It’s important to be aware of how visible you and your competitors’ brand names are online – particularly with AI actively looking for such things.
Do you know how visible your brand really is online? This simple method helps you quickly compare your digital footprint with your competitors, so you can spot gaps and take action.
Here’s what I’m going to cover:
It’s always been useful for SEO if your company brand has plenty of visibility online in a range of different places.
This isn’t purely for backlinks but more of a signal that you are a genuine brand and can be trusted.
AI systems (ChatGPT etc.) are also looking for mentions of your brand in different places and the more it sees, the better it is for you because these mentions feed into how your brand is presented (or ignored) in AI-generated summaries, answers, or recommendations
While there are various tools available that do aspects of this, it’s totally free to use the method shown in the video below.
What you’ll see are various directories and websites where your brand is mentioned. That should include obvious ones such as:
… but there will be many others (some you may not have even be aware of).
Now, onto the next part – comparing to competitors …
Think for a moment about a human searching online for the products/services provided by you and a direct competitor.
Google and AI systems are looking for trusted signals, which includes overall brand visibility.
If your competitors have more brand visibility than you do, then that could put you at a disadvantage.
So, taking that same principle above, do this in Google search:
“Your Competitor Name” -site:yourcompetitorwebsiteaddress
At this point you’ll be thinking “that’s pages of information – how do I easily compare myself to my competitors?”.
There is an answer …
By now you know how to see the brand visibility of you and your competitors.
Ideally, a magic fairy would tell you how you compare to them but in the absence of fairies, I cover a method in this video, which involves a scraping tool (low cost – I paid $60 for a lifetime subscription and it’s brilliant and has many additional uses): https://www.loom.com/share/23d19db7731d4ff189eaba0f9790ec46
If you follow that video you will be able to pull all your/competitor brand mentions from multiple Google search result pages.
If you’ve exported your/competitors brand mentions from Google then you’ll likely have several Excel sheets.
All you need to do with them is to upload them to ChatGPT/Gemini/whatever you use that allows file attachments and prompt it:
My company brand is [this is where you type your brand name] – analyse these spreadsheets that show my brand mentions and those of competitors and show me where competitors have visibility and I don’t.
You may have to play with that prompt a bit more to get it doing exactly what you want but the output will be a list of opportunities for you to get your company brand visible and appearing in future search results.