How to Improve Your Brand's LLM Visibility: A 90-Day Playbook | ShubHQ

You ran the free LLM visibility checker. You typed in your brand. ChatGPT didn’t know who you are, Perplexity cited a competitor, and Claude gave a generic answer that mentioned three companies, none of them yours. Now what?

This is the question we hear most often from founders after their first audit. The diagnosis is easy; the prescription is where everyone gets stuck. So here’s the playbook we actually use: a 90-day plan with weekly checklists, the three signals that genuinely move the needle, and an honest list of tactics that waste your time. No theory, no “build a brand.” Just what to do on Monday morning.

Why Your Brand Might Be Invisible to ChatGPT

LLMs don’t crawl the web in real time the way Google does. They learn from a training corpus, a frozen snapshot of the internet plus, increasingly, a live retrieval layer (Bing for ChatGPT, Google for Gemini, a mix for Perplexity). If your brand isn’t in the training data and isn’t surfaced by the retrieval layer, you’re invisible. Period.

The good news: the corpus is predictable. (We go deeper into the mechanics in our guide on how AI visibility tracking actually works.) LLMs over-index on a small set of source types because those sources are clean, structured, and high-trust. Get into those sources and you get into the answers. Get ignored by them and no amount of blog posting on your own domain will save you.

The Three Signals LLMs Actually Care About

Forget the 200 “ranking factors” SEO people talk about. For LLM visibility, three signal categories do roughly 90% of the work.

1. Encyclopedic Sources

Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, G2, Product Hunt, GitHub READMEs, official documentation sites. These are structured, fact-dense, and disproportionately weighted in training data because they’re easy for a model to extract clean assertions from (“X is a Y founded in Z”).

If your company has a Wikipedia page, you start the race 50 meters ahead. If you don’t, and most early-stage brands don’t qualify yet, Wikidata, Crunchbase, and a properly filled G2/Product Hunt profile are the realistic substitutes. A complete Crunchbase entry with funding, founders, and a clear one-line description gets pulled into answers more often than founders realize.

2. Authentic Community Discussions

Reddit, Hacker News, Quora, Stack Overflow, niche Discord servers that get indexed, and increasingly Lemmy and specialist forums. LLMs love these sources because they contain real user language: the actual questions buyers ask and the actual comparisons they make.

A single thread on r/SaaS where five people compare your tool to two competitors is worth more than ten blog posts on your own site. Why? Because the model sees independent voices, real context, and natural language matching the queries future users will type. This is also why ChatGPT will sometimes recommend a tool with 200 users over one with 50,000. The small one got talked about in the right places.

3. Third-Party Authority Mentions

Press coverage, podcast appearances, expert blog roundups, newsletter features, conference talks with public transcripts. The pattern here is someone with credibility says your name in a substantive context. A two-sentence mention in a TechCrunch article outperforms a 2,000-word post on your own blog, every time.

This is the signal that compounds slowest but lasts longest. A 2022 podcast transcript can still be feeding ChatGPT answers in 2026.

The 90-Day Plan

Twelve weeks. Roughly five focused hours per week. If you can’t commit that, cut scope rather than stretching the timeline. Half-done outreach is worse than no outreach.

Week 1–2: Audit + Wikipedia Eligibility Check

• Run the visibility audit against your top 20 buyer-intent prompts. Save the baseline; you’ll re-run it in Week 11.
• For each prompt where you’re invisible, write down which competitor was cited and what source the model seemed to pull from. Patterns will emerge.
• Check Wikipedia notability: do you have at least three independent, non-trivial pieces of coverage in reliable secondary sources? If yes, draft a page (or hire someone who’s done it before; DIY-ing Wikipedia almost always ends in deletion). If no, skip Wikipedia and double down on Crunchbase, Wikidata, G2, and Product Hunt profile completeness instead.
• Audit your existing third-party footprint: search "yourbrand" site:reddit.com, same for news.ycombinator.com, quora.com, and major industry publications. Make a spreadsheet. This is your starting position.

Week 3–6: Reddit/Quora Authority Building

This is the highest-leverage block of the entire 90 days. Do it well and the rest gets easier.

• Identify 5–8 subreddits where your buyers genuinely hang out. Not where you wish they were. Where they actually post.
• Spend Week 3 reading only. Get a feel for tone, mod rules, and which kinds of posts get upvoted vs. removed. Skip this and you will get banned.
• Week 4 onward: comment substantively on 3–5 threads per week. The goal is not to mention your product. The goal is to be the person who answers the question better than anyone else in the thread. Brand mentions come later, and sparingly.
• On Quora, find the 10–20 highest-traffic questions in your space and write genuinely useful answers. Quora answers age extremely well in LLM corpora because they’re question-shaped, which is exactly the shape of an LLM prompt.
• Track everything in a simple sheet: thread URL, date, upvotes, whether your brand came up organically (from you or others). You’ll need this in Week 11.

Week 7–10: Press Outreach + Podcast Pitching

Now you have a story (some traction, some community presence). Use it.

• Build a list of 30 podcasts in adjacent niches, not your exact category, adjacent. The “founder of a [your-category] tool” angle plays well on growth, indie hacker, vertical-SaaS, and operator-focused shows.
• Pitch with a specific angle, not a request for “an interview.” Hosts get 50 vague pitches a week; they accept the one with a concrete topic and a fresh data point.
• For press: identify 10 journalists who cover your space and have written something in the last 60 days. Reply to their actual articles with one useful data point or counter-take. Build the relationship before you need it.
• One newsletter feature, one podcast, and one industry-blog roundup mention over four weeks is a successful outcome at this stage. Don’t measure yourself against companies five years ahead of you.

Week 11–12: Re-measure + Iterate

• Re-run the exact same 20 prompts from Week 1. Compare side by side.
• Expect partial wins: maybe you now appear in 4 of 20 prompts where before you appeared in 0. That is a real result. Visibility compounds; the second 4 takes less work than the first 4.
• For prompts where you’re still invisible, look at what changed for the competitor who got cited. Almost always: a new Reddit thread, a new podcast, a new piece of press. The signal type that worked for them is the signal type you should chase next quarter.
• Pick two of the three signal categories to double down on for the next 90 days based on what actually moved. Drop the one that didn’t.

What NOT to Waste Time On

Most “AI SEO” advice circulating right now is recycled SEO advice with the labels changed. (If you want the longer breakdown of what actually does work at the optimization layer, see our AEO optimization guide.) Skip these:

• Stuffing your site with FAQ schema. Helps Google snippets, near-zero impact on LLM answers.
• Writing “ChatGPT-optimized” blog posts on your own domain. Your domain is the last place LLMs look. Self-published content doesn’t carry independent-source weight.
• Mass-posting to Medium, dev.to, and content farms. LLMs have largely learned to discount these. Effort:reward is brutal.
• Buying backlinks. Same reason it stopped working for Google in 2014. Models can smell it.
• Obsessing over a single prompt. If you’re invisible on “best X tool” but appearing on five comparison prompts, you’re winning. Track the portfolio, not one query.
• Daily re-checking. Visibility shifts on a multi-week cycle, not a daily one. Check weekly at most or you’ll drive yourself crazy and over-correct.

Run the 90 Days, Then Run Them Again

LLM visibility is not a project. It’s a posture. The brands that show up in AI answers two years from now are the ones doing some version of this loop continuously: auditing, building presence in encyclopedic and community sources, earning third-party mentions, re-measuring.

The single biggest mistake we see is founders running the audit once, feeling discouraged, and going back to writing blog posts on their own domain. Don’t do that. Run the playbook. Re-measure in 90 days. The compounding is real and it starts faster than you’d think. Most teams see their first new citations within six weeks.