiences
• Favorable press coverage

Of course, there is still a technical SEO component. You still need to:

• Optimize your pages
• Cover the right topics
• Target the right search queries
• Follow traditional SEO best practices

None of that disappears.

Core metrics for a brand mention audit

Here are some important metrics you can rely on:

1. Mention acquisition rate

Track how many new brand mentions you're earning over time. Consistent growth is more valuable than a one-time spike.

2. Mention growth velocity

Like backlinks, brand mentions have their own velocity. And accelerating growth is a strong indicator of increasing brand visibility.

3. Marketing campaign correlation

Compare mention spikes with your marketing activities. PR campaigns, billboard campaigns, TV ads, and radio ads can all naturally increase media mentions. Understanding what caused the spike helps you avoid attributing every increase to SEO.

4. Estimated organic traffic

Measure the estimated organic traffic of the pages mentioning your brand. This doesn't necessarily predict search rankings. But it does help measure overall visibility.

5. AI citations

You need to know how valuable your brand mentions are for AI systems. Check how often your brand is cited in AI-generated responses, even when the citations come from third-party websites.

Keep in mind: the exact metrics you prioritize will depend on your organization. Still, regardless of company size, everyone should focus on long-term growth.

If you want AI visibility, you need to keep earning new brand mentions every month and see that trend continue over time.

Ultimately, you want reporting that shows:

• Month-over-month growth
• Increasing mention velocity
• Stronger visibility
• More AI citations
• Clear long-term patterns that demonstrate your strategy is working

Tools for brand mention tracking and auditing

To track and audit your brand mentions, I'd start with free tools like Google Alerts or Ahrefs Alerts.

That's a great starting point. And also:

Backlinks are closely connected to brand mentions. So, you can also start tracking brand mentions by exploring your backlink data. It isn’t a perfect substitute for dedicated mention tracking. But it’s an accessible option for smaller teams.

If you're part of a larger organization with a bigger budget, investing in enterprise brand monitoring tools makes sense.

Which brand mentions to prioritize?

When I evaluate brand mentions, I focus on the ones that create real impact. The ones that directly influence AI Overviews, AI Mode, LLMs, traditional search results, and so on.

But here is the thing:

The brand mentions I'd pay special attention to are the ones shaping your reputation in ways you don't want.

If someone posts something negative on an obscure website that nobody reads and AI ignores, it probably isn't worth worrying about.

But if AI is reading it, citing it, and incorporating it into its responses, that becomes a top priority.

Why do brand mentions disappear?

Mentions disappear for lots of reasons: articles get updated, publishers refresh content, competitors replace you, and websites perform routine maintenance.

Monitoring those changes gives you opportunities to:

• Reach out and restore the mention.
• Negotiate another placement.
• Understand why a competitor replaced you.
• Identify weaknesses in your market positioning.

But keep in mind:

Losing one major brand mention won't necessarily cause an immediate drop in visibility. Instead, monitor it over time and watch for patterns.

Competitive mention gap analysis

If AI systems regularly surface your competitors, there's a good chance your brand can appear there too.

Take SaaS companies, for example. Competitors often appear in "Best software for..." comparison articles.

If your company is missing from those lists, you've identified an outreach opportunity.

Why do independent sources matter?

It's hard for AI models to determine what's true and what isn't.

If there's a potential conflict of interest, AI is more likely to trust independent sources than the brand itself.

Those sources can include:

• User-generated content (UGC)
• News and media publications
• Reviews
• A combination of multiple independent sources

That said, there are still many unknowns. Which is why hallucinations and misinformation can occur inside AI systems themselves.

How can you influence what AI associates with our brand?

If you create a positive customer journey, people will naturally share positive stories and recommend your brand.

Word-of-mouth marketing has always been one of the most powerful forms of marketing.

Of course, there will always be things outside your control.

Every business can receive critical reviews. The key is not letting negative experiences define the AI narrative. That’s why brands should reply professionally and provide context.

Teach each team the part of SEO that matters to them

Teach each team the 20% of SEO that's directly relevant to their work.

That approach creates much stronger results across the organization. It also prevents people from feeling overwhelmed by technical SEO concepts they don't actually need.

With that said, most SEO knowledge isn't relevant to every department. That's still the SEO team's responsibility.

The biggest SEO misconception

For years, people have built websites. They relied on SEO tactics, shortcuts, and loopholes instead of investing in brand building. That's a huge loophole.

Therefore…

The biggest misconception is believing you can continue doing SEO exactly the way you've always done it without building a real brand.

These are highlights from our Adsy Talks podcast with Despina Gavoyannis. For more insights, watch the full interview on our YouTube channel: