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When an AI answers a question using your content, it usually cites you with a source link. What it doesn’t do, 62% of the time, is say your name. The link is there. The brand mention is not. This is what I like to call a ghost citation: the AI using your content doesn’t mention you in the answer.
This week, I’m sharing:
- Why being cited and being mentioned are two different outcomes that require different strategies.
- Which LLMs name brands vs. which treat them as anonymous source material.
- The query format and content type that produce 30x more brand mentions.
A note from Kevin: I’m a big fan of HubSpot’s Marketing Against the Grain. I had Kieran, one of the co-hosts, on my Tech Bound podcast back in 2023. Now, they launched a newsletter with smart experiments, fresh perspectives, and practical lessons on what’s working right now. So, I thought I would give a friendly shoutout: Check it out.
This analysis draws on 3,981 domains across 115 prompts, 14 countries, and four AI search engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, AI Mode), using data from the Semrush AI Toolkit. Every appearance is tagged as “cited” (source link present) and/or “mentioned” (brand name appears in the answer text). The gap between those two states is the ghost citation problem.
1. 62% Of Your Brand’s LLM Citations Are Functionally Invisible
Most brands assume being cited means being seen. The data says otherwise.
74.9% of domains were cited, and 38.3% mentioned. 61.7% of citations are ghost citations: the domain gets a source link but zero name recognition in the answer text.
Only 13.2% of appearances convert into both a citation and a mention. Not a single domain was cited, but not mentioned at all, or vice versa.
2. Every LLM Shows A Different Behavior
The four AI engines treat citations and mentions in fundamentally different ways:
- Gemini names brands in 83.7% of appearances, but only generates a citation link 21.4% of the time. It operates more like a conversationalist drawing on brand knowledge.
- ChatGPT is the opposite: It cites 87.0% of the time but mentions brands in only 20.7% of answers, functioning more like an academic paper with footnotes.
- Google AI Overviews (AIOs) sit in the middle but lean toward citation.
- Google’s AI Mode offers about 17% more brand mentions than ChatGPT in its outputs, but also functions closer to an academic paper than its Gemini sibling.
For brands, this means Gemini visibility and ChatGPT visibility are not the same thing. (This data set showed clear evidence that there wasn’t much overlap with ChatGPT citations/mentions and Gemini citation/mentions for the same prompts.) Optimizing for one does not help with the other. There is no single “AI visibility metric.” There are at least 4 different behavioral systems running in parallel.
3. Strong Brands Get Named In…
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