What does AI say about me?
An AI answer recommended Liam Darmody as a personal branding expert who understands AI search. Then Google quoted his LinkedIn post within hours. He watched both happen from inside the dashboard.
Last week I opened a dashboard and found myself in it.
I was looking at mention tracking inside Brandi (the AI visibility platform where I work) when an AI answer came across my screen. The question it was answering:
"Which personal branding experts also understand how AI search engines work?"
The answer named six people and I was one of them.
The list had William Arruda on it, who the answer called the clearest established personal-branding name moving into AI visibility. It had Michelle B Griffin, Bhavik Sarkhedi, Leonid Bugaev, Margaret Bourne, none of whom I recognized except Michelle Griffin, who invited me to be on her podcast a few years ago. She rocks.
And then it had me, described as "very directly positioned at the intersection," doing entity building and quotable points of view and understanding how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google describe an individual.
It's amazing to read that about yourself, I won't pretend otherwise, but the line that stopped me wasn't the one about me. It was this:
"ranking on Google" and "being recommended by AI" are not the same objective.
That sentence is the entire thesis of everything I've been building toward, handed back to me by the machine itself.
Google's AI Overview cited my LinkedIn post the same morning
On September 21, I posted on LinkedIn about how lately I've been starting my posts with a "How to..." line, written the way I'd want the answer to sound if someone asked. The post opened: "How to build brand loyalty from non-customers."
A few hours later I searched that exact phrase. Google's AI Overview answered with my line about creating affinity, trust, and preference before a single transaction ever occurs, LinkedIn citation attached, my post sitting right underneath as the source.
The post was five hours old.
What the AI was actually citing
I could also see which pages the AI leaned on for that original query. The top five, by share of answers citing them:
- William Arruda's Forbes guide to making your personal brand AI-visible, cited in 44% of answers
- A personal-brand AI search guide from Winsignia, 38%
- Leonid Bugaev's post on building an expert brand for AI search, 31%
- An AI SEO services page from Unified Branding Experts, 31%
- Arruda's follow-up Forbes piece on checking whether your personal brand is visible to AI, rounding out the top five
The pattern is hard to miss. They're direct answers to direct questions. Specific, quotable, no throat-clearing. Which, I think, is exactly why a five-hour-old LinkedIn post that opened with "How to..." got picked up the same day.
You can't improve what you can't see
Two mentions in two days. One about who I am, one about something I wrote that morning.
I think the mention is the least interesting part of this story.
The interesting part is that I saw both of them happen. Most people have no idea what AI says about them. They can't see it, so they can't learn from it, so they keep publishing into the void and hoping. I watched an answer recommend me yesterday and quote me this morning, and I could see the exact query, the exact wording, the exact source it pulled.
That's the whole ballgame. You can't improve what you can't see.
One data point is not a formula, and I'm not selling you one. But I'm going to keep opening posts with the question I'm answering, because twice now the machine has shown me it notices.
Have you ever asked an AI about yourself? I'd genuinely love to know what it said.
Hi5,
LD
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