What Does AI Really Think of Your Brand? (Live Audit)

Hello everyone. Welcome to the dojo, a search marketing podcast from Exposure Ninja. My name is Luke. I'm the COO and I'm joined by the wonderful Charlie who is our CEO. And today we're going to be talking about a brand new tool just launched by Exposure Ninja called Mind My Brand. Charlie, why don't you tell us a little bit about what it is, why we built it, and how it works. Absolutely, and I couldn't be more excited to be launching it. So, my my brand is a new AI search tool that's focused on bringing you insights about your brand's reputation, which is incredibly important if you're the kind of business who is doing branded search because what you care about is what AI thinks about your brand. More and more we've seen people moving away from just searching on Google. They're searching in ChatBT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI models. And all of these AI models create a story. They create a narrative about your brand's reputation. So, in the same way you used to have to think about your brand's reputation on a larger scale, on a traditional offline sense, we're now also having to think about it in an AI search sense as well. So, this tool is for all brands really. It's formemes. It's for big businesses. It's for anyone who cares about how AI is describing their brand online. incredibly important if you are already thinking about or working on your AI search strategies and the best thing about it is it's super simple and really easy to use. That sounds really exciting. What made you decide that such a tool was needed? Were there any particular examples you were seeing from our clients or any specific situations where you thought aha something is needed here to fix this problem? We had loads of examples over the past sort of 12 18 months from clients, from prospects that we were working with, from businesses who are just coming to us to ask for advice. And that was things like AI has inaccurate information about my business. How do I change it? Or AI describes me in this way. It describes me as cheap, but I actually consider my pricing as premium. I'm trying to move further upstream. This is the new kind of audience I'm going for. And sometimes things like sentiment as well like I want my company to be described as innovative but actually that word very rarely comes up. Um one of the big examples we saw was for a very very well-known uh mobile phone tradein retailer and the situation that they had was they were accidentally unknowingly blocking all AI crawlers from their website. So chatbt wasn't able to Yeah. And it's not it's not uncommon. It's not uncommon at all. So CHGBT other AIS weren't able to crawl the website and that was actually down to Cloudflare causing that which is why they hadn't realized because it's a setting that if you have Cloudflare there was a default change. You have to update it. And it meant all of their reputation and AI was being said by third party sites. it was being lifted by thirdparty site sources which meant all of the information was outdoors weren't appearing for any non-branded prompts and that's because AI wasn't 100% sure it couldn't actually go and reconcile the information they were seeing on all these different websites with that mobile retailer's own website so it just decided to leave them out which if you think about people on search journeys who are trying to find something. They want to trade in, you know, their old iPhone because they're upgrading to the next model. They were not in those kinds of search journeys from people having those conversations in chatbt. And that's huge. That's just one example. But there were lots of little things like this where a business felt like they had no control over how AI was describing their brand. So we wanted to give them the insights that they actually needed to see across different AI platforms, across the major players, what's being said. Is it what you want to be said about your brand? And where is that information being pulled from? What are the actual sources influencing what's being said? Yeah, remember to check those Cloudflare settings, guys. Super easy mistake to make. Um, and it can have quite a big impact, in fact, a huge impact on how AI search talks about your brand. But I think it's probably easier if you just show us how Mind My Brand actually works. Uh so why don't we jump into a bit of a live demo here so that you can show us what the tool looks like. Yeah, absolutely. So if you're watching on the video version, then I've just added mymybrand.com to the screen. If you're not, then try and jump on the video version or you can go to minemybrand.com. That's mine as in we're mining like Snow Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Mine my brand. Yes. So what are we looking at here for those of us? Right. So this is the homepage. It's super simple to use. So mind my brand. It digs into brands reputations across chatbt, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grock. Those are the four major platforms. And I'm just going to pop in an example. So you just pop in your website URL. Just use your your main domain, your main homepage. And you click start mining. That's pretty much all there is to it. It's going to ask you for an email address, and it's going to ask you for your uh brand name as well. So, I'm going to use Revolute just as an example because we're all familiar with Revolute, Big Bank here in the UK and also in the US as well. So, what then happens is it starts loading up a brand report and it takes about 2 minutes to load it. That's because we've got lots of different API connectors running here to make sure that it's getting accurate information. So, it's not as quick as fast mode in chat GPT might be, but I promise you that it's going to be worth the wait. Good things are worth waiting for. Yeah, absolutely. And if you see it taking up to 2 minutes, it's not broken. That's how long it is supposed to take. So, just make yourself a cup of tea and get right back to it. Yeah. And so, here we go. It's loaded up a report now for Revolute. And you can switch between different AI models. This is the great thing about it. So it's got Chat GBT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grock. And I would say most brands are probably predominantly going to be thinking about Chat GBT and Gemini right now. So I'm going to leave it on chat GBT so that we can explore the analysis, but you can switch through anytime. So first thing it brings up, which is pretty damning in my opinion, is a brand sentiment positioning. And a lot of the time we tend to see this uh towards the positive side with AI. AI always tries to give a bit of a story of both side, pros and cons. Very chirpy AI by default. Chirpy. Yes. But this is coming up neutral which is showing there's a couple of things going on with Revolute and this will become clearer and clearer as we go through the analysis. So great thing up front you can see is the sentiment. It's got a mixed impression right of this of this brand tone. It knows that they are a premium tech forward bank. It knows where they are. Price point. This is incredibly interesting for a lot of brands is what AI thinks about your pricing because this is one of the big areas of inaccuracy. And we've had lots of clients feeling that the reflection in AI about where their price point actually is isn't necessarily what they want it to be. So, Revolute in this one's coming up as mid-range with free entry points and paid subscription tiers. This is obviously a much more complicated product because the product stack underneath Revolute is significant loads of different types of things. Um, but Luke, maybe you want to speak to a couple of examples our clients have had with inaccurate pricing in AI because it's not actually always about the exact price of products, right? No, it's often about perception, right? So, if you're, it's very, very important to a brand if you're specifically trying to go for that mid-market position, if you're going for a budget position, that all of your marketing consistently reflects that messaging so that people can understand and come to intuitively know that you are associated with a particular price point. We see this with supermarkets. You know, we know that Waitro is super expensive uh but good quality. We know that if you want to get something cheap, then you're going to little or Aldi. And then you've got the kind of sainsburries in the middle of the market I would say um option as well. So yeah, it's not just important what your price actually is, but how people feel about your pricing, what people think your pricing is. And it just means that in today's world where people use AI search all the time. That needs to be a place where your pricing message is consistently repeated. Absolutely. And AI search tools always pull pricing pages if you have them. So particularly if you're in something like B2B SAS, it will always be doing comparisons because that's the kind of query that people ask like what is the price of this? Same if you're in anything like hotels or retail, what is the price comparison between this place versus this place? Another thing we've got in here which was just for fun, just to add a bit of spice, was a celebrity match. And then this actually in our beta testing has been one of the things that businesses have most been interested in, I think, just cuz it's a bit fun. Um, so Revolute is going Elon Musk, which I think isn't great, but maybe loops in exactly with this sentiment of uh it not being entirely positive. A bit of a mixed bag if you're going Elon Musk. Uh, honestly, it's worth running just to see what what comes up. The one I saw the other day that I absolutely loved was for one of our clients, Riverford, and they had Q Hugh Fley Witting Store, and I thought there is no more accurate celebrity personality than I could think of. People want to know their celebrity match more than anything else, which is just great. So, I encourage you to go and find out what your brand is associated with celebritywise. Just one thing quickly, just a bit of housekeeping. The what we're talking about now about Revolute is what the AI search tools are saying about the brand. It's not my opinion. It's not Charlie's opinion. So, if the good people at Revolute are unhappy about any of this, then take it up with Sam Alman and the and the AI search guys or do some AI search marketing of your own to to reset the um reputation, which is something we'll probably talk about a little bit later. 100%. And this now that we're into the brand performance scores, this actually starts to reveal what's pushing that sentiment. So, we can see here they're really strong in market positioning. We know that, right? They're a really strong bank disruptor in the US in particular, but also in the UK as well, but needs focus and it highlights really clearly here in this yellow box customer focus. So, they've definitely got some issues going on with their customer satisfaction levels, probably reviews that they're getting from customers recent enough that AI is pushing this. Whereas, you can see the scores on all of these other areas. Actually, things like market position are coming out really strong. Brand clarity is pretty strong. Innovation is pretty strong as well. Value for money is not bad. It's really that customer focus where it's saying actually customer needs and service needs to be thought about a little bit more than it has been here. And that's probably what's influencing this sentiment overall. Yeah. And one thing I really love about this is how it portrays the information in really clear and easy to understand graphs. So we're looking at bar charts. We're looking at uh bold descriptors that are being pulled out of AI search. And for anybody who works in marketing like I do, you're just constantly building decks. Um so you can just press that little download button there that's on the screen and get that uh chart into your deck into your presentation. So, if if you if you've got a if you need to speak to your higherups about how AI search is is uh changing how your brand is doing, which which I know a lot of marketing managers I speak to is something that they are thinking about a lot right now. Uh then this tool really helps you do that. Yeah, absolutely. And we use it in our own AI search audits internally, Exposure Ninja as well for our clients. And actually, it's so nice being able to just pull the bar chart straight off of the report to then give the analysis and the information. So now we move into brand descriptors. And I think this is incredibly important actually even towards the enterprise level. So we had a client in the German DAX top 30, so huge huge global brand working in the cosmetic sector come to us worried that their corporate website wasn't describing them as innovative. And absolutely because investors care that brands they're investing in are going to be innovative. They wanted to know that AI was definitely perceiving their reputation the right way and they're incredibly innovative company. But the way AI describes something and where it finds its content means it doesn't always reflect what you know to be true about the business. So this brand descriptor section is an amazing first place to see are you being described exactly how you want to be described and if not then we can start to figure out why or why not. So in here we can see things like the brand being known as disruptive, fastmoving, ambitious, global, little bit sleek. Yeah. Okay. And it sort of gives you the visual signals for why that is. So it even goes into things like uh their dark UX, the the dark sort of design that their app has, the imagery they're using, the fonts, uh the visuals, the electric blue accents, which is the like CTA colors that this brand has. So actually we're even at the stage where AI is pulling out the visual signals and the design themes that are so apparent and so clearly linked to the brand as well. And if you see something here and it feels a bit wishy-washy, it's probably because you don't have these distinct visual cues that people use when they're looking at your brand site to understand. And so AI isn't picking up on those really clear identifiers. Yeah, I really like that it's picked up on Revolute's dark UI surfaces because that is something that really positions Revolute as in kind of that coding tech bro space where it's all about, you know, I'm I'm looking at my computer for 16 hours, so I need to make sure I'm not damaging my eyes. It I think it's just little things like that um make more of a difference to overall perception of your brand than you would necessarily realize on a day-to-day basis. So it can be very useful to have a tool like this pick out those details and and show you you know huh you know this decision that I've made is having this kind of impact and is that the impact that I actually want. Absolutely. And then we kind of get into what I would call accuracy information. So AI's understanding of your brand's mission and values, what you actually are, what you do, who you serve. But perhaps even more interestingly is products and services and the offers that it recognizes from your business. Now, if you think about how big a business like Revel is, they've got 11 different items found here. Some of these are going to be exactly the things they want to be known for. Some of them are going to be smaller products. If you're a smaller business, if you're in the theme space and you're thinking you've got like more than 11, I think that's also really interesting to look at because have you got older offerings that you actually don't want showing here that you still have information about online that needs a clean up? Are you perhaps going too broad, too wide in the market and AI is diluting its focus because it doesn't understand what your core priority service and products actually are? Or have you got a list where you read it all and you think 100% that's absolutely accurate for what we do and what we want to be known for as well. So we can see here like personal current accounts at the top. Debit cards. These are probably two of the main things that Revolute want to be known because it's actually their main straight to direct consumer offer. Get a personal current account. It's the free entry point to join Revolute. Yeah. Although I think Revolute is not free but um I think that this is the first place that I would go if I was um going to use this tool for one of for my clients is because when AI talks about your brand uh it's really important things that we think about all the time take for granted like I know that my business does services A B C and D like I know that I don't think about that very often but remember your customers might be brand new coming to you they might not know those things And so it's really really important that their first impression of you aligns exactly with what you actually do. So if there is a mismatch there, AI search, yes, it hallucinates, but there's a reason for the hallucinations. Right? So it's it's maybe a sign that you need to unpick. Why is this service showing up when it's not something that I want to be associated with it? Is it because I've got out of date pages? Is it because I once wrote a blog about this thing and I thought I was going to launch it and then I never really wound it down properly? What is the reason for that? uh mistake and how can I correct it. So I think that's a really really important thing to look at. Absolutely. And then we get into key competitors and these are AI competitors. They're the competitors that AI models commonly associate or compare your business to. So it may well be that you're not seeing competitors who you usually compare yourself to. And that's because this is all in the context of the AI platforms. So in here we're seeing Monzo Wise, Starling Bank definitely competitors we would expect to be seeing and I think some sort of different brands N26, Bunk and Chime perhaps less widely known in the market but something that AI is definitely comparing against specific products or services uh that Revolute offer. So well worth a look because your competitors often differ on different marketing channels and also you do want to make sure you're being seen against competitors who you perceive to be in the same area of the market as well. If your competitors are completely entirely different in here, then it might be that AI is misunderstanding what your business does and who it's for. If you are thinking, well, they're not really exactly who my competitors actually are. Yeah, I think that's a really important point about competitors per space, right? So, who is doing well in AI search in your sector? It may be a completely different bunch of people who to doing well to offline marketing to to tra traditional uh Google search marketing. So, have a think about that and maybe you might find some new competitors often smaller competitors and what agile and doing really well in this space. Um, so yeah, think have a look and and you might find some competitors who you can steal some good ideas from. Absolutely. And now this is my favorite part of the report. I don't know about you, League, but the strengths and weaknesses. I think this is the bit that I would want to get straight to to understand the gaps that AI models might be flagging. So the strengths, they're probably going to be things that you're really happy about. So in this example, things like high brand recognition, strong momentum as they're expanding into fintech, clear premium to premium model, great. Weaknesses, this is where some of that bad sentiment was coming from, right? Public criticism around lack of customer support. That's huge for a bank. Definitely something you'd want to be fixing. Trust concerns because of fraud and scam handling complaints that they've had. So anytime they've hit the news for something like that, that's likely going to be showing up in AI's perception. Things about compliance and risk controls feeds into a similar thing. Product breadth. This is interesting. I think that this comes up because they're quite a major player. So things like the proposition feeling complex rather than simple when ultimately everyone wants their customers to feel like the product is simple, easy to understand, it's the thing they want, easy to purchase, right? And then premium value as well. kind of what you were mentioning here about price point before Luke actually depends right how good is the premium version of the product. Yeah. To decide whether that's good value. Yeah. I think that this is definitely something that I would be downloading and putting into my presentation. If I was going to work on a particular marketing campaign for a particular area of the brand, you know, I want the higherups to see, you know, we've got weakness, A, B, and C, and we're really going to focus on on those three. uh and and expect to see some movement on that. Can I just ask you to like so at the moment we're looking all at ChachiPT, but the good thing about the tool is that it actually takes uh all of this information from different LLMs. So um you can see how the strengths and weaknesses vary somewhat by power platform just by clicking at the top across Chpt, Plexity, Gemini or Grock depending on what you're most interested in. Yeah. And they describe it slightly differently as well. So I've just switched into Gemini for example and now it's saying customer service response times can be slow. So it's raising a similar issue around customer service but actually the slow response times wasn't something that chatbt specifically described. So there's definitely variations um between different ones. Complexities flagging toxic culture for example allegations of that. So these are really I think the interesting point for marketers right is a lot of what comes into AI's understanding of a reputation here goes beyond just the marketer's job just the SEO or the content person's job within the team. These are bigger issues within the business that you want to raise to senior stakeholders to say, okay, what is the business doing? So that marketing can make sure they're correcting the narrative that they're putting out the right story for the business based on all of the actions that are being taken internally. Ultimately, not marketing's job to organize the support function. You know, you know, I've never met a marketing person who didn't want to be in a room with products at the same time to to influence decisions. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And then it goes into target audience identity clarity, which is, you know, how clearly and consistently the brand story has come across to AI. This is really important in AI because when AI is getting results, it's pulling from lots of third party sources as well as your own website in order to make a clear narrative. It's basically fact-checking itself across lots of different sources online and it wants to see the same story, the same truth points coming up to understand who the brand is, what it does and who it does it for. So if you've got mixed messaging on different websites, then that will cause confusion there. And that's actually really really common with a lot of businesses because there might be something from you know best companies review back in 2015 that's pulling all sorts of random information that you didn't mean to be shaping the narrative for your brand. Uh well a lot of people that I speak to don't realize that the first step of AI search marketing is making sure that you're very clear on your marketing marketing right what do you want the public to think about your brand and how can we make sure that that messaging is consistent. If you don't have that right, then you're not going to do well in any of the different channels. Yeah. And then I'm taking us to the last section, which is reference sources. And I think this is incredibly exciting because, right, my my brand is all about AI insights about your brand. These sources, these links, these articles that are published online are the ones that are really influencing how your brand is perceived in AI. And again, these change when you switch between different platforms. So, we're just looking at chatbt right now. And you can see that in this set of reference sources, so it's showing six on screen at the moment. There's a few from Revolute. So about half of these are from Revolute's own website. And interestingly, it's pulling from both pricing pages, but also their DEI, their diversity, equity, and inclusion pages. So it's actually also considering all of their internal policies, which will also be relating to their own staff and their own team. And then it's also pulling from some really big sites. So we've got tine.com in here. We've got Moneyw Week and we've got BBCI as well, news article around the firm that came out a little while ago. And it's using all of these sources in order to communicate this brand reputation. This is where it's getting the story from. So it's incredibly important. Yeah. And I think it just goes to show a lot of people think, you know, oh, I won't do anything about AI search because there's nothing I can do to influence how these tools are talking about me. But in this case, there's three pages right there that the tool, we know that the tool is using those pages to uh generate its overall story about a business and the brand controls these pages. So maybe if your pricing offering is being reported as complex, then you want to take a look at your pricing page and okay, you're not going to be able to change the whole pricing structure overnight, but you can change how that information is presented and make it so that users have an easier time understanding it. And just little things like that can quite quickly have a big impact on how your brand is perceived by these AI search platforms. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is probably the most actionable part of the whole report because it gives you like the under the hood details where you actually need to go to start influencing change and some of this is on-site content as Luke says much more easy and straightforward. You've got other stakeholders internally that you'd need to work with here. But then off-site content thinking about how incredibly important this is and the actions that brands can take around this because you can influence the off-site content as well. The first thing is sometimes you will be able to get in contact with journalists around the stories that they're telling depending what publications are coming up here. Less likely for Revolute but much more common for other types of business where it might be different types of publications. And you also think okay these are the sites that AI is trusting in this example. These are the sites Chat GBT is trusting. If some of these articles are becoming a little bit old, a little bit outdated, what new content can you get into those publications to start changing that brand narrative in the direction that you want to move now in 2026? How can you move them forward? Because AI sources, you can gazump them. Old content will eventually be filtered out of AI and new fresher content will come in. So you can start influencing how the business is seen in AI over time with this content creation. So you need to be thinking about both your on-site and your offsite content. And if you want to use mind my brand, it's completely free. You can jump on to get a run of the insights. You just need to put in your website address. Go to mindmybrand.com. There is a premium version available if you want extra insights. And every user has a free version they can run every month. But it's worth knowing that we do know your email address and the IP address. So you can't run multiple reports on different email addresses. It's capped to just one a month, which is great. If all you need is one a month and you want to check your business monthly, that works for everyone. Yes, that's an ironcloud security system that you will be unable to get around. Um, how much does the premium pricing cost and what do you get for that? Yeah, the premium pricing is $10.99 and what you get for that is 20 reports plus pro version insights. So, I just showed you a full breakdown of all of the insights available. Some of those are premium features so you get much more information. Um, but if you're working if you're a marketer working across multiple brands, if you're a consultant or if you're agency level, then 20 reports means you can get it across multiple clients. Yeah. And the other thing it does is it saves your historic reports. so that you've got a log of all of the different reports you've run. So if you want to have historical benchmarks and then run it time and time again, run it every month and then have a record of that so you can see how brand perception over changes over time which is you know very good if you need to prove your KPIs to to your senior stakeholder uh then the premium option might be for you. Absolutely. Right. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in today. If you have questions about my my brand and the actual insights that you're getting from the report, then you can drop us an email anytime at [email protected]. Or if you want to get me directly, please absolutely feel free. You can always find me on LinkedIn. And I'd love to have a LinkedIn message to talk about AI search. There's nothing I'd rather be doing than having a chat about AI search. So run the report. Let me know what you get. And the thing I want to see is a post about your celebrity match. Who is your celebrity match for your business? That's the question that we all want to know. That is that's the only that's the only important question of the [laughter] day is exactly Elon Musk and he would want to admit that publicly on social media. Let's find out. [laughter] And how many Hugh Fernly Whitting stores are there? I suspect not many though. All right. Thank you everyone for joining Luke and I on the dojo today and we'll see you next week. Thanks Charlie. Bye bye. [music]