“Mentions are the new links” has become one of the most repeated phrases in AI search.
But which kind of mention?
In our previous research, we analyzed different brand factors alongside AI visibility—including web mentions, anchors, search volume, number of referring domains and so on.
This time, we zeroed in on brand mention types.
We compared seven of them, from Reddit threads to TikTok videos, with how often the same brand appears in AI answers.
In total, we studied 10,000 brands and 260M (non-branded) AI prompts.
Use the results as a starting point for deciding where to focus your PR and brand-building efforts.
As always, a huge thanks to our data scientist Xibeijia Guan for pulling the data together.
- Reddit is the strongest signal with a ~0.75 correlation on the Spearman scale.
- Press coverage (0.67) doesn’t beat general webpage mentions (0.70)
- ChatGPT is the least tied to off-site mentions, across 6 of 7 factors
- Brands with 10x more Reddit mentions get about 5.5x more AI mentions.
- AI mentions rise with web page mentions, but with diminishing returns—a brand with 10x more web page mentions has only about 3.7x more AI mentions.
Reddit mentions track AI visibility at 0.75, more than any other factor
Every mention type we studied correlated strongly with AI brand mentions across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews—but none more so than Reddit.
- Reddit mentions (in ranking threads): 0.75
- Domain mentions: 0.70
- Webpage mentions: 0.70
- Total traffic of webpage mentions: 0.70
- News article mentions: 0.67
- YouTube mentions: 0.64
- TikTok mentions: 0.60
The scores run from 0.59 to 0.75, where 1 would mean the brands rank in exactly the same order on both measures (off-site mentions and AI mentions).
The gap between the strongest and weakest factor here is small, meaning none of the seven mention types should be written off.
But, with a correlation of ~0.75, Reddit mentions (within the threads that rank in Google) track AI visibility more closely than any other factor.
That’s partly by design: Reddit licenses its content to both Google and OpenAI, giving them direct access to its posts and comments to train their models and surface in AI answers.
Across Brand Radar, our database of ~500M AI prompts, Reddit is also currently the second most cited source across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews—just behind Wikipedia.
Press coverage (0.67) doesn’t beat general webpage mentions (0.70)
Surprisingly, brand mentions in the press don’t seem to count for more.
“News article mentions” correlated a little less strongly with AI visibility than mentions across the web at large (0.67 combined versus 0.70).
In other words, press coverage still shows a strong positive correlation, but it doesn’t appear to carry extra weight than mentions on general webpages.
If you’re planning earned media, aim for a wide spread of mentions across many sites as well as big-name coverage.
Traffic-weighted mentions score 0.70, the same as raw mentions
Getting mentioned on a high-traffic page doesn’t appear to win a brand any more AI visibility than getting mentioned on a quiet one.