by Nycole Walsh
Spring is here. You’re clearing out your inbox, reviewing your agency roster, maybe taking another pass at that content calendar you built in January and haven’t looked at since. Good habits.
But while you’re tidying up, here’s a question worth asking: when someone types a question into ChatGPT or Claude about a problem your company solves, do you show up?
If you’re not sure, that’s your answer.
AI search has fundamentally changed what it means to be visible online, and a lot of brands are carrying around a lot of dead weight — outdated content, thin off-site documentation, a review profile nobody’s touched since 2022 that’s actively working against them. Spring is as good a time as any to audit what you’ve got, cut what’s not working, and build what you’re missing.
Here’s where to start.
Dust Off Your Content and Actually Fix It
Most content libraries are a mess. There are blog posts from four years ago that still rank for something, landing pages that haven’t been touched since a product pivot, and a “resources” section that’s mostly PDF downloads nobody requests.
AI search tools don’t reward the brand that published the most content, they reward the brand that answered the question best. That means your content needs to be organized around what your buyers are actually asking (full sentences, real scenarios), not keyword clusters that made sense in 2019.
A few things to look for when you’re doing the sweep:
- Answer-oriented pages: Does your content directly answer the questions your ICP is typing into ChatGPT? Not “best practices for X” (vague), but “how do I do X when Y is true” (specific, useful, citable).
- Old evergreen pieces: These are worth refreshing with updated structure. Think, clear headers, direct answers, linked sources. AI models are more likely to cite content they can parse quickly.
- Orphaned content: If something isn’t ranking, isn’t driving traffic, and isn’t part of any campaign, it’s just noise. Cut it or consolidate it.
Teams that optimize for AI answer sets are 93% more likely to generate meaningful AI-attributable leads than those that don’t. That gap is way too big to ignore.
Check What the Internet Thinks You Are
Your website is just one data point. AI search tools are pulling from the whole web, and if the picture of your brand across the rest of the internet is inconsistent, incomplete, or just wrong, that’s what’s getting fed back to buyers.
Think of it as a knowledge audit. Go look at:
- Your Wikipedia or Crunchbase entry (is it accurate?)
- Your G2, TrustRadius, or Capterra profiles (current product description? Recent reviews?)
- Your executives’ LinkedIn profiles. Not just whether they list the right company, but whether the bios actually say who you help and why.
- Recent press coverage (does it reflect your current positioning?)
This is how LLMs build their understanding of who you are. If the information is scattered, contradictory, or just thin, AI models have very little to work with, and you lose the mention.
Take a Hard Look at Your Off-Site Presence
This one surprises a lot of teams. You can have a beautiful, well-optimized website and still be invisible in AI search because the signal isn’t strong enough off your site.
Earned media, third-party citations, analyst coverage, and review sites are the credibility signals AI models use to decide whether your brand is worth citing.
Teams that invest in PR are 107% more likely to report meaningful lead volume from AI search. That correlation exists because earned coverage on high-authority domains is basically a vote of confidence that LLMs take seriously.
Some specific things to consider:
- Is your brand being covered in publications your ICP actually reads?
- Are you showing up in roundups, comparisons, and “best of” articles?
- When journalists or analysts write about your category, are you in it?
If the answer is mostly no, you have a credibility infrastructure problem (and it’s fixable).
Start Paying Attention to What You Can’t Yet Measure
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about AI visibility: most of it doesn’t show up in your current dashboards, and the tools to track it properly are still catching up.
67% of GTM leaders say traditional web analytics no longer tell the full story. Traffic can drop while your brand impressions hold steady. You can be cited in an AI-generated answer that sends zero clicks. Your numbers look stable while your share of the actual conversation shrinks.
About half of teams have started updating their dashboards to watch for things like how often their brand appears in AI results, whether the information being surfaced is accurate, and whether they’re being included in citations at all. But 44% of those same teams admit they haven’t found tools that actually do this well yet. Most are pairing whatever directional signals they can pull with manual spot-checking.
That manual approach is the most accessible place to start (for now). Pick five to ten questions your buyers are likely to ask an AI tool and go run them. In ChatGPT, in Perplexity, Claude etc. See if your brand comes up. See what it says. See who else is in the answer.
It’s not a dashboard. But it will tell you something real, fast.
The Bottom Line
Spring cleaning for your brand visibility doesn’t have to be a massive overhaul. A lot of it is maintenance…refreshing content that’s gone stale, filling in gaps in your off-site presence, making sure the internet’s understanding of your company is accurate and current.
But the window to get ahead of this is closing. Most teams are still figuring it out, which means the brands that do the work now will be the ones AI surfaces first when buyers come asking.
If you want the full framework for building and maintaining your brand’s AI visibility, our PR in the Age of AI playbook is a good place to start.
Ready to audit your brand’s AI visibility? Let’s talk.
