How To Appear In AI Using Community and Brand Mentions (Case Study)

Appearing in AI responses is rapidly becoming the most important growth channel available to SEOs and their clients.

Sure, the volume of AI search currently may be small, but:

A.) It’s growing
B.) It’s high-quality

AI traffic is often pre-qualified, as we keep saying, because the visitor has already had a qualifying conversation with a representative, and you’ve appeared as the perfect solution.

We’ve covered before how you can appear in AI responses. For this post, we’re focusing on the specifics of how our Brand Mentions and Community Mentions services helped us appear in AI.

Brand Mentions

With fatjoe’s Brand Mentions service we secure external reviews and listicles on authority sites that mention your brand and, in particular, your USP.

Looking at the fatjoe example we provided the USP “Best for agencies and marketing teams.”

We then built this USP into all of the reviews and listicles we produced for “context seeding”.

This essentially just means getting our brand consistently mentioned in conjunction with its USP, so that we’re more likely to be suggested to people looking to solve the exact problems we help with (SEO agency and marketing team capacity).

We create a positive external review, like this:

This is then picked up and cited by AI when a user asks questions about our brand, expanding the overall quality of recommendation that we then receive:

The review secured by our Brand Mentions service has been directly cited in ChatGPT’s response here.

As well as direct reviews to help build contextual replies, AI and ChatGPT especially LOVE citing listicles:

fatjoe’s Brand Mentions service also secures mentions within listicles, again using the provided USP as the core of the listing.

It might appear concerning to be listed alongside competitors, but we’ll always ensure that your specific context stands out, including blurb as to why you are ideal for your perfect customer profile.

Community Mentions

Now that we’ve seen how Brand Mentions work to influence AI, it’s time to take a look at Community Mentions.

With fatjoe’s Community Mentions service, we secure mentions of your brand in UGC (user-generated content) in Reddit and niche-specific forums.

Reddit is the most-cited domain in AI answers, so getting mentioned there is the perfect way to start seeding the ground for getting your brand recognised – and recommended – by AI.

Take a look at this example here – a fatjoe-created Reddit comment has been used as a primary source in a recommendation by AI for this bail bond service:

Community Mentions are a great way to get mentions for timely and more urgent decisions users might be making, where the very freshest content is more likely to be cited – as in the bail bonds example above.

UGC is preferred in AI answers due to this timely relevance, as well as the real-world experiences the forum threads and comments provide.

AI training data helps provide a general basis, but for anything outside of their core knowledge, they need to ‘ground’ their results – essentially performing their own Google searches before providing summaries back to you, the user.

Both Brand Mentions and Community Mentions are a vital way of feeding AI and LLMs important context and positive sentiment about your brand/company, which can be picked up during this grounding process and then surfaced to the user in the form of shining recommendations for you.