But is my brand even visible in AI search? I feel old social media listening tools might be failing me

Most of those social media listening tools that I am used to are built to track mentions on legacy platforms, but it seems they now completely miss the new way consumers are finding products... People have started searching Google less to get genuine reviews and, much more often, started asking AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations based on Reddit threads, sometimes Medium articles, and other types of content blocks that ai search likes to index.

I tested this shift over the last couple of months while also managing our own brand presence in multiple ways. What worked quite well is focusing on authentic community engagement instead of standard monitoring or on doing things mass scale when it comes to seo and geo, social media posting. But paying attention to a set of best practices, and analyzyng our results and possible threads to write in, possible comments to make on medium, and other media interventions, have helped. Done that mostly through mentioned to and through some of old school semrush and even a bit of ad words. Then, we saw our AI-referred traffic climb to nearly 30% of our total volume. Our ChatGPT-driven traffic surged by 102%, Perplexity by 57%, with those users being 2.3x more likely to subscribe than people coming from traditional search.

What is much needed is an ability to track how our brand appeared in these specific AI recommendations. It became clear that if your brand isn't mentioned in the right community discussions, AI tools will simply ignore you regardless of your SEO efforts.

Most social media listening tools are still focused on reactive PR. I feel industry goes more into how real value is in predictive intelligence, all regarding how AI models interpret your brand. By the way, are you seeing any correlation between your Reddit presence and the answers your brand gets when users prompt AI search engines?

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Tiny-Peach-444•4 months ago•1

i have also started to notice that we're at the beginning of a hUgE change and this change can, unironically, be coming from this wonderful platform. good that you .have mentioned .to analyze actual threads with keywords, and this way, GEO>SEO and also GEO becomes = SMM if done right

Disastrous_Crab_6106•4 months ago•1

Yeah, the “legacy” listening stacks feel like they’re watching the wrong stadium now. They’re still obsessed with counting u/mentions on Twitter while the actual persuasion is happening in long Reddit threads and niche blogs that LLMs love to quote.

What’s been working for me is treating Reddit, Quora, and niche forums as training data, not just channels. I’ll pull a set of “best X for Y” prompts in ChatGPT/Perplexity, reverse‑engineer which subs and URLs get echoed, then go embed myself in those exact communities with useful, non-salesy answers. Then I recheck the same prompts monthly to see if the brand starts getting name‑dropped more.

Tool-wise I still use Ahrefs for classic SEO and SparkToro to sniff out overlapping audiences, and lately Pulse for Reddit to catch and prioritize fresh threads worth joining before they blow up. Once you see AI as a recommendation layer on top of community chatter, the strategy gets a lot clearer.

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