Once I started digging into how AI search works (and what small brands can do to optimize for it) I knew it was a fool’s errand to start optimizing without a plan.
I needed a way to focus on what mattered. It needed to be grounded in what was possible for small brands to achieve in this next generation of search.
So I developed a framework for assessing how a brand is doing in AI search called “The 3 Rs of AI Search.”
Here are the 3 Rs of AI Search.
- brand recognition
- brand reputation
- brand recommendations
You can think of these as worthy goals for your AI search optimization journey.
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be publishing a mini-series on each of the 3Rs of AI search, going deeper into my thinking on each of them than I can in a short presentation or a guest podcast.
Today we’re starting with the first one (and the foundation of them all) … brand recognition.
What is AI Brand Recognition?
Achieving brand recognition simply means making sure that AI engines recognize your brand as a brand.
It’s valuable because it’s foundational. Without brand recognition established, AI engines will struggle to assess your brand reputation (#2) and you won’t even have a chance at winning brand recommendations (#3).
To assess how well a brand is doing in terms of brand recognition, follow the steps below.
Step 1: Collect the data
Open up 8 tabs (use incognito mode) of ChatGPT or another chatbot/AI search engine.
Type in each of these 8 prompts, replacing “brand name” with your brand name.
- What is Brand Name?
- What is brand name?
- tell me about Brand Name
- tell me about brand name
- what do you know about Brand Name?
- what do you know about brand name?
- what do you know about the company Brand Name?
- what do you know about the company brand name?
Step 2: Check for sources
For each variant, check whether or not the prompt was augmented by a live search. Depending on the chatbot you’re checking, these prompts might always kick off web searches or they might sometimes kick of web searches.
If you see “sources” cited, you can be sure that those results are grounded in live search results.
If you don’t see “sources” cited, then the results aren’t grounded in the live search results—the model is pulling only from its pre-training or built-in “world knowledge.”
Step 3: Analyze the results
As you read through each of the results, answer these 4 questions:
- Is the brand recognized as a brand or is the answer a kind of nonsense answer that takes the words in the brand name and tries to “answer” it?
- Is there a difference in the brand recognition when search was used vs. when search was not used?
- Is there a difference when the brand name is capitalized vs. when it’s not?
- Assuming the chatbots are recognizing the brand, how accurate is that representation? Are your offers, positioning, and messaging coming through crystal clear … or kinda garbled?
Like what you see? Yay!
You’re rocking it. Give yourself an A+ for AI brand recognition.
You’ve mastered the first goal of AI search and the foundation of all the Rs to come.
But you’re not done yet. Check again tomorrow. Generative AI is probabilistic. The results will change more than you might think for each run.
The real goal isn’t just to be recognized once, the real goal is to be recognized consistently and over the long term. Make a plan to check in on the results at least quarterly.
Don’t like what you see? Well, at least now you know.
And don’t worry … it is fixable!
Achieving brand recognition comes down to giving AI engines access to information about your brand consistently, not just on your own site, but all over the internet.
Some tips:
- If your website is not yet ranking #1 for your brand name, aim for that first.
- Be absolutely consistent in how your brand & brand name is presented online—not just on your own site, but on any page on the internet that’s attached to your brand (social profiles, directory listings, media profiles etc).
- Start building out your “brand mentions” … basically, pepper the web with legitimate, non-spammy proof of your brand’s existence. Take part in the world wide web.
From Showing Up … to Showing up Well
Once you pass the first bar of being recognized as an entity, you can start finessing the output. Work on not just showing up in the results, but showing up well. Chatbots can become your new salesperson, but they need training!
Think about and identify the specific ways in which your offers, positioning, and messaging aren’t coming through clearly, figure out where the incorrect info is coming from, and then go fix it … on your website and on third-party sites too.
I won’t sugar coat it. Achieving brand recognition isn’t always easy work—but it’s worthwhile work. Now’s the time to start thinking about how your brand is showing up (or not) in AI searches because the trend is clear— a growing number of people, especially in younger demographics (1) are getting answers through chatbots.
It’s pretty obvious where Google is heading. They won’t stop at AI Overviews with a little AI Mode on the side (2). AI-organized search results as the default are coming, and if the last few years is any indication … it’s coming quickly.
Any work you do to get your brand recognized as a brand today will pay off well for years to come.
Footnotes
- Chatterji, Aaron, Thomas Cunningham, David J. Deming, Zoe Hitzig, Christopher Ong, Carl Yan Shan, and Kevin Wadman. How people use chatgpt. No. w34255. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2025.
- Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO) explained to Lex Fridman in an interview that their plan is to move elements of AI Mode into the default experience as they’re proven to work. “Our current plan is AI mode is going to be there as a separate tab for people who really want to experience that, but it’s not yet at the level there, our main search pages. But as features work will keep migrating it to the main page, and so you can view it as a continuum. AI mode will offer you the bleeding edge experience, but things that work will keep overflowing to AI overviews and the main experience.” Lex Fridman, host, The Lex Fridman Podcast, podcast, episode 471, “Sundar Pichai: CEO of Google and Alphabet”, June 5, 2025, https://lexfridman.com/sundar-pichai/
