What is the Best Way to Get Your Brand Mentioned by AI Search

In a conversation I was having with a business leader a couple of days ago she told me “Of all the referrals I got for my business in the past couple of months, 90% found me through AI.”  Lately, it feels like AI is the center of any business conversation I have. 

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Everyone understands that AI is changing the way people find solutions and brands. It is true that some products or services are more affected than others: the younger, more educated,and technologically savvy your audience is, the more likely they are to use AI. The more people traditionally find you through search and research the more likely users are now to search for you with AI. But, nobody is immune. More and more, people are turning to answer engines to start their discovery journey.

So now, everyone wants to know how to get your brand to show up in answer engines. Our AEO team is on calls with brands non-stop. However, no matter how good your content and website are, the LLMs will never give 100% share of voice within their citations. The LLMs will cross-reference what your site says with the content in reputable sites to ensure they are giving an impartial answer. And this is key.

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The Role of Third-Party Content in Your AEO Strategy 

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If you want to control your message and make sure that LLMs cite you, reputable third-party content publishers need to publish content about you that tells a very similar story to the one your website is telling. A similar story will allow LLMs to ratify your website story and will help prevent LLMs from hallucinating where they find inconsistencies. 

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We have said this before and nobody will be surprised by my recommendations. It is so obvious that it is almost intuitive. And yet, very few people are doing something about it. And why? Because once marketers understand the work and cost involved in getting the content out there and how hard it is to prove the direct influence on conversions, they find it extremely hard to get budgets approved.

Why Affiliate Is the Best Department to Lead Your AEO Content Buys 

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The lines between marketing departments are and should be blurry. As an affiliate account manager in an agency, I had clients refuse tactics like CTV because that falls within the media buying team and then ask me to work with influencers. And I had others love the idea of doing CTV through affiliate but want their social team to run influencers. That is what I love the most about affiliate marketing, you have a tactic you want to try, I can promise you that I have an affiliate for you. We have done everything from brand partnerships and out-of-home advertising to coupons and toolbars. However, I firmly believe affiliate is the right team to handle your AEO buys.  

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The reasons are simple: 

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• Relationships: Affiliate and PR marketers specialize in relationships. Their job is to know everyone in the space and build their network. Both of these teams will get your foot in the door with the reputable content partners. Knowing who is the right contact and how to reach them could take any other department weeks. PR has the advantage that they might get you an article for free, but that would mean being at the mercy of the editors not only to determine if they want to talk about you but also what they want to say about you. You won’t be able to control your message to ensure it matches the story on your website. 
• Tracking: Your paid media and programmatic team will be experts in tracking, they will be able to tell you every touch point and who eventually converted. This is important in AI, since as we mentioned before, not being able to determine the influence of those citations in the purchase journey is one of the biggest hurdles CMOs face when getting budgets approved for something like that. Affiliate marketers are these rare very sociable numbers people. They are used to tracking performance and optimizing placements. If one department is going to come up with a way to measure citations' influence it will be affiliate marketers, they are already working on it. 
• Content and influence: Social media like YouTube, Reddit and TikTok are appealing to LLMs because they can surface constantly updated and recent content for that reason, your influencer department might want to take on the AEO challenge. The problem is, if you only look at influencers, you are leaving all the large publishers out and most likely also looking at the wrong engagement metrics. Again, affiliate is used to working with influencers and large and small publications. 
• Branding: Brand marketing is another option to get your message across. However, usually with the affiliate channel, you can negotiate better deals while still retaining the control and you could negotiate CPA deals that will ensure the content remains evergreen and is optimized constantly. 

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Yes, content buys will always be expensive, but tracking will evolve. However, if you wait until you can prove value, you will most likely be too late.Your competitors may have already built those publisher relationships and captured that visibility.

Affiliate marketing gives you a way to start now, leveraging relationships you already have, negotiating smarter deals, and building measurement capabilities along the way. Affiliate and SEO team should be working together to identify the publications AI engines cite, your brand team should guide the messaging, and affiliate should build the partnerships that get that content published. 

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