Brand Is What Gets You Remembered. By People… and Now by AI.
Brand has always been talked about in terms of awareness, recognition, and preference. About standing out. About being memorable. About being the one people think of first.
All still true, all still relevant, nothing’s changed in that sense. But the landscape has.
Because increasingly, it’s not just people deciding which brands emerge as winners. It’s AI that’s deciding.
As more of us turn to ChatGPT or the rest of the LLM gang and ask:
- “Who’s the best supplier for…”
- “What’s the most reliable platform for…”
- “Which company should I use for…”
… your gang members like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity are shaping how people discover, compare and shortlist businesses with their answers.
And they’re not just drawing from websites or listing paid ads like old school search has until now. They’re answering based on what they’ve learned from conversations, from forums, from social platforms, from places like LinkedIn.
Where Are LLMs Looking?
According to a Semrush study from last October, LinkedIn is now the second most cited source for Large Language Models. Only Reddit ranks higher.
That means what’s being said about your category, your competitors and your brand on channels like LinkedIn is directly influencing how AI understands your market.
And that should fundamentally shift how you think about your brand. Because authority isn’t just a human signal anymore. It’s a machine signal too.
Brand Building & Authority
AI doesn’t just scan websites. It learns from conversations. And if your brand isn’t part of the conversations they’re training themselves on, you’re not going to make any buying shortlist, get recommended or get ‘surfaced’ (another nice new term to get used to). By the time the question’s asked, AI’s have ‘scoured and devoured’ to develop an understanding of your category and the ‘best’ brands within it (as they view it), and you’ve not made the cut. Ouch.
Which raises a pretty uncomfortable question. If your brand isn’t memorable, isn’t showing up consistently, doesn’t have a clear positioning, isn’t communicating a message that resonates, and isn’t present in conversations, do you even exist in AI’s world?
When you look at it in those terms, brand building stops being a “nice to have” and actually becomes commercial protection. Your brand is your competitive advantage, and it can fight tooth and nail hard to protect and de-risk your business with all it’s might (and it’s got might). Because strong brands:
- get remembered
- get talked about
- get searched for
- establish authority
Everything our LLM buddies are looking for to give us their answers.
On the other hand, weak, inconsistent or generic brands blend into the category background. Which means they’re less likely to be talked about. And if they aren’t talked about, they get ignored by all the AI gang.
So the reality is you either come to mind through great brand building work that makes you memorable and talked about, or you don’t come up at all.
Mental Availability is the Real Battleground
Distinctive brand assets, clear positioning, and consistent delivery are what build memory structures in people’s minds and create mental availability.
And now, they’re how you earn your place in conversations on channels or platforms like LinkedIn, to get yourself in the good books with the AI gang, and get ‘surfaced’ by them (that one again).
Brand has always been about being remembered. It’s just that now, you’re being remembered by machines as well as people.
So if your brand:
- isn’t distinctive
- isn’t consistent
- and isn’t clearly positioned
You’re not just losing human memory. You’re losing machine memory too. Which has a knock-on effect for discoverability and ultimately, revenue. That’s not a creative problem. That’s a commercial risk.
The Bottom Line
So back to the point about LinkedIn being one of the most cited sources for LLMs.
If LinkedIn is the second main source LLMs are drawing from, then what you say, how you say it, and how you show up matters more now than it ever has. And probably more than most businesses realise.
The world of discovery is changing. People aren’t just searching. They’re asking AI. And AI is answering. The brands that’ll win are the clearest, the most distinctive, the most consistent. They’re the ones that build mental availability. They’re the ones that show up in conversations. And increasingly, they’re the ones AI learns from, takes a shine to and references.
If your brand isn’t showing up in the conversations, it won’t show up in the answer.
So in a world where machines are helping decide who gets seen, and being memorable is no longer just an option, if you want your brand to show up on LinkedIn, in the conversations LLMs are learning from, and in the answers they give, let’s chat.
Together we can sharpen your positioning, nail your identity and hone your messaging to build a stronger, distinctive brand that stands out from the crowd, gets talked about, builds authority, and becomes the answer.
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You might also fancy reading about how brand is your company’s greatest de-risker.
