AI action plan: get your brand mentioned in AI answers

How to get your brand mentioned in AI answers

Find the sites AI cites for your buyers’ questions, get listed or reviewed there, publish the page formats AI cites, then re-check. Each step below maps to a view in Depra.

• Track the questions buyers ask. Depra suggests 5 topics with 8 buying questions each, none containing your brand name, and asks them to ChatGPT with web search, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews run daily, Perplexity weekly. See AI visibility tracking.
• Find the sites AI cites for your competitors. Every cited website is stored and labelled by type. Citation gap analysis shows the sites that recommend your competitors and never mention you, with competitors’ own sites filtered out.
• Get listed, reviewed or mentioned there. The places to get mentioned list ranks those sites. Your move depends on the site: pitch the publication, claim the listing, ask for a review or answer the forum thread.
• Publish the page formats AI cites. The pages to publish list shows which formats AI cites most in your category and how many of them you already have. Formats include comparisons, how-to guides and listicles, which are ranked "best X" list articles.
• Check that AI bots can read your site. robots.txt is the file that tells bots which pages they may visit. A blocked AI search bot is one fixable reason a brand drops out of that engine’s answers. The AI crawler check tests 41 AI crawlers against your site.
• Re-check. Mark each action done. Depra saves your numbers at that moment, and the impact page charts your visibility over time next to the date you finished each action.

Places to get mentioned

Places to get mentioned are websites you do not own where a mention can reach AI answers: lists, reviews, forums and press. Depra lists up to 12 of them per project, taken from the sites AI cited in your category’s answers.

Each site gets a priority from 1 to 3 based on the size of its gap, where 1 means act now. Sites known to belong to your competitors and sites irrelevant to your category are filtered out, so the list points you at places where a mention is possible.

• The action. A short title that names the site, such as "Get your brand cited on" followed by the domain, so you know where to go.
• The evidence. A two-sentence description written from the numbers, such as the share of answers that cited the site, the competitors named in those answers, and whether you already appear in any of them.
• The format to aim for. The description also names the type of page AI pulls from that site, such as its comparisons or its listicles, so you know what to pitch for.
• The move. Depra labels every cited site by type, such as editorial, forum, directory or reference. Use the type to pick the move: pitch a publication for coverage, claim a directory listing, ask a reference site for a listing or review, or answer the forum threads where competitors get recommended.

Pages to publish on your own site

If you are deciding what content to create for AI search, start with the formats AI already cites for your buyers’ questions. Depra groups every cited page by type and lists up to 12 formats to publish on your own site.

• Which formats count. Listicles, comparisons, how-to guides, articles, product pages and category pages. Forum threads and review profiles go to the places to get mentioned list, because you cannot publish those on your own domain.
• The threshold. A format needs at least 3 citations in your category before it becomes an action.
• The evidence. The format’s share of all citations in your category, how many cited pages it covers, and how many of those pages are already on your site.
• The ranking. A heavily cited format you have no pages for gets a higher priority. If you already have several pages in that format, the action is about covering more ground and gets a lower one.

Your top fixes

Your top fixes are up to 5 moves on the project overview, each with its reason in one sentence. They come from the same stored answers and pick the most urgent items across gaps, topics, languages and tone.

• Sites that cite competitors. For example: "Answer active threads on reddit.com where your competitors get recommended", with the reason that AI cites the site for your competitors and never alongside you. Directory and reference sites get a listing or review move instead.
• Topics where you never appear. When at least 4 answers in a topic never name you, the fix is to create or update a page targeting that topic.
• English vs Hinglish. Hinglish is Hindi-English typed in English letters, the way most Indians ask AI. When your English visibility runs 15 points or more ahead of your Hinglish visibility, across at least 5 Hinglish answers, a fix suggests Hinglish pages for your tracked questions. See Hinglish AI visibility.
• Tone. When your sentiment score, a measure of how warmly AI talks about you, is under 50 out of 100, a fix points you to the quoted sentences behind it.

Did it work?

Mark an action done or skip it. Done and skipped actions keep their state when the lists refresh, so a finished pitch never comes back tomorrow as a new suggestion. Untouched suggestions that stop being a gap drop off the list.

When you mark an action done, Depra records the date and saves your visibility, your share of voice and the number of answers behind them over the last 30 days. Visibility is the share of answers to your buyers’ questions that name you. Share of voice is your share of all brand mentions in your category’s answers.

The impact page charts your visibility, sentiment and average position by day, week or month, and lists every done action with the date you finished it. Read the chart against those dates to see what moved after each action. A change after an action does not prove the action caused it: AI answers shift for many reasons at once, including your competitors’ work and engine updates.

What Depra does not do

Depra measures, ranks and checks. Your team or agency ships the fixes.

• No content writing. Depra tells you which page formats to publish. It does not write the pages.
• No outreach on your behalf. Depra names the sites and shows the evidence. It does not email editors, post in forums or buy placements.
• No schema or heading audit. There is no schema, heading, internal link or entity audit. The crawler check covers AI bot access and llms.txt, a plain-text guide to your site written for AI.
• No guaranteed mentions. No tool controls what an AI engine says. Depra shows how your visibility moved after you acted.
• No traffic or sales attribution. Depra does not track visits or sales that came from AI answers.