When someone says "soft drink," you probably think Coca-Cola. When someone says "athletic shoes," Nike pops into your head.
That's brand salience. The brands that come to mind first for a category.
AI has the same thing. When users ask questions, certain brands surface first in AI responses. Others don't surface at all.
How AI brand salience works
When someone asks ChatGPT "what's a good CRM for small businesses?", the AI has to decide which brands to mention.
High salience brands get mentioned more often and more prominently. They're the default recommendations. Low salience brands might be mentioned as alternatives, or omitted entirely.
This isn't random. AI salience comes from patterns the AI learned.
Training data presence. How much did the AI learn about your brand during training? Were you mentioned frequently in its training data, or barely there?
Web presence. How often are you mentioned on authoritative sites? Do industry publications reference you? Do experts cite you?
Category association. How strongly is your brand associated with the category? When people talk about CRMs for small businesses, do they mention you?
Recent signals. For AI tools that search in real-time, current content and mentions matter. A brand that's getting attention now might surface more than one that's been quiet.
Measuring your AI brand salience
You can't measure salience directly. You can't see what's happening inside the AI. But you can measure its effects.
Mention rate is the clearest signal. How often does AI mention you for relevant queries? High mention rate suggests high salience.
Position tells you more. When you're mentioned, are you first or fifth? First-mention suggests stronger salience.
Unprompted mentions are revealing. Does AI mention you when the query doesn't include your name? That suggests strong category association.
Consistency across platforms adds confidence. If you're salient on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, your salience is robust, not platform-specific.
Building AI brand salience
Increase category association. Be known for what you do. Content, PR, and marketing that reinforces your category position helps AI associate you with relevant queries. If you want to be the first CRM mentioned for freelancers, you need to be the brand that consistently shows up when people talk about CRMs for freelancers.
Build consistent presence. Your brand name, what you do, who you serve. Consistent information across authoritative sites builds clear brand recognition. When 10 sources describe you the same way, AI forms a clearer picture.
Create definitive content. Comprehensive, authoritative content in your domain signals expertise. AI associates expert sources with relevant topics. If you want AI to think of you when users ask about your category, be the definitive source on that category.
Earn third-party mentions. Reviews on credible sites, press coverage, industry analysis. These signals boost salience. AI learns from what the web says about you.
Salience builds over time
Brand salience isn't a campaign. It's cumulative.
Every mention, every citation, every piece of authoritative content reinforces the association. The brands investing in AI visibility now are building salience that will compound as AI search grows.
Your competitor who started building AI salience six months ago has a head start. The longer you wait, the harder it becomes to catch up.
Tracking salience changes
Monitor your AI mention rate over time. Increasing mentions across relevant queries indicates growing salience. Declining mentions suggest competitors are gaining ground.
Tools like Mentionable track these metrics systematically across multiple AI platforms. You see not just where you stand, but the direction you're heading.
Because salience isn't just about today's visibility. It's about building the association that makes you the default recommendation for years to come.