AI Search Visibility: Why 85% of Your Brand Mentions Happen Somewhere You Don't Control

Are you posting every day, keeping your website polished, and still invisible to the tools your future clients are actually using? In this episode Crissy Conner breaks down a stat that changes how you need to think about visibility in 2026, AI models pull roughly 85% of brand mentions from third-party sources rather than your own website.

Grab Crissy's free PR guide, the exact resource she gives her paying clients, updated for 2026.

Links Mentioned:

• Free PR guide: https://thevisibleceo.com/leverage
• Visibility School: https://www.skool.com/thevisibleceo/about
• OMNI program: https://thevisibleceo.com/omni
• Podmatch: https://www.joinpodmatch.com/crissyconner

The OMNI Method is a diversified visibility strategy built across social media, search and AI - designed for female entrepreneurs who want to be known, found and unforgettable without living online around the clock. If you are ready to build visibility that works harder than you do, learn more at https://thevisibleceo.com/omni 

Website: thevisibilityimpactshow.com

Brand: thevisibleceo.com 

Instagram: instagram.com/itscrissyconner 

TikTok: tiktok.com/@crissyconner 

Facebook: facebook.com/crissyconner 

YouTube: youtube.com/@CrissyConner 

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/crissyconner 

Transcript

0:00

You can be posting every single day and still be invisible to the tools your future clients are actually using. Most people think they've got it in the bag if they have their social media tight, posting every single day, and they have a website. And first of all, I'm gonna say both of those things are so not true, especially when we think of diversifying our visibility. It is not enough. Most likely your v website is not even in a space where AI could even read it, And that's what our that's what our people are using for tools today. That's what they're searching for. And when we think about AI, new research just shows that AI models pull roughly 85% of brand mentions not from your website, but from third party sources. Why is this so important? Well, I'm gonna tell you number one, this is something I have been talking about since 2020, diversifying your visibility and leveraging other people's audiences. And one of the reasons that I got something called a Google Knowledge Panel in six weeks versus 12 months, which is how long it normally takes, is because I already had this work done. I just did not have it in a place where Google and AI could read it in the right places. When we think about brands with visibility, when they are across multiple third-party sources, when they get cited, they are 6.5 times more often than brands relying on their own website. So that means that 6.5 times more they're being recommended by AI platforms. It means that your own website may feel perfect to you. And it may tell the world how amazing you are or your brand is or your business is. It may tell your reader how much your clients love you and the transformations they get. But this is all coming from an entity that you own that you are feeding information to. And while this needs to be accurate and this gets to be updated, and this is an important part of AI visibility, it is not the only part. Basically, whatever that website says that you own and you contribute to, you need to have other sources that are backing it up. It's gotta back it up. It can't just be, I'm the best visibility visibility queen out there, I'm the best visible CEO there is. I can't just say that. I can say that, but if I don't have anything to back it up that says, Chrissy Connor is a visibility strategist, she's been in business for 10 years, like it has to back it up. It can't just be me. And so when we think about why this matters right now, whether it's ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI, Claude, whatever your pick is, right? They don't just crawl your site. You've got to imagine when you go into AI and you're doing massive research, it is basically scraping the entire internet in seconds all at the same time. So if it's scraping the entire internet at the same time and it only finds your website. or only finds you on social media, or only finds you here, instead of that diversification that we're talking about, that proof to back up this is who I say I am, it is not going to recommend you. There is no reason for it to. It has to cross-reference what your website says, what others say about you, it also has to be congruent. This is one of my favorite words to use because so many of us are not congruent across platforms, across diversification of our visibility, right? And so if we think about, if you are the only place your name shows up, like your website is the only place AI has zero trust and confidence to recommend you. It just can't. It's not going to just start recommending people left and right that it doesn't have proof that they're who they say they are. You've got to think about bot accounts, right? For example, social media accounts. There's bot accounts all over the place. There are people that take, I have a friend who has over a million followers, and so people are constantly making accounts to twin her, basically. And whenever I like her post. They message me, but their account name is so close to hers. I have to do a double take, like, wait a minute, is that is that Larissa? No, that's not Larissa. But had I not known her, right? And I would have been duped. And I would have thought that was her because this account has, you know, 20, 30,000 followers, because we can buy followers, right? So they can make it happen. But this is basically what what AI is trying to avoid. It doesn't want to have a dummy website, right? And be like, this is a real person when it's when it's spam. Right. It wants everything to back it up. Which also you get to look at reviews like Google reviews and you get to look at whatever all those other sites are. Like if there's stuff out there about you, you want it to be as positive. Now we can't always control that, but you want it to be positive and it obviously needs to be more than reviews. It needs to be PR third party mentions as well. So we want to make sure we're not the only place that our name shows up. Not just our website, it's gotta be more. Remember, A confused AI will never recommend you. And an AI that only has one data point about you is confused. It's not confident enough to put your name out there. We don't want that to happen. Again, social media, not enough. A website. Not enough. It has to be diversified, friends. This is how we win the be visible to AI game. So let's think about where do third-party mentions actually live? Well, number one, being a guest on someone's podcast. If you have your own podcast, that's amazing and that's great. And it helps build this portfolio of this is who I say I am, but guesting on other people's podcasts, because this is an opportunity for them to number one, you get to leverage their audience. It's a win-win, even if before AI, also someone else is asking you questions. Someone else is introing you. Someone else is proving to the world, AI, whatever, that you are who you say you are. Because you have no idea the questions they're going to ask you. And you've got to be on time and prompt with answering them. The other thing is you can do guest blog posts and contributor articles. So basically, where you contribute your knowledge, you contribute your expertise, you contribute your your authority in what you do. These are great opportunities. Again, they're somebody else's website. Like if you think back in the day when we wanted a website to rank, we always wanted something we call backlinks. This is kind of similar, but it really is about putting you in the spotlight. Whether it's as a guest on a podcast or a guest in an article, right? And giving you this opportunity to this platform basically to say who you are and what you do. The other thing is directories and listing sites in your niche. So let's say you are a certified whatever. Is there an industry listing or directory for that? And are you on it? Does it prove who you are? We've got to think about. threads where we can show up authentically. Now, a lot of us show up authentically in social media threads, but here's the thing. If it's not public, it doesn't matter. So if it is a closed Facebook group that is hidden Facebook group that like the public can't see, it doesn't really matter. Doesn't do you it doesn't do you any good in the AI world. I still 100% recommend it because it is a visibility strategy. It is a way to show your expertise and get in front of those people. So don't do it, don't not do it just because it doesn't help with AI. Do it because you love serving and that gets you more clients. But think about like Quora. Quora is a a great place where I get a lot of content ideas because you can see what the questions people are asking you, you can go there and show up authentically, not as a sales pitch, but really again to serve and support, like we talked about doing in Facebook groups. You can get in local press or industry roundups.

And here's the thing: 8:19

you don't need a PR degree. You don't need to pay somebody thousands of dollars. You can do most of these things for free, or with a team member can help you do this, and it will blow your freaking mind. Here's the other thing. I apply for a lot of opportunities and I also get requested to be on a lot of opportunities. Why is that? Because I am visible. Because people see my YouTube videos. I get opportunities to speak on stages, like so many things. And speaking of speaking on stages, that's another great opportunity where you can get third-party mentions. You were a keynote at XYZ conference. That's a huge deal. There's probably a website link. You're probably mentioned there. Keep all of that information. It's huge and is going to serve and support you on so many levels, friend. So I want to take you through a simple action step, okay? I want you to go. And I want you to go into your favorite AI, whatever it is, and I want you to say. Tell me about whatever your name is or whatever your brand name is from what you can find publicly. Obviously, your AI probably knows you really well, but we don't want it to tell us what it knows from what you've put in it. We want it to search publicly and say, Who are you? When I did mine, when I first did mine, it said, are you the same Chrissy Connor that was a recruiter? And I used to be an IT recruiter years and years ago. Are you the same Chrissy Connor that owned a skincare business? Yes, I am in 2012. So again, we want to make sure that all these things are showing up, but we also want to make sure that it's accurate to today. If nothing comes up beyond your own site, especially when it comes when we think about sources, because we want to ask AI to also give sources. if nothing comes up but your own site, We gotta close that gap. Like that is a gap. We we we've gotta we've gotta find a third-party channel. Whether it is getting on somebody's podcast, I use a I use a platform called Podmatch that I love. And we also want to find PR sources that we can search. Again, most of the things I do are free. PodMatch is not free, but it's just such a great platform that I'm willing to pay $32 a month for it. This is exactly the PR guide I give to all of my clients, my paying clients. And I have never done this before, but I am gifting it to you. So make sure you check out the show notes so you can grab that link. But we wanna make sure that something comes up. If nothing is coming up or we're only getting sporadic answers, or maybe we've changed directions a couple times in our business or brand, we're gonna see some incongruencies there and we want to fix those. We wanna find out where all that's coming from, whether it's our website, a third-party site, we wanna find those and we wanna fill in the gaps or do as much congruency as we can, asking them to edit it if possible, or making sure that our website explains. For example, I used to call myself the visibility queen. There is so much stuff out there about the visibility queen. It's impossible for me to change it all. So my website is set up so it tells AI and it's structured to tell AI. That I was previously known as a visibility queen, just like the visibility impact show used to be called the visibility queen show. And again, I connect those dots for AI so there's no confusion. But you don't know if those dots need connected if you can't search yourself and you can't find anything. Okay. So I want you to connect this to what you do when it comes to your marketing. One of the things that I love with this. document I'm going give you is my clients do a PR hour at least a week. I have some clients who do it every single day because they know how valuable this is. We want to make sure that we are leveraging this because this is a leverage pillar in action. And again, I help my clients, my ultimate goal is to help them create a visibility strategy. It works harder than they do. And this is a huge piece of it. If they do not have this, That's not gonna happen. it's not about being everywhere. It's about being mentioned by others, and I'm not even gonna say everywhere, but all over the place. We don't want to just be a guest on one podcast all the time. We don't want to write articles for just one website all the time. We want to have a diversification of the articles just like we would visibility. And Even even though we're talking about this in the instance that it helps you be more visible to AI, friends, this looks really good when you put it out into the world and people realize she must she must be who she says she is. Or this is proof to back up what you say. This is great to add in an as as seen in or have a media page on your website. Like you want these things. They're going to serve and support you way more than being visible to AI, but we're For purpose of this podcast episode, we're talking about being visible to AI. So I want you to do your own AI visibility audit this week. I want you to really look into what does this look like for me? What's showing up? What's not showing up? And where can I fill in the gaps and be a little bit more strategic about this? Okay. If you need More support with this. One of the things that we do in the Omni program is we really focus on this deeply. Again, that's where we really build the system. we do a a little bit of it inside of visibility school, but I'm gonna drop those links as well. But you want this guide. This is again, this is the exact guide that I give my long-term paying clients. And typically, when it's updated, when I update it, you'll also get the update if you need to re-download it or whatever. But it is Updated for 2026. There's so many more resources on there, and I know it's gonna serve and support you and really help you see that PR and getting these opportunities to leverage other people's audiences is not as hard as you think it is. And if you just set aside like an hour a week and sit down and submit to these, you're going to see a game changer And not only being visible to AI, but this is an opportunity for you to share these things with your audience as well. And every single time I share a PR resource that I was a part of or I was cited in, I get so much attention. And it is a great reminder to share those wins and to share those exciting things because your audience wants to celebrate with you.