United States

Generative AI is everywhere now. You see it in content, campaigns, customer experiences, and even internal workflows. It promises speed, scale, and efficiency, but there’s a harder question sitting underneath all that progress; Do your audiences actually trust it?

Trust in the Age of AI: What Consumers Really Think About AI Generated Content

Today, PR teams aren’t just tracking media coverage and share of voice. They’re also measuring how their brand shows up in AI-generated answers, search summaries, and large language models (LLMs). This new LLM visibility layer is quickly becoming a critical part of PR performance.

15 Must-Have PR KPIs and How to Track Them

See how one platform can power every decision across PR, communications, and marketing.

The Meltwater Blog

Blog Topics: Generative Engine Optimization, Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing

Find out how you can leverage Facebook to boost your brand's online presence and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

Facebook Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage Instagram to boost your brand's visual appeal and gain a competitive edge. Explore our category page today!

Instagram Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage LinkedIN to grow your professional network and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

LinkedIn Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage TikTok to elevate your brand with creative content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

TikTok Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage X / Twitter to engage your audience effectively and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

X / Twitter Blog | Meltwater

Find out how you can leverage YouTube to create engaging video content and gain a competitive edge. Explore the Meltwater category page today!

YouTube Blog | Meltwater

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is transforming how brands show up in AI-powered search. Explore insights, strategies, and best practices to help your content rank and resonate across conversational engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot.

Explore insights and strategies for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to help your brand stay visible and discoverable in AI-powered search.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Blog Collection | Meltwater

Every day billions of conversations take place on social media: tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and much more.
Learn how to use social listening to make sense of all of that data.

On our social listening category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around social listening and social media monitoring. Read more.

Social Listening Blogs | Category

Business Reputation Management: What does it take to add reputation management to your marketing strategy? More importantly, how do you keep your reputation sparkly and shiny? Here’s your all-access guide to online reputation management for the long term.

On our reputation management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around business reputation management. Read more.

Reputation Management Blogs | Category

From your brand's logo to your website, your social media presence to your customer support—these elements combined are what constitutes a brand in the minds of customers. But, there are thousands of other businesses that have a logo, website, social media presence, and website. So, how can you position your business on the market and make it stand out from the competition?
The key to success is branding & brand management!

On our brand management category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around brand management. Build your strategy and reach your goals!

Brand Management Blogs | Category

Competitive intelligence and the act of collecting competitive data can be seen as growth drivers for a company. Our guide will help you understand the concept of competitive intelligence (CI) by answering questions such as: What is the definition of competitive intelligence? How is competitive intelligence useful to organizations? What is the goal of competitive intelligence? And more.

On our competitive intelligence category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around competitive intelligence. Learn how to stay ahead.

Competitive Intelligence Blogs | Category

Let’s dive into the customer journey framework and how to optimize the process by creating a customer journey map and using metrics that matter when analyzing the customer journey.

On our customer journey category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Customer Journey Blogs | Category

What Is Data Analytics? [Beginner’s Guide 2023]
How can I grow my business? 
How do customers interact with my newly launched product?
How do I increase the productivity of my employees?
How do I know if my marketing efforts are working?
We have just two words for you...Data analytics!

On our data analytics category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around AI and data analytics. Technical and still easy to understand.

AI & Data Analytics Blogs | Category

Public relations and media relations can add impact to any marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity for brands to grow their reach beyond traditional sales messages. PR helps to shape the image you want people to have of your brand.
So, what is PR and how do you use it? This guide shows you everything you need to know to build a strong public relations foundation.

On our public relations (PR) category page, you find all our blogs covering public relations and communications topics. Step up your PR game.

Public Relations (PR) Blogs | Category

We all know exactly what the roles of sales or accounting are in a company, right? We might even have a slight idea of what the IT guys are doing.
But there is another business discipline, that plays a crucial role in organizations, even more so during the pandemic – internal communications!
But what exactly do we mean by that, what purpose does it serve and what steps can you take to ensure you and your employees will communicate effectively?

On our internal communications category page, you find all our blogs about internal comms topics. Learn about the intranet, internal newsletters, and more.

Internal Communications Blogs | Category

As the internet has taken root in more areas of our lives — everything from entertainment to shopping to paying bills and more — traditional marketing is becoming less impactful. As any marketer knows, you need to focus on where your audience is if you want to reach them. Since the average person spends about seven hours a day online, it’s no surprise that content has maintained its hold on marketers.

Here's a closer look at what content marketing is and why it matters more than ever in our digital-first economy.

On our content marketing category page, you find blogs about content marketing topics. Learn about strategies, KPIs, tips, and more. Make your content king!

Content Marketing Blogs | Category

The rise of the influencer marketing space – today a $10 billion industry, growing 50% per year – is one of the clearest examples of how social media is transforming traditional marketing. These days having a business website, presence on social, PR coverage, and your own content isn’t enough to compete.
We'll dive into the intricacies of influencer marketing to help ensure that you're equipped with the insights needed to be successful in this space.

On our influencer marketing category page, you find blogs about influencer marketing topics. Build your strategy, find influencers, and measure results.

Influencer Marketing Blogs | Category

Have you just launched a new product or service that you want to get the word out about? Maybe you want to share with consumers why it is awesome and how it is so much better than the one your competitors offer.

Well, then, there is one thing you can't do without...Marketing!

On our marketing category page, you find blogs about marketing topics. Learn about all the different angles and types of marketing and improve your results.

Marketing Blogs | Category

In this guide, we want to give you a peek into the definition of social media management, the daily schedule of a social media manager, social media platforms to promote your business, and the do’s & don’ts of social media management.
Are you ready to begin the journey of becoming a social media superstar?

On our social media management category page, you find blogs about social media management topics. Build and manage your online community.

Social Media Management Blogs | Category

Building a following and using social media platforms to reach a wider audience requires a well-planned social media marketing strategy. In this guide, we’ll be looking at why social media marketing is so essential and how you can make it work for your business.

On our social media marketing category page, you find blogs about social media marketing topics. Learn how to get the highest paid social ROI!

Social Media Marketing Blogs | Category

In the fast-evolving realm of digital marketing and public relations, utilizing the right tools is crucial for success. Our interdisciplinary category showcases all the pertinent tools for digital marketing & PR. These tools help in enhancing your online presence and effectively reaching target groups, whether through reputation management, influencer marketing, or social media management.

On our digital marketing and PR tools category page, you find all our blogs covering topics around mapping and understanding the customer journey.

Digital Marketing & PR Tools Blogs | Category

Every day, billions of conversations take place online: on social media, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and more. Social listening is a strategy to help you sift through these huge volumes of social data to extract the pieces that are relevant to you.

When you’re growing a brand, you need eyes and ears everywhere your audience is. If you’re out of the loop, you have no idea what others are saying about your brand or a competitor. 

Trying to find these mentions manually is time-consuming, and sometimes it feels impossible. With social listening tools, you can automatically capture key mentions and the context surrounding them. Here’s a closer look at the social listening process and how you can use it to your advantage.

What Types of Data Can Be Measured Through Social Listening?

What Are the Top Use Cases for Social Listening?

Social Listening Case Study: Pride in London

Get Started with the Meltwater Social Listening Suite Today

Social listening refers to how you discover and analyze what people post on social media platforms. You filter the content you want to see by using keywords and search terms to narrow down the results.

Social listening platforms aggregate data from a wide range of sources, including Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, blogs, discussion forums, consumer review sites, and even podcasts.

If you're looking for some podcasts to inspire you, take a look at the best financial podcasts, the best PR podcasts, the best retail podcasts, the best social media podcasts, the best SEO podcasts, the best Shopify podcasts, the best eCommerce podcasts, the top branding podcasts, and the best tech podcasts out there.

With social listening, you can easily find out about important social media statistics and make use of specific social media analytics, like:

Social listening data also helps you dig down regionally. Find: social media statistics for Australia, social media statistics for the Philippines, social media statistics for Hong Kong, social media statistics for Singapore, social media statistics for Indonesia, social media statistics for Malaysia, UK social media statistics, social media statistics for Sweden, South African social media statistics or UAE social media statistics.

There’s some overlap between the terms social listening and social media monitoring. Monitoring is the first step; you’re combing millions of conversations for mentions that matter.

Listening is the second step; it uncovers the context behind those mentions so you can understand what’s being said. This helps you determine why those mentions matter and how to use that data accordingly.

Tip: Read this full blog about Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring: When and How to Use Effectively

Quantitative data gets you the numbers to prove the broad general points of your research. Qualitative data, on the other hand, brings you the details and the depth to understand their full implications. The two are complementary. In order to fully understand data, you usually need both.

The number of social mentions: the number of times a specific keyword (a product, brand, expression, or hashtag) is mentioned on social media (learn more about hashtag tracking tools)

The scope of the social mentions: the number of Internet users potentially exposed to a message, calculated according to the audience of the people that have shared the message

The number of engagements: the number of interactions between users and content

Quantitative data can be divided into two categories:

Descriptive data: Gives you a trend or key figures, such as the number of new subscribers, engagements, impressions, or clicks.

Actionable data: Contextualizes this information by deepening the analysis. Answers questions such as: Where do my new subscribers come from? What type of content receives the most engagement? At what time should I post to get the most amount of impressions?

Qualitative data helps companies better understand numbers. This is achieved by listening to online exchanges and conversations by consumers, which are undoubtedly full of useful information. The quantitative data tells us what’s going on; the qualitative data helps us understand why this is happening.

Here are two primary examples of qualitative data:

The development of semantic analysis technologies has made sentiment analysis possible. This lets us know if a keyword, phrase, or name is mostly negative, positive or neutral, and is an extremely useful indicator for assessing the perception of a product, update, company, campaign, or CEO.

By identifying peaks and dips in sentiment, we have a much better chance of understanding how audiences feel about a particular topic.

It’s also useful in determining high positives — which may be due to an influencer having posted about you — or extreme negatives, often the tell-tale sign of a crisis.

No one has the ability to read through the millions of posts shared every day, but it is possible to automatically analyze correlations between exchanges and extract commonalities and tendencies. This kind of trend analysis is perfect for companies wanting to understand the context in which your brand or product is being talked about, and with which themes it is associated.

Tip: Learn how to find social media trends.

On social media networks: Most of the main social media networks have their own range of statistics and analysis tools, accessible through the users' business profiles. The data they provide can be great to use to understand the performance of your profiles and single posts.

With social media engagement tools: Many social media management tools provide more advanced automated analysis for a more in-depth understanding of the data on social media.

With social media listening tools and social media monitoring tools: For the most exhaustive analysis possible, it’s best to focus on not only your current community but those interested in your competitors and the wider industry.

In a typical day on social media, 1.4 billion people log on to Facebook, 5 billion Snaps are sent, and 95 million photos are shared on Instagram.

That's a lot of opportunity, but that much data takes time to sift through. That’s why taking advantage of AI for social listening is important. AI-powered insights help reduce human error by analyzing commonalities between posts, identifying sentiment, and uncovering key conversation drivers.

Tip: Learn how to connect social listening with generative engine optimization.

Social media listening platforms give PR and marketing teams the power to easily explore all of this data and extract meaningful insights that can help them make better-informed business decisions. 

Social listening makes it possible to listen to a much wider and more diverse audience, allowing you to tap into the ideas and opinions of billions of people all around the world.

It mitigates the issue of response bias commonly found in surveys and interviews because the data comes from people expressing themselves freely on social media. 

Social media listening enables companies to identify trends and patterns among those billions of online conversations, using trend detection, trend forecasting, and trendspotting to identify risks and opportunities that might otherwise pass them by.

Tip: Learn the best way to jump on social media trends as a brand with our Ultimate Trendjacking Guide!

Social listening is a much quicker and easier option. Focus groups take time and resources to organize, whereas social media listening can be done very quickly, as often as required. 

Social listening is real-time, giving you up-to-the-minute data on what people are saying about a topic right now. 

The process requires less budget, less time, and fewer human resources. You only need a computer and a social media listening tool.

Social listening can’t entirely replace market research, but it certainly makes it easier for marketers to get faster answers to a lot of questions. Social listening complements research projects and serves as a more accessible everyday source of market intelligence.

Different companies use social listening for different purposes. They all share a common goal: to get ahead of conversations, or at the very least, join them authentically. 

Here are some ways companies are using social listening tools like Meltwater to improve visibility into their businesses:

Keep track of all social mentions of your brand and products to understand how your company is being perceived and what topics are surrounding it.

Anticipate crises and limit the chances of them going full scale by tracking your brand’s sentiment and potentially negative keywords. This allows companies to react as quickly as possible if something comes up. You can also track the impact of a crisis, such as changes in public perception and sentiment.

Analyze the communication, news, LLM presence, and reputation of your competitors. Social media listening can enable you to predict trends, remain up to date with industry innovation, and stay ahead of competitors.

Identify key topics that drive conversations in your market. When you understand the relevant themes your target audience is talking about, you can discover technologies or trends that your company could pioneer. 

Discover exciting new business opportunities by listening for any aspect of your product or business. Pair your search along with complementary terms like “how to” or “which tool do I choose,” and engage with these consumers and their community.

When you launch a new ad campaign, you expect people to go nuts and talk about it. Social listening can tell you if people are doing exactly that. It can monitor for mentions of campaign-related keywords so you can see if your product and message resonate.

Follow our step-by-step process to get your company's social listening strategy off the ground!

Do you want to know your consumer better?

People are talking online about your brand, competitors, and industry — generating valuable insights for your organization. Making sense of those insights is where social listening comes in.

What is Social Listening? The Complete Guide for 2026

A buyer, journalist, or analyst types “best platforms for…” into ChatGPT. Within seconds, the model produces a list of vendors, explains what each one does, and frames your entire category, including your brand.

Your messaging passes through a filter you didn’t build. It compresses everything—your positioning, your differentiators, your relevance—into a paragraph written by a system you don’t control. And without the right visibility monitoring workflow, you won’t see this output.

Multiply this scenario by thousands of queries happening every day. Large language models (LLMs) now shape your brand narrative. The only question is whether the narrative they’ve learned is accurate.

This is why tracking LLM visibility matters. These models adjust their answers based on new content, reviews, and competitor signals. Without AI media monitoring, you allow an unpredictable system to shape your positioning for you. 

Learn how to track LLM visibility to ensure the version of your brand people see in AI platforms matches the one you intend.

Why Does LLM Visibility Matter for Brands?

What Should You Look for in an LLM Tracking Solution?

How Meltwater Helps Brands Track LLM Visibility

How to Get Started with LLM Visibility Tracking

Making LLM Visibility a Measurable Brand Signal

Imagine you’re planning a campaign and you want a quick answer to something simple, like: “How do I work with the right influencers?”

A few years ago, you’d open Google, skim a bunch of links, check reviews, compare websites, and maybe read a few blog posts.

You get one tidy answer. No scrolling and no gazillion tabs, just a confident summary that sounds authoritative. This is how your customers, stakeholders, and even journalists now gather information: through LLM-generated summaries. This behavior is already mainstream. Bain & Company reports that roughly 80% of consumers now lean on AI overviews for at least 40% of their searches. 

Bain & Company chart showing 80% of users rely on AI summaries at least 40% of the time (Source)

This growing reliance on AI-generated answers from search engines underscores why LLM visibility matters.

Consider the drivers making LLM visibility critical for brands: 

AI assistants are becoming a primary research tool. Gartner estimates that by 2026, volume on traditional search engines will drop 25% as users shift their questions to AI chatbots and virtual agents.

LLM answers shape first impressions. If an AI assistant cites outdated details, misinterprets reviews, or summarizes sentiment inaccurately, that version of your brand becomes the user’s starting point. AI presents a definitive answer, not a list of search results to compare.

Models rely on the same signals brands already monitor. LLMs pull from news, social media conversations, reviews, forums, and owned content. If those signals are outdated, inconsistent, or dominated by competitors, the AI summary will reflect that.

AI recommendations influence real decisions. McKinsey found that half of GenAI users factor AI recommendations into purchase decisions, especially for complex or high-consideration categories.

As more consumers turn to AI assistants for answers, brands need visibility into how these models describe them, since these summaries now shape customer perception and decisions.

To track LLM visibility effectively, turn vague AI mentions into something measurable. 

The simplest way is to use a fixed set of prompts that reflect real user questions (e.g., “best tools for…”, “alternatives to…”, “top platforms for…”) across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and any AI search interfaces you care about. 

Review the answers for the four metrics below and record them the same way each time, just like you would track share of voice or SERP positions. Over time, these repeated runs become your baseline and show you if your LLM search visibility is improving, slipping, or becoming inconsistent.

Here are the four core LLM metrics to get an idea of your brand presence in AI search engines:

Coverage: Track whether your brand appears for all category-level queries. This gives a simple presence rate similar to appearing on the first page of search results. 

Frequency: Measure how often your brand shows up across multiple prompts and variations. This confirms whether you’re consistently recognizable to the model.

Placement: Note where you appear in the generated answer. Top placement signals strong relevance, while later placement suggests weaker authority.

Tone and accuracy: Check if the model’s description of your brand is accurate, up-to-date, and aligned with your actual positioning.

Suppose you want to understand Meltwater’s LLM visibility. If you run “best media intelligence platforms” in both ChatGPT and Perplexity, you get two slightly different outputs, yet both show how Meltwater fares across these four metrics.

ChatGPT ranks Meltwater at #1, accurately describes its capabilities (media intelligence across news, TV, radio, online, and social), and frames it as strong for organizations needing wide coverage.

ChatGPT response ranking Meltwater first for “best media intelligence platforms” and listing its capabilities (Source)

This gives you clear signals across all four metrics: Meltwater appears, appears early, appears consistently, and is described correctly.

Perplexity also lists Meltwater first, but the description is more functional and less narrative. 

Perplexity search result listing Meltwater as the top recommendation for “best media intelligence platforms (Source)

Combining these outputs provides a simple, measurable view of Meltwater’s LLM visibility for this query:

Tone and accuracy: Correct, but with different depth and framing

This is also where many teams introduce an LLM tracking tool, since manually running the same prompts each month can get messy. 

Meltwater’s GenAI Lens solves this operational need. It helps teams run fixed prompts across all major LLMs and automatically stores their outputs, allowing them to compare these four metrics over time. 

Meltwater’s dashboard showing 90-day LLM responses with prompts, models, sentiment, key phrases, and source links (Source)

For example, it will automatically indicate if future versions of Perplexity start positioning your brand differently or if new competitors begin appearing above you.

Once you know what you’re measuring, you need a simple way to consistently collect results. Avoid testing dozens of prompts or running complex setups. Instead, create a repeatable workflow that shows how LLM outputs shift over time.

Here are some quick, easy ways to set up AI brand monitoring workflows: 

Start with 3–5 prompts that reflect how users actually search for your category. 

For example, a realistic set of prompts for Meltwater might include:

“Best PR platforms for enterprise teams”

“Top social listening tools for brands”

Consistency matters more than quantity. It ensures usable month-over-month comparisons.

2. Run the same prompts across the same models each time

You don’t need every LLM on the market. Pick the ones your audience is likely to use (typically ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a secondary model like Gemini or Claude). 

A competitor suddenly appears more often.

Outdated product descriptions start creeping in.

The tone shifts (for example, overly generic or overly negative).

You don’t need anything fancy. Use a simple table or spreadsheet to capture the outputs. 

Capture the following for each model and prompt: 

The purpose is to create a baseline. After the first run, subsequent runs reveal whether something changed and whether that change is positive or negative.

Meltwater’s GenAI Lens replaces manual logging. It automatically stores each run, tagging it with sentiment, key phrases, brands mentioned, and the exact date—enabling you to compare month over month without re-running everything manually.

LLMs constantly absorb new content, adjust weights, and refine their training data. As a result, your visibility might shift even if nothing has changed on your end.

For example, a competitor getting a lot of press coverage or reviews in a short window may appear earlier or more often in AI-generated lists, even if your product hasn’t changed.

Track changes consistently to spot this early, avoiding the surprise of discovering months later that your category positioning has drifted.

Once you capture outputs across a few LLMs, evaluate what those results mean. 

Identify where the models get things right, wrong, or inconsistent to understand your brand’s digital footprint.

Here are some things to consider when evaluating results:

Look for outdated or incomplete descriptions: LLMs often pull from older public content. So if ChatGPT or Perplexity frames Meltwater only as a “media monitoring tool” and leaves out social, consumer, or influencer capabilities, it’s a sign the model is relying on outdated or incomplete sources. That usually indicates that older owned content, reviews, or third-party summaries need updating.

Accuracy issues or hallucinations: LLMs sometimes fabricate details. Models often blend older reviews or competitor capabilities, incorrectly crediting a tool with features it lacks, such as a built-in journalist CRM or native press-release hosting.

Competitors receiving richer or more detailed descriptions: Note if the model provides competing brands with longer, clearer, or more up-to-date descriptions. This usually reflects fresher third-party content or stronger review signals about those vendors.

Narrative drift over time: If your brand appears first, then drops lower later, or if the framing shifts from “comprehensive solution” to “niche tool,” it signals that the model’s understanding has changed. This results from new training data, better competitor content, or stale content about you.

Integrate visibility tracking into broader brand monitoring

LLM visibility only becomes meaningful when you connect it to the rest of your brand monitoring work. AI models don’t invent narratives out of nowhere. They absorb signals from media coverage, social chatter, reviews, SEO results, and competitor momentum. 

When you evaluate how ChatGPT or Perplexity describes your brand, the next step is to understand where that description came from and how to act on it.

Here’s how to map LLM behaviour back to the real-world sources that influence it:

How to Track LLM Visibility: Metrics, Tools & Benefits

You run social for a B2B brand. Your team launches a new feature, you schedule the posts, and you wait for traction. Surprisingly, the real lift doesn’t come from your own channels. 

It comes when a trusted industry expert on LinkedIn breaks down why that feature matters, when someone posts “we tried this, here’s what changed,” and a niche creator includes your update in their newsletter.

B2B influencer marketing helps you tap into the voices your buyers already trust, including the operators, consultants, analysts, and creators who explain problems clearly and share what actually works. 

Learn what B2B influencer marketing really is, why it works so well for long sales cycles, and how your team can build a strategy that connects with your target persona, drives brand awareness, builds authority in the industry, and generates demand for your product. 

Why Do Brands Use B2B Influencer Marketing?

Who Are B2B Influencers? (and How to Find the Right Ones)

How to Build a B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy That Delivers

What to Look for in a B2B Influencer Marketing Tool

The Meltwater Blog

What is Social Listening? The Complete Guide for 2026

How to Track LLM Visibility: Metrics, Tools & Benefits

B2B Influencer Marketing: What it is and Why it Works

The Complete Guide to Social Media Analytics

Global Trade War: How Tariff Discussions Impact Brands and LLM Answers

How to Build an AI Brand Monitoring Strategy

The Top 22 Social Media Monitoring Tools 2026

How Does AI in Social Listening and Media Monitoring Work?

AI Media Monitoring: Definition, Tools & Strategy

AI Visibility: How to Track Your Brand Across Generative AI

The Top 13 Social Listening Tools for 2026

From Micro Creators to Mega Stars: The Marketing Value of Stranger Things Influencer Partnerships