What Is Brand Visibility? (And How to Build Yours in the Age of AI Search)

Brand visibility is where, how, and how often your target audience encounters your brand in search results, social media feeds, ad placements, online videos, and AI-generated answers.

Discover how to navigate brand visibility in the AI era now:

What is brand visibility?

Brand visibility is where, why, and how often target audiences can see your brand on marketing platforms and channels. These channels at one time included newspapers, magazines, TV commercials, and billboards.

How does AI search affect brand visibility?

AI search makes brand visibility less dependent on clicks.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews for options in your category, the answer can name your brand, cite your site, or leave you out, often before that person visits a website.

What marketing channels support building brand visibility?

Marketing channels that support building brand visibility include:

• Social media accounts
• Ads on Google, Bing, and ChatGPT
• Business websites
• Video content on platforms like YouTube
• Ads on streaming services like Hulu or HBO Max
• AI-generated answers in places like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

What is the difference between brand visibility and brand awareness?

The difference between brand visibility and brand awareness is placement. Brand visibility happens before brand awareness, measuring exposure to your brand while brand awareness measures the recall of that exposure.

How is brand visibility measured?

Brand visibility is measured in different ways, including:

• Video completion rate (VCR), which is the percentage of the audience that watched your promotional video from beginning to end.
• Impressions, which is the number of times users see your brand in online experiences, whether in Google’s AI Overviews or a Google ad.
• Share of voice, which measures how often your brand appears compared to competitors in AI-powered experiences, like a ChatGPT conversation or Google search.

Why is brand visibility important?

Brand visibility is important because that visibility helps your customers get started on their journey with your company.

Once they’re introduced to you, they can take further action, like following your social media pages, exploring your site, reading your blog, or even making a purchase or contacting you for more information.

The other reason brand visibility matters is because fewer customers start that journey by searching your name.

WebFX’s analysis of 1,061 domains found the share of organic traffic coming from branded queries fell 6.7 percentage points from 74.7% over two years. That means your brand needs to show up for unbranded searches and questions.

Who should prioritize brand visibility?

Brand visibility is essential for anyone who wants to build their consumer base. It’s especially essential for startups and small businesses. With great brand visibility, you can start gaining those first few customers.

How to increase brand visibility

Increase brand visibility for your company with the following tips:

1. Identify your target audience

Your target audience refers to the potential customers or clients who’d likely be most interested in your products or services. Identifying them is one of the first and most important steps in increasing your brand visibility — they’re the ones you want to get noticed by.

You can identify your target audience by looking at:

• Demographic data
• Psychographic data
• Their purchase intent

Once you’ve solidified your target audience, you’ll be better equipped to get noticed by them, increasing your brand visibility.

2. Buy ads

In the short term, targeted ads can help your brand gain visibility, especially if your company is new. You can purchase ads on platforms like:

• Google
• LinkedIn
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Local newspapers

When you purchase ads, you’ll want to create a plan for monitoring the performance of your ad campaign. Most platforms, like Google Ads, offer ways for business owners to view their ads’ performance. What’s important is that you dedicate time and effort to checking the data so that you can improve for your next campaign.

3. Be active on social media

Creating a unique and consistent social media strategy can help bring new audiences to your business. You can target audiences by doing market research on which social media platforms they visit most frequently to figure out where you should start.

A few different strategies you can use across social media platforms to increase brand visibility include:

• Using relevant hashtags, especially on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and X
• Participating in online trends and partnering with creators, especially on trend-driven platforms like TikTok
• Being responsive to comments and direct messages on your social media accounts, especially regarding client concerns or questions
• Maintaining consistent branding across your channels
• Uploading content consistently so that users finding your content don’t assume your account or business is inactive
• Sharing helpful and interesting content that appeals to your target audience

4. Write blog posts

Blog posts are a great way to introduce more people to your business. You can publish content in your field to answer questions customers may have about your product or industry and increase trust in your company, which will be crucial later when you’re building your brand awareness.

High-quality blog posts with experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) are more likely to show up in Google search results, which increases your brand visibility. Some of the most important features of a top blog post include:

• An engaging title and idea
• A powerful introduction
• Accurate research and use of secondary sources
• Helpful use of quotes, when relevant and valuable
• Easy readability for better understanding
• Meaningful use of images to get ideas across

If you’re looking for engaging blog post ideas, check out our blog post idea generator!

5. Improve your search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an all-encompassing term for getting websites noticed by search engines. The pages that show up toward the top of search results reflect successful SEO — basically, the search engine puts the pages that best satisfy a search at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

You can improve your website’s SEO using several strategies, including:

• Optimizing pages for keywords
• Producing original content that’s not reproduced from another source
• Creating evergreen content that holds up over several years
• Keeping up to date on sneaky algorithm changes
• Meeting user expectations and delivering on promises as best as possible

SEO also feeds AI search: Google says its generative AI features are rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems as traditional Search. There’s a lot more to consider regarding SEO — much more than we can get into here. Consulting with an SEO agency is one way to lead your website to success.

6. Practice AI search optimization

Learn into AI search optimization to build brand visibility with the following approaches:

1. Earn mentions in the sources AI tools cite: Placements in industry publications, review sites, and directories shape how answers describe your brand. Use those placements to give AI tools accurate, repeated signals about who you are and what you offer.
2. Track your share of voice: Use tools like OmniSEO®, a platform for tracking a brand’s AI search visibility, to see how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews mention or cite your business.
3. Keep your content eligible: Google’s Search generative AI control in Search Console manages whether your site appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Google Discover. Excluding your site keeps its content from being shown, linked, or used to ground those answers — keep it in instead.

WebFX is a Partner in Driving Results

Hear from HydroWorx, who saw a 131% increase in organic forms by partnering with WebFX

Watch the Video Testimonial

Build your brand visibility across search

SEO can get your website noticed and increase your brand visibility in search results and AI-generated answers. At WebFX, we’ve driven more than $10 billion in revenue for clients in the last 5 years. Our SEO services and AI SEO services are trusted by clients from various industries, and we can create a customized strategy that fits your business’s needs.

If you’re ready to increase your brand visibility and get your business noticed, we can help. For more information or to speak to a strategist, contact us online or call 888-601-5359 today!