Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at the Search Central Live Shanghai 2026 event on May 15th that he and Google strongly warns against buying or manipulating mentions brand mentions to try to show up in the AI responses, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
I’m seeing our brand mentioned in ChatGPT and other LLM responses, but none of those mentions have a citation link. At this stage, I don’t even know which one is better for SEO purposes.…
We tested 300 prompts to measure how common brand mentions are in LLM responses. See the data on how brand, soft-brand, and non-brand queries impact visibility, including a surprising look at the volume of brand mentions generated by Gemini.