Branded GEO: How to Control What AI Says About Your Brand

A few months back, one of my clients pinged me on Slack and said:

Sure enough, when prompted, ChatGPT confidently responded, “No, the platform does not have that feature, but this other competitor does!”.

For obvious reasons, this was worrying for the client.

Not only was ChatGPT spreading misinformation about their product, it was actively pitching an alternative solution.

The source of the misinformation: A single old blog post that hadn’t been updated in two years.

How many potential buyers decided not to book a sales call because of this?

How many had discovered a new competitor instead?

This issue signals a large shift in how bottom-of-funnel product research is done.

Before: Your website was the source of truth.

It was your “always on” salesperson. You kept your homepage and product pages fresh, and that was where buyers did their digging.

Now: Large language models (LLMs) are a product research assistant. A new touchpoint at a critical stage in the buying journey.

They’re the modern day gatekeepers, acting as the layer between you and your target audience, communicating on your behalf.

And their source of info? It’s often sources you’d forgotten even existed.

As marketers, it falls to us to make sure LLMs are communicating the right things in the right way about our products and services.

In this article, I’ll show you the 7-step playbook my team is developing to tackle this challenge — what we’re calling Branded Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

What is Branded GEO?

Branded GEO is the process of making sure conversational AIs and LLMs give accurate, helpful, and up-to-date answers about your brand. It focuses on branded prompts and queries.

This targets a highly valuable audience segment, including those who are:

• In the market to buy a solution or service like yours
• Already know you are a viable option and are exploring your offer

This segment is showing the highest intent — they’re asking questions about your product, and they’re using your brand name in their prompts.

Like branded SEO, branded GEO is easier to influence. It’s more actionable than trying to optimize for broad industry queries. For that reason, it’s a fantastic starting point if you want to explore GEO.

For the following exercise, I’ll use ChatGPT as the LLM and the B2B SaaS product, Airtable, as an example.

Airtable has recently undergone some serious positioning and product pivots, so it illustrates the new challenges of branded GEO.

Let’s start with a quick setup.

Step 1: Set Up Your LLM

Head to ChatGPT and turn on temporary mode. This avoids any personalization skewing your results.

Also turn on the “search” feature — this ensures ChatGPT is accessing information after June 2024 when it was last trained.

This is currently the data we can influence.

Step 2: Enter Your First Branded Prompt

Next, prompt ChatGPT with a simple question: “What is [your brand name]?”.

Here are the results for Airtable:

Step 3: Analyze the Response

Pay attention to how ChatGPT describes your product and company.

Is it accurate? Is it how you would describe your company?

Or do things need to change?

With Airtable, we see what must be a frustrating situation playing out.

Airtable pivoted in June 2025, shifting away from their “super powerful spreadsheet” positioning and relaunching as an:

That’s quite the change. And ChatGPT hasn’t caught up yet.

Here’s how Airtable positions themselves versus how ChatGPT does:

Luckily, most readers are unlikely to see such a drastic mismatch.

But at the current rate of technological innovation, almost all companies are undergoing continuous reinvention, and so you are likely to find outdated features and positioning.

Step 4: Find the Source of Misinformation

In this step, we start to tackle the misinformation by looking for its source.

We usually find that ChatGPT has sourced its information from:

• An outdated article
• A LinkedIn page that hasn’t been updated in three years
• A landing page that reflects the “old you”
• A hallucination due to completely missing information on that topic

To address the misinformation you find, visit the sources used and look for a match between the language used by ChatGPT and the words on the page.

See that it says you cost $1,000? Find the source that says that and update it. Fixing the issue is often this simple (unless there is hallucination, which we address in the next step).

To operationalize this process, collate all the sources driving misinformation into a spreadsheet and note down:

• Whether that source should be deleted or updated
• Specific text that needs to be changed
• Specific text that needs to be added — for example, if a feature is missing, you can spell it out in the sources

For our Airtable example, we can see that a highly trusted source (Wikipedia) is currently out of date.

Their team should note this down and edit this Wikipedia with their new positioning as soon as possible.

Step 5: Publish, Update, or Delete Sources

For smaller brands with a relatively small web footprint, we find this task is more straightforward.

Take your latest positioning, messaging, and features, and make sure they are represented in key sources LLMs are referencing. Ideally, refresh every source that mentions your brand — from social media accounts to on-site and off-site web pages.

Brands with a larger web presence will find this task more challenging.

If, like Airtable, you have outdated articles written about you across 100s of websites you don’t control, outreach may need to be operationalized to update or take down those sources. If you have no luck with that, we’d suggest running a new campaign that seeds LLMs with lots of new sources that contain your up-to-date information.

If we worked for Airtable, we’d start with the Wikipedia article.

As a major, trusted source of internet knowledge, updating Wikipedia is likely to help influence LLMs, but it may not fix the positioning issue in one fell swoop.

Given sources like Zapier and Airtable’s own starter guide (pictured below) still have their old positioning, there’s more work to do.

Here’s the branded GEO adjustment we would make for Wikipedia:

You may also find that LLMs are hallucinating something entirely. This can’t be fixed by updating or removing a source. This often happens because they didn’t find an answer in any sources.

If LLMs are hallucinating an answer, you’ll want to try to influence the answer by creating a source that answers the question with the correct information.

Start building a content roadmap with new topics to cover, directly answering those key questions your target buyer has.

These can be hosted on your blog or help center, and serve dual purposes: for branded GEO and as helpful sales material.

Step 6: Expand Your Branded Question Prompts

So far, we’ve asked just one question about your brand.

But, prospective customers are likely asking many, many questions that you’ll want to monitor.

Unfortunately, exact data on those questions is still not available.

Prompts are unlike traditional keywords. They’re often longer and more personalized. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t optimize for the less long-tail prompts and hope that bleeds through.

We can make educated guesses at the topics LLM users are asking questions about using six methods:

1. Ask Your Inbound Leads

I ask every inbound lead who found me via ChatGPT what their prompts and journey were. One even pulled the conversation up and read the exact prompt back to me — it said “I want an SEO agency in the B2B space who is staying up-to-date with AI,” and our agency came up.

This kind of insight is gold dust.

It shows you how your audience prompts, what issues they face, and what content and GEO efforts of yours are already working.

A similar technique is to look in sales insights platforms like Gong for mentions of ChatGPT and to encourage your sales team to ask the question for you.

2. Start With Common Questions

Begin with general questions that people ask about brands. Then, tailor those questions to fit your specific situation.

We’ve made a spreadsheet template to help you find the questions people ask AI about your brand.

3. Use a Keyword Research Tool

Head to your keyword research tool of choice and enter your brand name.

In Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, you can filter on “Questions” to pull a full list of the questions people are asking about your brand.

Find questions that someone considering your product might ask.

For example, these are a few I’d select for the Airtable before their pivot. Each question factors into the purchase decision.

4. Use Google Autocomplete

Another helpful tool for finding audience questions is Google Autocomplete.

You’ll find autocomplete is a part of normal Google Search. It anticipates and suggests search queries as you type, making predictions based on popular searches, your location, and your search history (so do this in incognito mode).

Enter these queries to see what people are asking:

• Is [brand name]
• How [brand name]
• Does [brand name]
• Where [brand name]
• When [brand name]
• What [brand name]

You can get more suggestions by adding each letter of the alphabet afterward, too. Like this:

To speed things up, I recommend taking screenshots of each autocomplete and uploading them all to ChatGPT for extraction and grouping.

5. Use ChatGPT Autocomplete

If you’re lucky enough to be represented in ChatGPT autocomplete already (at the time of writing, only very large brands are), this is also a place to dig into.

6. Talk to Your Sales and Support Teams

When we do this exercise with clients, we run a Q&A session with both the sales team and customer support teams.

This first-party insight is invaluable for predicting the questions your target audience has.

Here are six top questions from our client questionnaire:

• What common questions about your product do you get from prospects on sales calls?
• What do prospects misunderstand or get wrong before speaking to you?
• What common objections about your brand do you get from prospects?
• Do prospects ever mention ChatGPT and what they found there?
• What questions do people typically ask in your website chat about [brand name]?
• What usually triggers prospects to book a call or sign up for [brand name] now?

Step 7: Repeat

Now you’ve gathered your questions, it’s time to see how LLMs answer them and fix up the answers.

To do this, repeat steps 1-5.

Tracking the Impact of Branded GEO Work

The impact of branded GEO is twofold:

1. Relief: From knowing you’re being accurately represented by LLMs.
2. Additional Conversions: From removing inaccuracies and misinformation, adequately filling content gaps in your lower sales funnel, and better informing buyers before they join sales calls.

To track the impact of this exercise, we recommend:

1. Monitoring LLM output: Take your list of questions and compare the before and after. Monitor those regularly to confirm continued accuracy.
2. Track conversion metrics: Compare key conversion rates (sign-ups, demo requests, sales) before and after your LLM content improvements. I suggest you add a “Where did you hear about us?” to your sales booking forms to closely monitor leads that started in LLMs.
3. Sales team feedback: With the example in the introduction of this article, the sales team had been facing misinformation issues. If you’ve faced a similar issue, stay in close contact with them so get a pulse check on the impact.