AI SEO

AI SEO is not a single tool or a magic ranking factor. It is a set of activities aimed at one outcome: being cited as a source or recommended brand when an AI model answers a question. The models powering ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and others generate answers by reading existing web pages. They summarize, synthesize, and cite those pages. If your business is not on the pages these models read for a given topic, you will not appear in the answer.

This creates two distinct channels of work. The first is measurement: you need to know which questions your buyers are asking these engines, and you need to track whether and how your business appears in the answers over time. The second is influence: you need to get your business onto the specific pages the models are reading. In practice, this means earning backlinks from authoritative, relevant sources that the AI trusts. The work is concrete, specific, and focused on sources, not on manipulating the AI directly.

Vendors in this space typically sell one of three things: tracking dashboards, content generation services, or link placement packages. Tracking dashboards show estimates of how often a brand is mentioned in AI conversations, often based on extrapolated data from panels or web scraping. Content services promise to create 'AI-optimized' articles designed to be picked up as sources. Link placement packages commit to delivering a certain number of backlinks from domains they claim have AI visibility, frequently sold on a per-placement basis.

The pricing is often opaque or tied to outcomes the vendor controls. You might see offers like 'from $500 per month for visibility tracking' or '$250 per placed link'. Some vendors sell annual contracts upfront, presenting a monthly rate that is only available if you pay for the full year. The published price ladder for Mentionry, for comparison, is a free seven-day trial, then $99 a month for the Starter plan, and Enterprise is quoted individually. These are monthly prices; an annual term is available at a lower effective rate.

The primary risk is paying for signals that do not influence the AI models you care about. An AI visibility dashboard might show your brand name appearing in conversations, but if that data is modeled from a small panel or social media, it may not reflect your actual standing in Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT. A link placed on a low-quality directory page might pass a traditional SEO metric like Domain Rating, but if that page is not among the sources the AI reads for your niche, the link does nothing for AI visibility.

Another significant risk is violating search engine guidelines. Google's link spam policy explicitly prohibits buying or selling links that pass ranking signals. A penalty for this lands on your website, not the vendor's. Many link placement services operate in this grey area, promising links that pass 'link equity'. If a vendor promises to place links for you, ask how they acquire those placements. If money changes hands for the link itself, you are likely buying a policy violation.

There is also a data recency problem. AI models and the sources they trust can change quickly. A report showing your visibility from three months ago is historical data, not a current measurement. Effective tracking requires running your specific prompts against the live engines on a schedule, daily, and recording the exact answer text, citations, and named entities. Without this, you are optimizing for yesterday's AI.

Ask specific questions about methodology. For a tracking service, ask: 'What engines do you measure? Do you run my specific prompts, or do you use estimated volume? Can I see the raw answer text you captured yesterday?' A legitimate provider will show you the recorded answers, the URLs cited, and the brands named. They will also clarify that they track only the prompts you set up; they cannot see the world's private ChatGPT conversations.

For an influence or link service, ask: 'How do you find the opportunities? Do you send pitches from my email, or do you place links directly?' A tool that sends outreach from your connected mailbox is aligning incentives correctly: you control the message and own the relationship. A service that places links directly is often buying them, which is risky. Also ask: 'How do you verify a link was earned?' The provider should check back after a pitch to confirm the link appeared, on which page, and with what anchor text. This post-placement verification is how you know what was actually earned, not just what was requested.

Examine what is not built. Be wary of providers claiming massive databases of 'AI-ready' sites or promising to fix 'broken links'. These are often repackaged traditional SEO tactics with an AI label. Authentic AI SEO is narrower: it finds the specific pages that currently link to your competitors and that AI models are reading, and it helps you earn a link there through legitimate outreach.

Mentionry focuses on two concrete actions: measuring exactly what the AI engines on your plan say about your business, and finding the specific, pitchable opportunities to earn a backlink from a source those engines read. It does not sell estimates, panels, or placements.

The measurement is direct. You write the questions your buyers ask. Mentionry runs each prompt on a schedule, three times per reading, once per engine per day. It records the full answer text, every URL the answer cited, every brand name mentioned, and the search queries the model used. From these records, it computes visibility, share of voice, and average position. Recording starts the day you add a prompt; there is no historical backfill because those past answers were not captured. A day when every run failed shows as a gap in the chart, not as zero visibility.

The opportunity engine works in two ways. The Mine channel finds pages that link to your competitors but not to you, plus resource pages and directories found by searching your niche. The Earn channel finds journalists asking for sources, podcasts booking guests, conferences taking speakers, awards taking entries, and articles that already name you without a link. Every opportunity is judged individually by a model that can reject it if your business cannot honestly answer the query. Every opportunity comes with a drafted email sent from your own connected mailbox, using your address and your domain. Nothing here is promised; Mentionry sends the pitch, but whether a link appears is the recipient's decision.

The verification is post-pitch. Every opening that was pitched is checked later to see if the link appeared, on which page, with what anchor. If a link is later removed or turned nofollow, the scoreboard updates to reflect that change. This reports what was earned, not just what was requested. The system is designed to exclude paid placements, as buying links violates search engine policy. Given a reply asking for payment, the drafting model will decline and explain why.

It is important to understand the boundaries of the tool to set correct expectations. Mentionry does not place, publish, or deliver links. It sends a pitch from your mailbox. It does not have a database of pre-vetted sites or a registry of contacts. It finds opportunities live, judges them, and drafts the outreach. It does not track private user conversations in ChatGPT or other engines; it only records the answers to your own tracked prompts.

Mentionry does not pull in queries from Help a Reporter Out (HARO), Source of Sources, or Connectively automatically. Those platforms work, and they are not automatic. HARO is live and free. You can paste a query from any of them into Mentionry, and it will be judged and drafted like any other opening, but it does not log into those services on your behalf. The tool also does not perform broken link building, anchor text audits, or manage relationship inventories. Its scope is measured AI visibility and the direct outreach to earn links from the sources that influence it.