I recently compared my March 2025 “What works well in LLMs” analysis with Ahrefs’ May 2025 study of 75,000 brands, and we independently arrived at the same surprising conclusion about AI search visibility.
It turns out, brand matters – a lot.
Today’s Memo is a deep dive into a concept that’s often talked about (but rarely measured well): Brand authority.
In this issue, I’m unpacking:
- What brand authority really is, and how it’s different from topical authority.
- Why brand search volume is the strongest predictor of AI chatbot mentions.
- How Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines frame brand reputation and trust.
- Tactical steps you can take to build and track brand authority.
- A brand-new framework (premium only) for live brand authority dashboards.
If you care about AI visibility or becoming the go-to answer in your niche, brand authority needs to be on your radar.
Let’s define it. Track it. Build it.
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Brand authority has gained a new quality in the context of AI search.
In “What Content Works Well in LLMs?,” I analyzed over 7,000 citations to see which content performs best.
The conclusion?
Brand search volume has the strongest influence!
After matching many metrics with AI chatbot visibility, I found one factor that stands out more than anything else: Brand search volume. The number of AI chatbot mentions and brand search volume have a correlation of .334 – pretty good in this field. In other words, the popularity of a brand broadly decides how visible it is in AI chatbots.
Ahrefs came to a similar conclusion:[1]
Our correlation of 0.392 for branded search volume closely supports Kevin’s findings – but we’ve uncovered even stronger signals.
The problem: Topical authority is often fuzzy and undefined. The implication is that people use it as an argument to justify actions that are actually not related.
So, I want to double-click on the LLM study and:
- Clearly define brand authority and show how it’s different from topical authority.
- Explain its role in AI search.
- Show you how to build brand authority.
- Share a concept for measuring brand authority.
A Crisp Definition Of Brand Authority
Brand authority started as a metric by Moz, built on Google’s Quality Rater guidelines, and then became an industry term.[2]
What Is Brand Authority?
Brand authority is the cumulative trust, prominence, and perceived expertise a domain earns (across the open web and offline sources) that search engines and LLMs use to decide whether and how prominently to surface that brand as an answer.
Brand authority is really just another name for reputation measured across:
- Branded search demand.
- High-quality citations.
- Authoritative backlinks.
- Expert/press mentions.
- Positive user engagement.
How Is Brand Authority Different From Topical Authority?
Topical authority is the depth and breadth of expertise and trust in a defined topic niche, while brand authority applies to all topics a domain targets.
You could call brand authority the sum of topical authority across an entire brand, its domain, and all targeted topics.
From “How to Measure Topical Authority“:
The idea behind topical authority is that by covering all aspects of a topic (well), sites get a ranking boost because Google sees them as an authority in the topic space.
On the other end of the spectrum would be sites that only touch the surface of a topic.
This handy visual from Clearscope.io’s article “Topical Authority: The What and Why” breaks this down simply:[3]
How To Think About Brand Authority
Part of what makes brand authority such a fuzzy term is its contextual quality: Authority is query and topic-dependent.
Some topics have clearly authoritative sites or brands. (Think NerdWallet for credit cards, The Zebra for insurance, and Nike for sneakers.)
Others don’t. For example, a very new topic where authority isn’t established (you know, like GEO/AIO optimization).
Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines (GQRGs) speak about three types of authority:
- Unique Official Authority: Government sites for official documents; company sites for their own products.
- Recognized Authority: Well-known sources that are go-to references for specific topics.
- Informal Authority: For non-YMYL (or Your Money or Your Life) topics, reputation information may be less formal. Popularity, user engagement, and user reviews can be considered evidence of reputation for non-YMYL websites.
Even the size of a site or business matters in deciding when authority is most important. (For more to consider, read my take on the question: Does Google give big sites an unfair SEO advantage?)
Again, from the GQRGs:
You should expect to find some reputation information for large websites and well-known content creators. People or businesses who create content in a professional capacity typically have some reputation information available. However, small websites may have little or no reputation information. This is not indicative of high or low quality.
Brand authority is often mentioned in the same breath as E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthiness), a concept in the GQRGs to describe ideal results.
Important to note: The GQRGs guidelines say that trust is the most important factor.
If the results aren’t trustworthy, none of the other four factors matter.
As a result, you need to be known for a topic and also come across as trustworthy, which is strongly reflected in my recent AIO usability study:
Emotion is tied to risk. Searchers are internally asking What’s at stake? when making a decision to trust a result
And as a result, high-stakes niches – or even expensive products – receive more skepticism and scrutiny from users.
This skepticism plays out in the form of clicks – a.k.a. your opportunities to convince people that you’re trustworthy.
Takeaways:
- Measure brand authority in the context of your competitors.
- Recognize that your ability to compete with high-authority brands depends on industry and targeted topics. (Example: A regional medical private practice will have difficulty competing against WebMD for visibility on generic medical topics, but would likely excel in location-specific content.)
- Ensure your site is the unique official authority for your products and services. If not, find out why and urgently resolve it.
Ready to make tracking brand authority across metrics easier? I came up with a concept for a brand authority live dashboard, and premium subscribers will get it at the end of this memo. Should save you tons of time!
How Can You Influence Brand Authority?
The main underlying challenge with brand authority? That so many factors influence it.
And for growth marketers and SEO pros, there are often limitations on the inputs you can control.
What you can influence:
- What your brand’s website or content says about itself → via brand positioning, reflection of E-E-A-T.
- What others say about the brand, website, or your content creators → via data stories and first-party data.
- What is visible on the page, including the main content and supporting sections, like reviews and comments → via content production effort, design & layout, trust signals.
- User reviews → via providing a great product, service, and experience to submit those reviews.
What is hard to influence:
- Customer service/support.
- Sales experience.
- Product quality/product market fit.
- Brand campaigns.
- Company positioning & messaging.
Tactical Steps You Can Take
1. Research your reputation to find sites that have an outsized impact:
- Search queries raters use: [ibm -site:ibm.com], [“ibm.com” -site:ibm.com], [ibm reviews -site:ibm.com] (these search operators surface up branded mentions across the web).
- Look for articles, references, recommendations by experts, and other credible information written by people about the website.
- Sources must be independent (not created by the website itself).
- Note that sources of mentions/links like news articles, Wikipedia articles, magazines, and ratings from independent organizations signal stronger authority.
- Different types of evidence matter for different industries:
- News sites: Journalistic awards, Pulitzer prizes.
- Medical sites: Recognition from professional medical organizations.
- Ecommerce: Customer service reputation, BBB ratings.
- Academic: Citations, peer recognition.
2. Use a tool like Semrush Brand Mentions/Ahrefs Mention Tracker/other third-party tools.
- Track mentions.
- Grow the number of mentions while using positive sentiment as a guardrail.
- Differentiate between products that get negative reviews by default.
- Monitor differences in backlink authority for your brand vs. peers (via Ahrefs DR, Moz DA).
3. Analyze and optimize your third-party reviews.
- React to bad reviews (notice if, in some spaces, you only get bad reviews → which ones?).
- How to analyze? → Can you build a small tool that scrapes reviews from G2, Trustpilot, etc., and summarizes their sentiment?
- Look at the average rating.
- Review what the 5- and 1-star reviews highlight (both positive + negative sentiment).
4. Analyze whether the right pages show up for branded queries (or even exist in the first place) to ensure you offer all important information to users, Google, and LLMs:
- Review Google Search Console for “brand + topic” impression tracking.
For example, in the screenshot below, you see a site that gets impressions for the term “{brand} document management” but doesn’t have a dedicated landing page for it.
Google ranks the homepage and other product pages at the top, but the user experience would be much better with a dedicated landing page.
5. Opt into LLM-citation tracking through a tool.
I’ve included a few of my favorite options below:
- Profound.
- Scrunch.
- Xofu.
- Semrush.
- Ahrefs.
6. Brand lift & awareness surveys.
- What to measure: Unaided/Aided brand recall in your category – Perceived expertise (e.g., “Which brand would you consult for X?”).
- Why it matters: Directly tests real-world authority in user minds – separate from search behavior.
- How to track: Run sub-100-respondent surveys via Google Surveys or Pollfish quarterly.
7. Sentiment & themes via social listening.
- What to measure: Net sentiment score (positive vs. negative mentions) on Twitter, Reddit, forums, and Slack communities; share of voice vs. key rivals in topical conversations (e.g., “skincare AI recommendations”).
- Why it matters: Authority isn’t just volume – it’s perceived expertise and trust. Social buzz reveals genuine endorsement or criticism.
- How to track: Tools like Semrush Brand Monitoring, Ahrefs, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, or Meltwater; set up topic-specific streams for “brand + topic” keywords.
One of the best ways to make sure the tactical steps you’re taking to build brand authority are actually moving the needle is to measure and monitor your efforts.
Below, I’ve just dropped a brand authority live dashboard for premium subscribers.
If you don’t have something like this set up already, this should save you hours (maybe even a couple of days) setting up something on your own. Check it out and try it. 👇👇👇
For premium subscribers only: A brand authority live dashboard concept.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
