How to Run a Brand Gap Analysis | 2.1. AEO Course by Ahrefs

Hey, it's Ammo and welcome to the second module in our AI search course. Now, in module one, we covered how AI search actually works, the mechanics, the platforms, and what winning AI visibility looks like. In this module, I'm going to walk you through an AEO strategy that works in two phases. First, we'll assess where your brand stands today, figuring out exactly where the gaps are. Then, we'll move on to discovery, where we'll find the keywords and prompts people use to get information related to your business. So, let's start with step one, assess. In this lesson, I'm going to walk you through how to run a brand gap analysis. A brand gap analysis measures the difference between where your brand should be showing up and where it actually is. So, this is in Google search, AI results, and basically across the web. It examines everything shaping your discoverability and reputation from how AI describes you to which competitors are cited instead of you. So, the first step in this analysis is to map out your branded entities. Before you can find your gaps, you need to get clear on what you're actually measuring. And here's the thing, your brand gets referred to differently by different people. So, you want to map out your main brand name, any subbrands, product names, proprietary features, proprietary metrics, and even personal brands associated with your company. For example, at Hrefs, we'd map out the main brand HRES, product brands like Site Explorer, Brand Radar, and AI content helper, proprietary metrics like domain rating and traffic potential, and personal brands like Tim Solo, Patrick Stocks, Ryan Law, and Glenn Alaw. Each of these has its own visibility profile in search and AI results. And you can repeat the analysis I'm about to show you for each one. Once you have your list, connect each entity to the topics and attributes people should associate with it. Search engines and LLMs don't understand brand names on their own. They infer meaning from how your brand is described and discussed. So, you need to clarify what problems you solve, what qualities you're known for, and what context you belong in. A quick way to do this is keyword research. Look for recurring adjectives, modifiers, and descriptive phrases people use alongside your brand or category. things like affordable, AI powered, enterprisegrain, whatever applies to your space. This gives you your benchmark for what your brand should be known and found for. Now, let's move on to the second step, which is to run your audit in hrefs. Start by entering your brand's website into site explorer. You'll get a dashboard of baseline metrics, domain rating, referring domains, organic keywords, organic traffic, and traffic value. This gives you your traditional SEO snapshot. But what we really care about in the context of AEO are the AI citation metrics which give you a snapshot of your brand's visibility in AI search across different platforms. Clicking into any of those takes you to the brand radar report for that platform which is where the real audit happens and there are four key things to pay attention to. First are mentions which are the number of times your brand is mentioned in AI responses. Then we have citations which are the number of times your website is actually cited as a source. impressions, an estimation of exposure based on how often responses containing your brand are shown, and AI share a voice, how often your brand is mentioned compared to your competitors. Now, the real power of Brand Radar is in its filters. This is where you can isolate the exact scenarios that matter. For example, you can filter for prompts that mention your brand name in the AI platform of choice. You can filter for responses that mention your brand but don't site your website. Those are miscitation opportunities. You can also add a competitor and then filter for queries where they're mentioned but you're not. And you can look at specific topics to see whether AI associates them with your brand or someone else's. Now take note of these numbers and let's move on to the third step which is to identify your gaps. When you're looking at this data, it helps to think about your gaps across six dimensions. And this is a framework Despina from ATFs laid out in her brand gap analysis guide. The first is your visibility gap. This is where your brand appears less often than competitors in search or AI results. The second is your narrative gap. This is how AI or media describes your brand versus how you actually want to be positioned. For example, maybe you're a premium tool, but AI keeps calling you a budget alternative or your key differentiator just isn't coming through. Third is your topic gap. These are topics you should be associated with but aren't. Like if you're a project management tool, but AI never mentions you when people ask about remote team collaboration. That would be a topic gap. Fourth is your format gap. AI tends to site certain types of content, guides, videos, reviews, comparison pages, and if you're not producing them, that's a gap. For example, in module one, we talked about YouTube being one of the most cited domains. And if your competitors have YouTube content getting cited and you don't, then you've got a content format gap. Fifth is your web mentions gap. These are external sources, listicles, review sites, forums, publications that mention competitors but not you. And as we covered in module one, those third party mentions are one of the strongest signals for AI visibility. And sixth is your demand gap. These are branded queries or searches that signal awareness opportunities you haven't captured. People are searching for things in your space, but your brand name never comes up alongside those searches. Now, when you look at all six together, you get a complete picture of your brand's visibility in AI. Not just how often you show up, but whether you're showing up for the right things in the right way in the right places. So, as you do your brand audit in step two, it's worth adding your prompts to these buckets. And it'll set you up perfectly for the fourth step, which is to prioritize. You're going to find a lot of gaps, and you can't fix everything at once. So, you're going to have to prioritize your efforts. You're generally going to do one of three things. Fix, which is improving or optimizing something that already exists. you're going to build, which is creating new content or pages for opportunities you're not covering at all, or influence, which is strengthening your off-site visibility through outreach and brand mentions. And you want to weigh each opportunity by asking how much demand could this drive? Does it support your brand credibility? And does it improve your chances of being cited in AI? Start with the quick ones. If you have a page that's already ranking but just needs a content update to close a topic gap, that's low effort and potentially high impact. If you're missing from a major listical that all your competitors are on, that's a web messions gap you can close with outreach. Now, as you go through this process, you'll probably find that most of your gaps fall into one or two of the buckets I mentioned before. And that's a good thing because it tells you exactly where to focus so you can create systems around them. and I'll walk you through how to close each type of gap in module 3. From creating content that gets cited to earning mentions from thirdparty sites to optimizing your YouTube presence. So the audit you do right now, it becomes your personalized road map for the rest of this course. Now one more thing, you can do this exact same audit for your competitors to get a wealth of insights on new topics and gaps that will be relevant to your business. Look at their branded queries to see what users and AI connect to them more strongly than they do to you. Sometimes those are quick wins. You might already have the features, you just haven't created the content that connects them to your brand, or you don't have enough pages that are talking about that feature. We've put together a template you can use to organize all of this and share it with stakeholders. So, I'll link that in the description. Now, you have your baseline saved and a clear picture of where the gaps are. But knowing your gaps is only the first step. You also need to know what opportunities are out there. And keyword and prompt research for AEO is how you do it. But it's a bit different from what you might be used to. There are queries where AI dominates, queries where traditional SEO still wins, and a whole set of platforms most people aren't even thinking about. That's what we'll cover in the next lesson. I'll see you there.