How to Influence What AI Says About Your Brand — with Dan M. Jones | Ep. 268

Can you influence whether AI recommends your business? And which sources shape what it says about you? Recorded at BrightonSEO, Björn Darko sits down with Dan M. Jones to explore how SEO, reputation management and AI visibility are coming together. Dan shares how posts in public Facebook groups unexpectedly brought a local speaking club into Google’s AI Overviews—and attracted new members. We discuss his experiments with LinkedIn posts, third-party websites, PDFs and digital PR, plus why getting content indexed became a crucial part of his approach. We also explore brand mentions, reviews, entity information and grounding pages. How do you build a consistent reputation across the web? How can you measure progress when answers change with every prompt? And what happens when AI agents start choosing businesses for us? A practical conversation about the experiments working for Dan today, the limitations of measuring AI visibility, and why brand reputation deserves a bigger place in your search strategy. 🎙️ This episode is in English. KEY TAKEAWAYS • Third-party mentions can help reinforce what your own website says about your business. • Public Facebook groups and LinkedIn posts are worth testing as sources of search visibility. • Publishing is only part of the process: check whether your content actually gets indexed. • Communicate your business facts, expertise and genuine achievements consistently across platforms. • Grounding pages can give AI systems a clear reference for who you are and what you do. • AI visibility is difficult to measure: prompts, personalization and changing sources affect the answers. • Dan’s experiments show current opportunities, but individual results are no guarantee of lasting performance. CHAPTERS 00:00 Introduction: Dan M. Jones at BrightonSEO 01:36 How AI Overviews are changing SEO 02:54 Why third-party mentions matter 04:00 The Facebook groups experiment 06:55 “Post everywhere”: expanding your presence 10:11 LinkedIn, local search and indexing 13:36 Using PDFs and third-party websites 16:07 The role of indexing tools 17:32 Reputation management and digital PR 19:09 Consistent brand narratives across platforms 22:09 Reviews, business facts and grounding pages 24:17 Measuring AI visibility and query fan-out 26:49 AI agents and reputation 28:06 Building a search strategy on a limited budget 29:25 Dan’s prediction for the future of search