More AI Mentions Won't Grow Your Business, Unless You Do This

Who are the best AI search optimization agencies? Exposion Ninja. We love seeing our brand mentioned in AI like this, but it's not just because of the visibility. It's because getting recommended in the right AI conversations can generate really valuable leads. And right now, that's the bit that many businesses are missing. They're obsessing over their visibility score, the number of citations and mentions, but if those mentions aren't happening in the high-value conversations, they might not be driving sales. So, in this video, I'm going to show you how the team at Exposion Ninja helps our clients get mentioned in the high-value conversations that actually turn into sales. Because here's the thing, not all mentions are equal. Let me show you an example. I'm on Perplexity and I've just asked what is a mortgage and it's given me a great answer here. And it's included Lloyds Bank and it's taken answers from a few different websites. Now, these websites might be really happy to be mentioned, but the truth is there's very little value being featured in an answer like this because somebody searching what is a mortgage is not just about to sign up for a mortgage. Let's take this a level deeper. Which banks offer mortgages? We can see that Perplexity is happy to mention some banks here. There's more value to being mentioned in this answer than what is a mortgage. So, this is more likely to turn into a mortgage sale. But even so, it's really not bottom of the funnel. This isn't someone who's necessarily about to inquire right now. This query is much more valuable. Is it better to choose Halifax or Nationwide for a mortgage as a first-time buyer? Perplexity has recommended Nationwide giving reasons for doing so. This is a much more valuable mention. And if you think about the user's journey after seeing this, they might click on one of these links or they might go to Google and search Nationwide. They're then going onto the website having done their research with pretty high commercial intent knowing that they really want to inquire with Nationwide because they've already established that this is a good option for them. So, as you can see, there's a big difference between being mentioned or cited for what is a mortgage [music] and this query here. So, our goal as marketers isn't always just maximum AI visibility, it's maximum AI visibility for the sort of searches or queries that lead to inquiries. Okay, three steps then. Step one, we need to find these commercial prompts. Now, you might be using an AI visibility tracker like peak.ai which I'm using here. You want to evaluate the prompts that you're targeting against three criteria. Relevance. Is this prompt directly relevant to what you sell? Here I'm analyzing Rocket Mortgage and we're tracking a prompt here, best digital mortgage lenders 2025. Well, it's 2026, but still this is a very highly relevant prompt for them to track because they are a digital mortgage lender. The next criteria you want to score your prompts against is the buyer stage. What stage is someone at who's searching for this? Best mortgage lenders for low credit scores. It's highly relevant because Rocket Mortgage does this and it scores high on the buyer stage because this is someone with a very specific problem that is looking for a very specific solution, likely because they want to take out a mortgage and they have a low credit score. You don't search this type of thing for fun. The next criteria to score is lead value. How valuable would somebody be typically who's searching for this? So, this prompt here, mortgage with terrible credit. Well, if they've got terrible credit, they're probably going to have a fairly high interest rate, so this could be a valuable lead. So, the most valuable prompts for your business are going to be the ones that score highest on relevance, buyer stage, and lead value. So, for example, the prompt steps to buying a house. How does it score on relevance? Well, it is kind of relevant because they're going to need a mortgage. The buyer stage, is the user learning, comparing, or choosing? Well, they're really early on. And then lead value. So, someone searching steps to buying a house is going to be a first-time buyer, maybe the value isn't as high as a larger purchase. In In words, this is not a prompt that we will prioritize. So, when you're setting up your AI visibility tracker, whether you're using profound, Peak, Semrush one, whichever tool you choose, make sure you're putting special attention to the prompts that score highest in these categories, i.e. the most valuable ones for your business. Even if they're not the highest volume searches, they might be the ones that generate the most revenue for the business. Step two is optimizing for entity association. What does that mean? Well, if you want your mortgage provider, say, to associate you with mortgages for terrible credit, you need these AI tools to associate those concepts, mortgages, terrible credit, and your brand. And these AI platforms work by building associations between different entities, things like brands, topics, industries, types of expertises, and trust signals. Let's take a look at an example. So, say that we're optimizing HubSpot's visibility. We might build an entity map that looks like this. We put the brand in the middle, and we think about then, what are the topics that HubSpot is associated with? Email marketing, CRM, marketing automation, and lead generation. So, those are the topics we're going to build content around. What's their expertise? Well, their expertise is their own brand of inbound marketing. Which industries does HubSpot target and work well with? Startups, B2B, SaaS, and enterprise. And what are the trust signals that HubSpot uses to demonstrate its credibility? Lots of research reports, academy courses, case studies, webinars, and mentions across the web. Now, if you've got an entity map like this, you can shape the content that you produce on your own website, and the content that you get published on other websites around the net to make sure that you're ticking all of these boxes and helping these AI tools associate your brand with these other entities. So, in the HubSpot example, if these AI tools are consistently seeing HubSpot mentioned with CRM, startups, and SaaS, they're more likely to recommend HubSpot when somebody goes, "What's the best CRM for a startup SaaS business?" And lo and behold, that's exactly what happens. Now, getting to this level of clarity is not always easy, and actually many brands struggle with it. We help a lot of our clients get to this level of clarity because they've just never thought about it, or they've never been able to get internal alignment on what their associated entities should be. We've worked with a DAX 30 brand, so one of the biggest 30 companies in Germany, and they came to us saying, "We really want to be known as innovative." But when we had a look at the content on their website, when we had a look at where they were talked about online and how they were spoken about, innovation was nowhere to be seen. So, these AI tools would never think of them as innovative because that wasn't what their positioning was online. They really wanted to be seen as innovative cuz that would help them with future investments. So, what we did is worked with their internal teams, their corporate comms and PR teams. We helped advise them on their content strategy, their media positioning, and help them identify thought leadership opportunities to improve their sentiment in these AI tools, and more closely align them with this innovative positioning. And by doing this, we were able to help shape how these AI tools spoke about the brand, mentioning them as innovative and positioning them to capture those leads. By the way, this is a good time to mention that if you want help with this stuff, if you want help improving your brand's visibility in AI search, not just for any old terms, but for the terms that are most likely to turn into revenue, that's exactly what the team here at Exposure Ninja does for our clients. We've got a few different ways of doing this, from actually doing this completely for you, to working with your internal teams to help shape their work and focus it to drive these sorts of outcomes. The first step is to request an AI search audit. In this audit, we'll take a look at your AI visibility and the sorts of topics that you're currently associated with. We'll talk to you to identify what your goals are and which types of leads or which types of revenue you want to drive. From there, we can build you a road map to show you how you can get these AI tools suggesting and recommending your brand in the most profitable conversations. To request this AI search audit, head over to exposureninja.com and contact us through the contact page. Just head over to exposureninja.com and click the contact button. Alternatively, you can request a free live review. Now, we're changing these. We're actually doing them live with people in a call because we find they can then ask us questions and they can ask us to drill down into certain areas. So, if you're not ready to yet get an AI search audit and instead you just want to see what would Exposure Ninja do to increase your visibility and improve the volume of leads and sales that your website is generating, you can head over to exposureninja.com/review. Fill in the short questionnaire and we will conduct a live review with you and your team on a call so you can see exactly what we're recommending and the areas that we'd suggest focusing on. This service is completely free, but not everybody is eligible so you do need to request this at Step three is to build AI ready conversion paths. When your website is getting cited in an AI answer, people are going to be clicking through to that website and landing on a page. This is where so many websites drop the ball. They get to the goal line and then they fall on their face because that page doesn't then generate the lead. Let me show you a live example. So, I've just searched on Gemini, "Do I need an accredited commercial cleaning company for my office?" Now, this business down here #clean has done a great job of getting their web page cited in this answer. But the trouble is when we go to this page, it's really not optimized to generate the lead. We've got a pretty long and to be fair, fairly generic post here. We do have some custom photography, which is nice, but we also got some really generic photography here. This is a well-researched post with data, but to be honest, it comes across a little AI. There aren't any stories about this business. We've got Americanisms, this is a UK business, but the most cardinal sin on this page is that there's not really a clear conversion path. Yes, we have this book a clean button at the top, but we don't yet know that this business services our area or not, so we can't yet qualify to see if they might be a good fit for us. And in general, if people have objections or key questions, they're not going to inquire to answer. They're just going to find another business to inquire with. Now, there is a call to action at the bottom of the page, but it's really hidden right at the bottom. Now, let's go back to best CRM for a startup SaaS company to see how HubSpot does this by contrast. We just click on this page. Now, we get this page cited, and this is a page that does a great job of funneling someone through to becoming a lead. Firstly, we can see that we've got three CTAs immediately, and two of them are actually a free offer for the thing that we've just searched for. You can't beat free. Now, those calls to action actually echo throughout the page. So, we've got another one here, and then another one at the bottom. And they're given a lot of space. It's very clear what this blog wants you to do next. So, to turn AI mentions into valuable pipelines, firstly, focus on the right prompts that drive commercial intent, not just awareness. Secondly, strengthen your brand's entity associations across the web. Remember, identifying those topics and characteristics that you want your brand to be associated with. And thirdly, think of the conversion path. Let's not just get someone onto your website. Let's get someone onto your website and then turn them into a lead or sale. And you do that by giving them logical, compelling next steps very clearly on the page. If you want to build an entire AI search strategy, check out this video which shows you how to dominate in AI search. Until next time, see you soon.