The new front page is an answer.
For twenty years the goal was a blue link near the top. That surface is collapsing. AI Overviews and chat answers synthesize a response and cite a handful of sources - and most buyers never scroll past it. If you are not in the synthesis, you do not exist for that query.
This changes the job. You are no longer optimizing for a ranking position. You are optimizing to be the source a model trusts enough to repeat. The mechanics rhyme with SEO, but the unit of victory is different: a named mention and a citation, not a click.
"Best in category" is now a sentence a model writes. Your job is to make sure your name is in it.
Make yourself ingestible.
Models can only repeat what they can cleanly parse. The first wins are structural, not creative.
- +Publish one canonical, plain-language "what we do" page. No jargon, no hero-speak - the sentence you'd want quoted.
- +Add structured data to your key pages so engines can extract entities, pricing, and category cleanly.
- +Keep docs, pricing, and integration pages public and crawlable. Gated content is invisible content.
- +State your category and differentiator in the first two sentences of every important page.
None of this is glamorous. All of it moves the needle, because you are removing the friction between your truth and the model's summary.
Build source authority.
Engines weight sources they see corroborated across the web. A single great page is not enough; you need a web of agreement.
- +Earn accurate descriptions on G2, review sites, and category roundups - these are cited constantly.
- +Publish first-party data or research. Original numbers get quoted, and quotes carry your name.
- +Get your experts publishing under their own names, so the model associates people with the category.
- +Make sure every public surface tells the same story. Contradictions get averaged into vagueness.
Own the comparison prompts.
The highest-intent AI queries are comparisons: "X vs Y", "best tool for Z", "alternatives to W". These are where deals are won and lost in a single sentence.
Find the exact comparisons your buyers ask. Then publish the cleanest, best-sourced answer to each one - framed on the ground where you genuinely win. Do not overclaim; models punish contradiction. Be specific, be honest, be the easiest source to quote.
The brand that supplies the clearest comparison usually becomes the comparison.
Work the human channels.
Reddit, forums, and community threads are disproportionately cited by AI engines because they read as authentic. They are also where reputations are made in real language.
Show up as a human, not a billboard. Answer the actual question. The voice that works is lowercase, specific, and helpful - the same register our drafted replies use. Zero marketing language. A genuinely useful reply that happens to mention you outperforms a hundred polished posts.
Measure, then defend.
You cannot improve what you cannot see. Most teams have no idea what AI says about them today, let alone how it changed last week.
- +Track your mention rate and share of voice across every engine, not just one.
- +Snapshot answers over time so you can prove the lift - and catch the slip.
- +Get alerted the moment an answer about you changes or a competitor overtakes you.
- +Connect visibility to pipeline so the work earns its budget.
This is the part you should not do by hand. Re-running prompts across six engines every two hours, diffing every answer, and surfacing the story is exactly what Mentionova was built to do.
See what AI says about you right now.
Paste a domain and Mentionova returns your mention rate, share of voice, and the exact answers - across all six engines, in under two minutes.
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