If you’ve been following my posts on Natural Language Processing and SEO, then you already know we’re living in a new era of search. Users aren’t just turning to Google to answer their questions anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Chat. And guess what? These tools don’t serve up ten blue links. They serve up answers. This means you’re invisible if your brand isn’t part of those answers.

As someone who’s been deep in the weeds of traditional search and now spends her days helping major brands figure out what AI is doing to their traffic, I’ve been exploring how to make LLM brand visibility something we can measure and optimize.

What Is Brand Mention Tracking for LLMs?

Unlike traditional rank tracking, where you see how your page performs for a keyword on Google, LLM tracking tools like SpyGPT, Knowatoa, and “Am I on AI” help you understand how your brand is represented in generative AI responses. These tools ask questions users are likely to pose and analyze how often, where, and in what tone your brand appears.

SpyGPT essentially simulates user prompts across ChatGPT and logs which brands are recommended. It also compares this visibility to your competitors and identifies content gaps, so you can win those recommendations back.

Knowatoa runs prompt-based queries across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, then scores your presence, sentiment, and accuracy against your product descriptions. It flags hallucinations and highlights competitors beating you.

“Am I on AI” automates prompt testing across multiple LLMs and visualizes your brand’s presence. It’s great for understanding where you’re gaining traction and where you’re missing from the conversation entirely.

Building a Custom LLM Mention Tracker

You can invest in a paid solution or build an internal version for Your Website if you have an engineering team capable of building it. It’s not just possible; it’s totally within reach. Google Analytics already gives us user referral data from ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing. If you layer that with a dashboard tracking:

• Total mentions by model (ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing)
• Sentiment analysis (positive, neutral, negative)
• Weekly AI traffic trends
• Prompts where you win vs. competitors

You can build a living, breathing map of how your website is performing across the web.

Here’s what that might look like:

Sample Visuals:

• Bar Chart: Prompt-by-prompt comparison of your site vs competitor1, competitor2, etc
• Pie Chart: Sentiment breakdown across AI mentions
• Line Graph: Sessions referred from AI platforms over 12 weeks

How AI Overviews Differ from LLMs

Now, if you’re wondering whether optimizing for Google’s AI Overviews is the same thing as optimizing for LLMs like ChatGPT, the answer is: kind of. In my guide to optimizing content for AI Overviews, I explain how Overviews rely heavily on traditional web indexing and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

What does that mean?

• Google AI Overviews still crawl and pull from web pages. Your content’s structured data, freshness, authority, and schema all matter.
• LLMs like ChatGPT are trained on snapshots of the internet. They don’t pull live data (yet), and what they say about you depends on what was in their training data, or what’s being pulled in via plugins or web-connected models.

That’s why you need to optimize for both: publish high-authority, well-structured content that Google trusts and get that content featured in sources LLMs are learning from (like Reddit, Wikipedia, product reviews, and publications like SEJ or Wired).

Why All of This Matters

Search behavior is changing fast. A recent Bain & Company study found that 80% of consumers use AI-generated results for at least 40% of their searches. HigherVisibility reports that 71.5% of users are actively querying tools like ChatGPT, and ChatGPT itself now boasts 160 million daily active users.

If you’re still only tracking keyword rankings on Google, you’re flying blind.

The future of SEO has already slipped quietly into the room, not with a roar of rankings and backlinks but with the quiet certainty that the brands that get remembered are the ones that show up as the answer themselves.