Getting found by AI: What communications pros need to know about LLM visibility

The rules of brand visibility are being rewritten. Search engine optimization got us this far, but a new challenge has emerged that most communications teams aren’t prepared for and that is getting your product or service cited by AI.

Large language models (known as LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly where buyers go for recommendations, comparisons, and category education. If your company isn’t in the training data, the citations, or the trusted sources these models draw from, you don’t exist in that conversation.

Here are four tactics that I use with my clients to help them ensure AI visiblity is part of their communications strategy.

1. Own the Topics of Your Category

The big difference with AI is that while search engines index pages, LLMs "learn" from the content on the pages. If your company isn’t publishing the answers to the core questions in your space, someone else is filling that gap, and the model learns accordingly.

This means going beyond surface-level content. You really need to think comprehensively about the key questions a buyer in your category asks. This goes from awareness on the topic through to the decision making time.

However, you have to be smart about what you publish because, while AI publishes a whole lot of “fluff”, it doesn’t like it when it's learning. It wants facts. It wants unique thought leadership content. It wants the proof points that show that you "own" this space. In other words, your sales copy, your corporate blah blah are all wasted content.

For comms teams, this is a content strategy and PR brief in one. You’ve already got the subject matter experts working beside you. Now, you’ve got to get them to talk to you so you can produce material that genuinely advances the conversation.

2. Align Your Messaging to Your Buyer’s Journey

One of the more counterintuitive insights from AI visibility research is that LLMs reward relevance, not volume. People often tell me they are trying to post every day and it's so time consuming. The good news is that posting daily doesn’t matter. It’s posting quality content that will elevate you in AI.

What matters is whether your content reflects the way your buyers think about their problems and evaluate solutions throughout the buying journey. It does not need to mirror their wording exactly (that is SEO). AI is smart enough to recognise relationships between concepts, context, and categories, and use those patterns to determine relevance and then come up with an answer.

What matters is whether your content matches the language your buyers use across every stage of their buying journey -- and this does not have to be the "exact" words (that is SEO). AI is smart enough to learn patterns between concepts, context and categories, and can build relationships between them to come up with an answer.

Unfortunately, too often, we are focused on the “sales conversion” conversation when communicating and not on all the other parts of the journey leading up to it. You need to take a step back and think about the original problem your customer might have that makes them go to AI and type in that first question.

Remember, at this time, they don't know your product name, they don't know the feature and benefits, they don't know the price. What they do know is that they have a problem and need a starting point.

To figure out the starting point, look into customer interviews, sales call transcripts, support tickets, and community forums to gather the questions your buyers are asking, and use this to map out their journey. Then make sure these questions are answered not just on your website, but consistently across every owned and earned channel.

3. Earn Third-Party Validation from Trusted Sources

This one should feel familiar to you as a communication professional. It’s public relations (press releaeses, podcasts, interviews, etc.). Whereas with SEO you could dominate just by having a great website with the right keywords, that’s not going to cut it in the AI era. To boost your AI visibility, you have to consider that LLMs weigh what is said about a product or service and they weigh who says it. AI is fantastic at analysing coverage, industry media mentions, reviewing site presence, and validating independent expert endorsements.

This means that a mention in a respected trade publication as either a press release or a thought leadership piece may do more for your AI visibility than dozens of owned content pieces and daily social media posts. Strategic PR elevates the value of your crediblity and reputation.

Think of every earned placement as a citation in the model’s understanding of your brand. Coverage in the right outlets is its training data.

4. Make Your Positioning Clear

Vague brands get skipped. Sharp brands get cited. That’s the blunt reality of how LLMs surface recommendations.

AI models are like working with a highly skilled researcher. If you don’t have proof points or if you are hiding what you do behind adjectives like "innovative" and "groundbreaking" without facts to explain why it’s innovative, AI will struggle to slot you into the right answers.

For communications professionals, this mean you need to get tough about your positioning. Your messaging pillars, your USPs, your executive bylines, your social bios…basically everything that goes out needs to aligned and you need to really know what makes you different from your competion. For example, you might have the "best skincare brand", but your competitor also claims the same thing. What makes yours the best? What is unique about it that makes your customers commit to purchasing it?

The brands that get recommended are the ones that have made it easy for an LLM (and a human) to figure out exactly what they do - and make it clear on what they offer.

The good news is that most of this work is already in the communications professional’s wheelhouse. Authority-building, message clarity, earned media, audience alignment are all things that you have been doing.

AI visibility is a matter of focus, finetuning and being smart about your efforts.