Measuring Your Brand for SEO

This edition of the SEO Riddler is brought to you by Ahrefs. Ahrefs is an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform. Thank you Ahrefs for sponsoring this post!

Obviously AI Mode is all the latest hype and with it comes a lot of speculation on the future of search. I think the scary part is learning (and knowing) that the changes Google is introducing to search with AI are not well thought, or based on user needs. They're just in panic mode trying to stay relevant. What's even worse is when an ex senior UX designer at Google compares this with what happened 13 years ago with Google+... we all know how that ended 😏

Apparently, when Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “Search itself will continue to change profoundly in [2025]”, he didn't know exactly yet what he was talking about 😄

Anyhow... last week, I blogged about a tactic to maintain organic traffic despite ai overviews. This week is no different, let's go!

TL;DR

• Google’s AI rollouts are driven by fear, not strategy.
• “Build a strong brand” is vague advice.
• To improve something, you need to measure it. That includes your brand.
• Measurement without action is just reporting.
• Cliché but still true: If you're not using reddit for your brand, you're already behind.
• Try targeting People Also Ask queries with [reddit] modifiers.
• Exact match domains aren’t the flex they used to be.
• More brand mentions does not mean more traffic. There are other factors in play.
• No one has all the answers, sorry!

Build a strong brand (groundbreaking, I know 😁)

One of the most ambiguous SEO advice you'll see circulating on SEO LinkedIn and other social networks is "build a strong brand". This is pretty much similar to when Google says "create helpful content"... tell me HOW???

Measuring your brand

The first step to get anything done in a new space is... measuring! When you start monitoring your brand in SERPs and AI Overviews, you will get insights on how to improve and better optimize.

That's today's tip really and for the rest of this blog, I will show you a few ways that measuring can help you pull actionable insights!

Action-oriented measuring!

Let's look at "perplexity" as an example. I'm using the Brand Radar Tool by Ahrefs, take a moment to check it out! It's very interesting to see that healthline.com is one of the top websites mentioning perplexity as a brand... Also the usual suspect comes on top, Reddit.

What insights can we gain from this?

• Reddit: so much has been written about the importance of reddit for your brand since many LLMs use it for training data. You are already behind if you're not on reddit. If I were perplexity, here's an SEO checklist for reddit:
  • have my own subreddit
  • have a social media person/team dedicated for reddit
  • find branded keywords with [reddit] modifier, check out the related URLs and create posts/comments where relevant.

• I came across this interesting “people also asked over the weekend, and I'm testing going after keywords with [reddit] modifier, but checking out the related subreddit and comments, and summarizing them. Test will be live today on LinkedIn, let's see if this works! So what I'm trying to say is, you can experiment with going after those keywords in the content on your website as well!

• Healthline: if I were perplexity, I would check why I am getting cited/mentioned on Healthline, and learn from that. You can easily do that with the Brand Radar Tool by Ahrefs. For example, I clicked on Wikipedia mentions, and I got a list of AI Overviews where a Wikipedia URL that mentions "perplexity" was cited in AI Overviews!

In this case I learned that, "perplexity" as a word is used in different contexts, and that there's an opportunity for the brand to be mentioned on any search engine related content on Wikipedia, time to reach out to Wikipedia editors to get more of those mentions in relevant content (do not spam!)

More mentions equals more interest?

Another interesting insight is that more mentions of your brand are not necessarily correlated with more traffic! Looking at this example, I decided to compare "chatgpt" and other LLMs traffic vs mentions.

In this graph you'll see that Claude has the highest number of brand mentions online. It delivers better output than chatgpt btw for coding exercises sometimes!

But when we look at traffic to those platforms, chatgpt comes on top!

What insights can we gain from this?

I think the conversation here is similar to what we say about backlinks, more is not more and clearly there are other factors at play when it comes to measuring your brand... mentions are not enough, but a good starting point.

Your brand name matters

An irrelevant thought,

There's never been a more important time for your brand name to matter in search than right now. As you saw in the analysis above, using exact match domains is more risky in 2025. If you want to build a strong brand that stands out in search, exact match domains are not the best choice. They can confuse AI tools like language models and make it harder for people to remember or recognize your brand.

Wrap up,

I don't have all the answers, and I don't think anyone does at this stage. We were just trying to figure what will stick to the wall with AI Overviews, when Google dropped the "AI Mode" bombshell on us last week!

Brand tactics for SEO are the way to go right now in my opinion. This is the best way to future proof your SEO strategy.

One tactic which is obvious is measuring your brand. But don't just measure to report, measure to find opportunities and test ideas.

That's that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

*Disclaimer: AI helped me improve this blog.

Please note that I'm terribly exhausted as I'm recovering from a back injury and flu, so a bit lower energy. I'm also working on my masters, I'm packing because I'm moving and many many more things... if you dm/email me expect a slow response...🤷