Right now, if someone asked ChatGPT “What’s the best [YOUR CATEGORY]?”…would your brand show up?
Once upon a time, your buyer used to do some Googling, watch some videos, and make up their own mind. Now, more and more of them are asking a machine, and trusting the shortlist they get back.
If you don’t make that shortlist, you might as well be on page 2 of Google results in 2019: out of the race before you even start. And your website barely helps: the list gets built from what everyone ELSE has to say about you.
So, DOES AI know you exist? (“I don’t know” = “no,” btw.)
I’m NGL, a shocking amount of brands have NO CLUE. Maybe you’re 1 of them. Today, we’re talking about what to do about it…no matter where you rank.
Next up: a recap of where AI gets answers, a 3-step audit to see if AI knows you, a free AI toolkit, and the answer to the big question: how do you make sure you get chosen, if you don’t control any of the things doing the choosing?
problem: how do you make sure you get picked, when you don’t own the thing doing the picking?
Let’s get into it.
Where AI Gets Answers
Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode, AIs build answers from sources they’ve learned to trust: publishers, reviewers, creators, affiliates, Reddit threads, etc.
Your website’s in the mix too, but only barely. McKinsey’s research found that a brand’s owned site only affects about 5-10% of what AI pulls from. So, you could have the most polished website on the internet and it would barely move the needle. (Don’t use this as an excuse to abandon your website, LOL)
We’ve played a version of this game before, with SEO. Google never ranked anyone on their own say-so, either. But the AI version (or AEO/GEO for short), is messier. There’s no objective rank tracker to pull up. No tidy dashboard telling you you’re ranking #4 on Google for “best CRM.”
But it’s not TOTAL chaos either. AI visibility improvements aren’t some black box you have zero control over. It’s a system with levers you can pull, like an arcade game you’ve used to grab a stuffed animal.
Only now, your brand is 1 of the toys in the box, and you have to figure out which lever will help you get picked by the clawwww AI.
The 3-Step AI Audit (No PhD Required)
Before we talk about how to fix it, let’s get a read on your AI visibility right now. Here’s the 20-min walkthrough anyone can do:
1. Ask AI directly: Open your buyer’s favorite AI engine in an incognito window, signed out, and ask your category question a few different ways: “Best [category] for [use case],” “how to [solve specific problem].” Act like a potential customer who’s never heard of you.
2. Study where your competitors are winning. Competitor showing up and you’re not? Don’t spiral, get curious instead. Follow the sources the AI is pulling from. You’ll see lists of trusted 3rd parties. Basically: someone other than the brand, doing the talking. This is your new map.
3. Grade your own showing. If you ARE appearing, how’s it reading? Accurate? Flattering? Or buried under other brands? The pattern behind getting cited AND how you’re talked about is boring and repeatable: show up across many trusted sources (like a diverse set of creators & affiliates), with content that answers questions cleanly enough for a model to yoink.
TLDR: Every win can be traced back to someone who isn’t you.
So, back to our big question: what levers can you pull to get other people talking?
Partnerships = The Lever That Counts Twice
Surprise: out of the top 10,000 sources cited by AI, OVER 40% have affiliate links or are sponsored outright.
Yep: a massive chunk of the ENTIRE citation ecosystem, the stuff supplying the literal answers your buyer is getting, is partnership content.
This content, the mentions you earn through them, the trusted sources that link back to you because a partner vouched for you first…all of it becomes evidence (as far as AI’s concerned) that you’re a real player.
That means creators, affiliates, and referrals now do double duty for your brand:
- Drive new traffic to you in the moment
- Consistently create trusted 3rd-party content
That’s how you get a trusted outsider producing the content AI really pulls from, on repeat, instead of hoping for a lucky Reddit thread that’s gone by Q3.
A NOTE ON PICKING THE RIGHT PARTNERS: Be careful, because your highest-volume affiliates might not be the 1s AI thinks are credible. Start by looking at which creators are driving AI traffic on your site. This is where a tool like impact.com comes in handy, because it’s built to find, recruit, and track attribution for the right partners, with a marketplace of 300k+ vetted candidates to start from. They are also, not by accident, the crew behind the free AI toolkit I’ll point you to in a minute.
You Have A Head Start. But It’s Temporary.
According to Adobe, traffic to US retail sites from generative AI grew ~4,700% year over year, as of mid-2025. And impact.com’s Global State of Affiliate Marketing report has content and review partners on track for an 11-point jump in collaborations this year.
For a lot of brands driving this growth, AI citations have nothing to do with it. They’re in it because partnerships pay for themselves, and AI visibility is a bonus they haven’t clocked. Which means you get to be early.
And “early” is your chance, because quality partnerships take time to build. They aren’t the kind of thing you can flip like a switch, and catch up in a quarter. They also compound over time. Which is why brands taking them seriously are winning visibility now, AND will build up an advantage that’ll be harder to close later, when everyone else figures this out.
There’s another bonus, too: partnerships program-building will strengthen your positioning muscles. Building partner content forces you to get sharper about your own messaging: what you do, who you serve, why you’re different. Sharper messaging performs better everywhere, not just inside an AI answer box. Show up better for AI, and walk away with a clearer brand as a side effect. Win-win.
Building Your Audit Habit
Remember that 3-step audit before? There’s a 4th step that’s important:
Connect it to which partnerships are working, and REPEAT.
1 audit gets you a snapshot of your AI visibility. Snapshots go stale fast. Sources shift. Competitors build new partnerships. The whole landscape moves while you’re refilling your coffee. Put a recurring audit on the calendar, at least once a quarter. Ask the same questions, and track the results over time.
Which brings me to something that’ll make this all easier:
Your Toolkit for Running This
impact.com has been building out a library with everything you need to get started scaling partnerships that maximize your AI visibility.
START HERE: The AI Partnerships Toolkit. There are workflows to copy, content rules to follow, and measurement frameworks to see what’s working.
After that, check out their Ultimate Guide to Partnership Marketing, and the Partnership Automation Playbook (for scaling without losing your mind).
Now, go run your audit for real. If you’re already in the answer, you get to spend the rest of the year widening your lead. And if you’re not showing up, you’ll find out why while there’s still time to fix it.
Either way, the answer is getting written right now. Make sure you’re the 1 chosen.
