Tim Soulo: How to make your brand discoverable in the era of AI | Ahrefs Evolve Singapore 2026

We're so happy that you're here. Uh this is actually our third evolve third HFS evolve in Singapore. Uh raise your hand if you have been to the first tool. Okay, some people. Cool. Uh just a quick backstory. Uh Hrefs had offices actually located here in Singapore and we started doing in-person events shortly after COVID ended. So this was our first event. It was called beers and snacks. It was March 2023. And from there we started hosting more and more smaller events. Uh and we realized that there are a lot of digital marketing professionals Singapore and they're hungry for learning. They're hungry for networking. So we did a proper conference for 200 people. It was 2023. It was called Singapore SEO Summit. We thought it would be a conference just for Singaporeans only. But we realized that a lot of people came from Indonesia, Malaysia, India, other neighboring countries. And so we started losing sleep thinking, should we do a bigger conference? And thanks to our awesome event team, we managed to pull it off. 2024, we did a big proper conference, international conference here in Singapore. 500 attendees from 50 countries. That is a quarter of the world. We were super humbled. Uh it was in Pen Pacific Orchard. Beautiful place. Everyone enjoyed it. So then I started losing sleep. Should we move this in the US? Would we be as successful in the US? So 2025 we brought HFS Evolve to the US. Again, over 500 people. It was in San Diego, California. Amazing event. Everyone loved it. But even though we moved our biggest event to the US, we couldn't leave our awesome Singaporean community without an event. So here we are. Uh and we plan to continue doing it, the big event and the small event. So we're hoping to see you at our events. But why why we created HF wall? Why bother with this conference? First of all, we want our community, our community of customers, our community of fans and just community of digital marketers in Singapore to learn from the best. So, we're bringing uh best speakers we can get from the region and from the entire world so that you could learn from them and learn from each other because there are a lot of people in this room who you can learn from, exchange ideas, exchange notes. We want you to get ex inspired and energized because again there are a lot of people in this room who are doing cool things and their stories, their successes, their results can inspire you to achieve something awesome as well. We want you to make lifelong connections. Uh I've been to quite a few conference in the course of my career myself and I met so many people who are now called friends. So, I'm hoping you're going to meet a bunch of such people at this event today. And finally, we digital marketers, we spend our days sitting at the computer all the time. So, it's great to have a break to go out into the world and to talk to other people. Uh, with that said, once again, welcome to HF's Evolve. We're super happy you're here. And we have a little tradition. Uh we start H chefs evolve conference from saying let's go together where I say let's and you say go. And I know people are in Singapore are kind of quiet. They don't like to shout much but let's break this because we need to set energy in the room for the day. So I say let's and you say go but loud. Okay. Loud guys. Singaporeans loud. Okay. One two three. Let's go. Who said Singapore was quiet? Singapore is awesome. So, I'm the first speaker of the day. Uh, conveniently, I'm going to be talking about how to make your brand discoverable in the age of AI. Now, I really like the word discoverable. So much so that I'm actually writing a book with the same name, discoverable. And uh, how do people actually discover your brand or your business? So in the course of doing marketing for over 15 years, I realized that being discoverable actually uh there are three things how people discover you. First they do a search. They can do it on Google, on ChatGpt, on YouTube, on Amazon. Whenever they need something, they do a search. Do you show up? This makes you discoverable. Second, they notice you. They might be watching TV or like scrolling their social feeds, minding their own business or even driving the highway and they might see advertising or maybe you will do something viral that spreads virally on social media. So you have to do something for people to notice you. And finally, people talk about you. So all your happy customers, if they make a recommendation to your friend, this is how their friend is going to discover you. So these are kind of the three pillars of discoverability. At least how I see it after my 15 years of marketing. And the thing is the first pillar search is undergoing a major disruption ever since that twoletter word appeared on our radar. AI specifically here is search traffic to our own website hrefs.com in the past two years. And as you can see, things were going pretty well until 2025. uh we were having a great time and then it started from March 2025 core update that hit us and wiped out a bunch of our traffic but as you can see from there it was little by little downhill something was chipping off our search traffic. So what it was the thing is a lot of people think that Google is losing market share to those AI chatbots AI systems but it has been proven again and again and again that this is not the case. Yes, AI chatbots are raising in popularity. More and more people are using chat GPT cloud other systems but not at the expense of Google because the active user base of Google stays more or less the same even with the chatbots growing in popularity. So what is really happening is that Google is taking clicks away from us specifically with AI overviews. So these days when you search on Google there is a good chance that AI overview would show up and answer your question without you not having to click anywhere. And we actually studied this. So we studied this back in March 2025 and we figured out that the presence of AI overviews reduces clicks in the search results by 35%. But then we started it again in December 2025 and realized that AI overviews actually reduce clicks by almost 60%. So people are not searching less because actually uh chat bots like chat GPT cloud etc. they expanding the pie. The pie is getting bigger. People are actually searching more but they're clicking less. We already know uh what happened to our clicks when Google first introduced featured snippets and the entire SEO community was complaining that featured snippets are actually stealing clicks away from other search results. But as you can see, Google started rolling out a lot more AI overviews compared to featured snippets. So featured snippets are going down but AI overviews are going up. And generally uh we have a fun little website called chatgpt versus google.com where we track some aggregate traffic statistics of 75,000 websites that are connected to our HFS analytics. And what we're seeing across those 75,000 websites and there's like all sorts of websites big, small, different industries is that overall in the past 10 months, the search traffic from Google that all those websites are are getting from Google is going down. Actually, Google lost 5% of its traffic share across those 75% uh 75,000 websites. But it's not like traffic from AI search is skyrocketing. Yeah, they had a nice run up until like November 2025 and then it's going down. That's because those systems, they are not incentivized to make you click. They they are incentivized to have a conversation with you and to keep you uh asking questions rather than going to other websites. And in fact, even though Google lost 5% of its traffic share to all sorts of websites, it is still the major driver of traffic. And as you can see, CHGPT actually brings less traffic to websites than duck go. Now, it can be different from website to website because for some websites, Ced GPT actually brings more traffic to Doug Go, but across 75,000 websites that we're tracking, this is the case. So don't expect to get a lot of websites from AI search, but you can still get quite a decent amount of uh search traffic from Google. But what is important is that even though AI systems are not sending you a lot of traffic, they are surely sending you customers. So this is selfattribution for Hrefs. So whenever people sign up for an account, we ask them how did you hear about Hrefs? Uh as you can see most people are mentioning Google a lot of people are mentioning YouTube but Chad GPT is actually our number uh number three source uh of people selfattributing where they came from. Again selfattribution is not precise. It's not accurate. So people prone to all sorts of biases and uh they might just write chat GPT just to get rid of this form. And yet this is indicative of how popular those systems are in recommending you products and services to buy. So the takeaway is you shouldn't bother that much about trying to get more traffic from AI, but you should definitely bother about getting mentioned by AI. So let me answer the question, how to actually get mentioned by AI. And I'm sure that our speakers are going to give you a lot more tips. So I'm I will try to go very broad and very general. First of all, what I'm about to say is largely based on a lot of data studies that HF's team has performed uh in the last few months. We studied over 1 billion data points and we published 11 data studies that are all on our blog and also wildly discussed uh on LinkedIn. Maybe you've seen some of them. So a lot of my advice would be derived from those data studies. First of all, how do AI systems generate answers? Well, whenever you ask something to chat GPT or claude or any other large language models, it has two options. Either it just answers your question right away based on the training data that it has, but actually more often what it does, it needs to ground its answer in some other information from other websites. So, it has to do a web search. It has to find some pages, pull information, and then answer your question. And doing a web search and retrieving information from those pages sounds a lot like SEO, right? This is why a lot of people in our industry, actually myself included, are saying that AEO, answer engine optimization, is like 80% SEO. But there are also some pretty major differences. First of all, when people do searches, how many pages they visit and how many searches they do? Well, they may do maybe a couple searches. Maybe they would visit five or six pages to uh read and get information from. LLM's AI, they don't really have boundaries. So, they can do dozens of searches. They can pull dozens of pages and they can aggregate information from a lot of pages. Second difference is that every LLM has its own biases. We studied the most cited websites or sources in different LLMs in different chatbots, Google AI overviews, chat GPT, Proplexity, and there's not that much overlap because each LLM was biased towards different search uh to towards different sources. And the final difference is the answers that you get from AI, from LLMs are quite heavily personalized. I'm sure you know that all those systems like chat GPT they start generating some memory about you. They know who you are where where they work like all the information you give them they start saving it and they use it to properly answer your questions. We've heard a lot about personalization in SEO and there was a lot of talk that the search results that you get from Google are personalized. Yeah, but not to the same extent. So the way that AI personalizes his answer is nothing like what we've seen in SEO in all those years. Which brings me to the first kind of very general takeaway. If you want your brand to consistently show up across all of the AI systems, not just Chad GPT or not just Perplexity, but all of them, the best thing you can do is create a lot of mentions of your brand all around the web. You cannot limit yourself to just a few sources or just to go after GP Chad GPT because if you only go for the sources that CHG GPT is citing, it doesn't mean that you will get the same amount of citations in perplexity. And again, this is backed by data. We actually studied the correlation of different factors with AI visibility. Of course, correlation is not causation, and there are a lot of other factors at play, but what we're seeing is that brand mentions correlate with higher visibility in AI systems more than anything else. And what's interesting, we also saw that specifically YouTube mentions have correlated with higher AI visibility, which was quite interesting. Okay, so how do you get brand mentions? I have a bunch of uh strategies, tactics and just advice for you. First of all, you need to start from your own properties. So, as you can see here, we have HF's website, we have HF's podcast, we have uh HF channel on YouTube, we have our help section. So, the most simple thing you can do is to ensure that you have a lot of information about your product and your business on all your owned properties. So, there's just no way around it. And uh a good place to start figuring out uh how many citations you have right now is actually our site explorer tool. If you plug your website in site explorer, the first block that we now display is how many citation and how many of your pages are getting cited uh in all of these AI systems. So you you have to make sure that all those citations, all those existing citations, the pages where those AI systems are pulling information from are up to date. they have a lot of information and that they're well structured so AI doesn't have to spend a lot of tokens to figure out what your page is talking about. Uh, also if you have some key pages that contain important information about your business, you need to check and make sure that they are being cited because if you have an important page but AI systems are not picking it up, something is wrong. Maybe that page is blocked from crawling or maybe AI systems favor a different page. You need to figure it out. One important thing is that adding more content to your page isn't necessarily better. So don't just mindlessly add more content to your pages to make them show up in AI systems. This is not uh how it works. The second piece of advice is just launch or acquire more web properties. So here's an example of us implementing the modern answer engine optimization strategy of creating some listical articles across our properties and there is uh my blog at medium there's blogger jet also my old old blog there is detail that we acquired from Glen Alup uh we published listicles across different properties that we own and this exposure allows us to improve our citation rate in AI systems. Interesting thing about this is that if the domain rating of the properties that you use to talk about yourself is low, it doesn't mean that they are not going to get picked up by AI systems. Because in our research, we saw that even low DR websites are getting cited in AI just like the high DR systems. And again, LLMs seem to really love YouTube, especially Google AI overviews. So, if you still don't have YouTube channel for your business, if you're still if you're still not putting information about your products and services in the form of YouTube videos, you're really really missing out and you need to fix this basically today. Surround sound. So, basically, what is surround sound? You want to get mentioned in every top ranking page in Google for for all the keywords that you care about because yeah, you can rank with your own website. You can acquire a bunch of websites which would also be ranking at the top but there are some other websites which might not necessarily belong to your competitors but maybe third parties. Go and try to get mentioned. This is kind of the workflow of how it works. You take the list of keywords that are important to you. You pull top 10 or top 20 pages and you check if you're mentioned on all of them. If you're not mentioned and it doesn't belong to your competitor, try to get a mention. Again, one important uh piece of advice is that if you see listicles that are not mentioning you, try your best to get cited there because right now listicles are the thing. I'm not sure how long this loophole is going to be open, but for now it works. So, uh, you can use it. Review all existing citations. So, I'm sure you've heard about our product called Brand Raider. So, in Brand Raider, you can plug your website, you can plug your competitors, go to the citations tab, and you would see all of your citations. As I already said that you need to make sure that those pages are up to date and don't contain some outdated information about your pricing, about your product, etc. Then you should review the citations of your competitors because this might give you ideas what pages you might be missing on your own website. It's good to understand what pages of your competitors are being cited. And then everything else, the pages that don't belong to you, the websites that don't belong to you and don't belong to your competitors. And you can use a filter to filter where you are mentioned and where you're not mentioned. Because if you are mentioned on these pages, you need to make sure that the information is relevant. If you're not, then you should try to get mentioned. And finally, if you're only tracking existing citations, you're already a step behind because new citations, new mentions of your brand appear online all the time. And we recently launched a project called Firehost that is free for now. I think soon we're going to make it paid, but right now you can play around with it absolutely for free which actually connects you to HF's web crawler and it catches all the new pages that mention a given brand or even a given word. So this is for example I created we call it a tap. I created a tab for my own name and every day it just catches all the web mentions of my own name and you can track or you should track your brand, your competitors or even any relevant keywords that describe what your niche is about. And again another interesting piece of research what we've noticed uh about listical specifically I believe uh is that fresh pages are getting cited more and it makes sense because AI systems wants to give want to give you uh up-to-date information. So this is also why it is important to track all the new pages that appear all the time mentioning your competitors and mentioning you and mentioning your niche because these are the pages that are going to be probably going to be cited weeks or months from now. And again just a quick reminder that Hrefs operates one of the world's top web crawlers. So this is a cloud flare cloud flare radar that tracks uh bot activity online and as you can see Hrefs is almost top 10. We kind of go in and out of top 10. So it is very important that you track all your brand mentions online and brand mentions of your competitors. But yeah I shared a lot of different strategies. Uh who has time to do all that? There's a lot of work. Well agent A has time to do all that. This is a new product that we just launched about a month ago at Hrefs. What is agent A? I like to explain it as a combination of three things. First of all, it's an AI model. It can be clouded, it can be uh open AI, deepseek. We have a bunch of models to choose from. Secondly, it is full unrestricted access to HF's data. Yeah, there's MCP, there's API, but those things don't give you all the end points that we have in HFS, all the data points that we have in HFS. Agent A plugs into everything that we have in HFS, just like our main app, just like our interface does. So, it gives you a lot more access. And finally, it has a lot of builtin marketing skills uh and applications and reports that are created by our own team. So we've been publishing and sharing our marketing knowledge on our blog for a long long time. But now we are importing all of that into agent A. So whenever you ask it a question or ask it to do something, it would use all our skills and knowledge to do this. And here are some examples. I oneotted uh a report of my mentions using Firehost and agent A. I just asked it to build me a report uh showing me all my uh all the mentions of my name as they appear online. This is surround sound. Again, I asked agent A uh take some of the most important keywords for HFS.com. Check who's ranking. Uh go through those pages and tell me if we're mentioned on those pages. So yeah, recently I posted on LinkedIn that 90% of my work as a CMO goes through cloud code. But the thing is cloud code is general purpose AI. It's not built for marketing. So I have to build out all the skills and teach it to do things the way I want it. In that sense, uh, agent A already has this built in for you. Uh, last section, tracking your performance in AI search. So there are a few important things that you need to be tracking. First of all, AI referral traffic. Yeah, I said that you shouldn't expect your traffic from AI to be growing like crazy. But as you can see here at HFS, we do get traffic from AI search, from chat, GPT, Proplexity, Gemini, etc. And it's good to be tracking this as one of your metrics. You can do this in HF's web analytics for free. Bot visits from AI bots. So whenever bots from chat GPT or other systems are visiting your website, this is a good indication that they're trying to pull information from you. So you want to see that uh those uh AI bots are visiting your website and uh are able to pull information from your pages. The next one is AI visibility. I actually don't have much time to go into all the issues that people are making with AI visibility, but just to be quick, a lot of people are tracking the wrong prompts. For example, they have a lot of branded prompts in their AI visibility tracking. And if you already have your brand in your prompt, the answer will also contain your brand, which immediately boosts your AI visibility. So, you have to be mindful of that. We published an article uh how to choose the best prompts to monitor on our blog. So, check it out. It it it will give you some nice details. A lot of companies are saying that you have to be tracking real user prompts. Uh I disagree with that. I don't think that real user prompts give you any advantage and specifically because real user prompts are super long, super personalized and these are not even prompts. These are conversations. So pe people would ask follow-up questions. So you cannot just say oh I have real user prompts and therefore I have an advantage prompt volumes. So how many times people search for something on Chad GPT? Again those things don't make sense because people ask Chad GPT the same thing in very different ways. And now with uh people being able to just dictate what they want, it's very conversational and you cannot just put a number, oh this many people searched for this thing in chat GPT. So everyone's prompts volumes are very very rough estimations. Uh and finally be mindful that whenever you're using different tools to calculate and see your AI visibility, you have to understand how exactly it is calculated. Do they calculate it across all the AI platforms? Do they use the search volumes of different prompts? Uh do they use your position in the uh AI answers? Those things are important, but you need to understand how your how the visibility in the tool that you use is calculated. And finally, self attribution. This is easy to track. This is most tied to your ROI and revenue. And fun thing, this is self attribution across AI chatbots for HFS. And as you can see lately, we suddenly have a huge influx of people coming from cloud, which is very interesting. Maybe it's uh related to the MCP and API connectors that we released. That's about it from me. Uh hope you learned something cool today. Uh and I encourage you to subscribe to HF's podcast where I interview other marketing leaders. And the chef's podcast is actually how I learn marketing because I get to hop on a call with top marketing professionals from all areas and ask them a lot of questions that are interesting to me. So subscribe and let's learn marketing together with HF's podcast. That's it from me. Thank you.