Blog written by Daniel Lees, reviewed by Chloe Humphreys.
Brand authority refers to the level of trust, authority and consequently online visibility a brand has on the web. ‘Web’ being everything from your standard pages on Google, to online communities, forums and content on YouTube. Brand authority is key when it comes to AI search, as trust and visibility play a massive part in whether your preferred AI search engine pulls a brand, their product and their content to mention, recommend or cite for the user.
Compounding the increasing use of AI search, Google shifted to a default AI summary at the top of the search page in May of 2026. This completely transformed the search habits of users irreversibly and made the practice crucial with one simple change.
We’re here to explore how to build and utilise your brand authority, including off-site authority building, on-page content, and technical amendments, to maximise your visibility. We’re utilising Danone as a case study to provide examples of what these strategies look like in terms of implementation.
Off-Site Authority
Off-site authority is all about how widespread a brand is, how well trusted the brand is by real users on forums and social and whether the brand appears consistently across a range of reputable and ‘already-search-engine-trusted’ sites. Presence across multiple types of sites – including social media, industry journals and websites and forums around a product type or industry – improves authority.
For a large multinational food and beverage company such as Danone, they would look to build authority around the three segments the brand operates within: Dairy & dietary alternatives, baby and infant products and hydration.
Digital PR
One way to build off-site authority surrounding your brand for AI search is to do so through being cited or referenced in industry journals and relevant publications, through a digital PR campaign. Having your website consistently referenced in trusted sources that you can see Google is referencing to provide their AI summaries will help to support your own visibility.
For a multinational within the food and beverage FMCG industry like Danone, references in Dairy Reporter, EatingWell or health.com would be beneficial. These sites were cited in Google AI summary when “Best protein yogurts” was searched. Whereas “Best nutrition drinks” returned a page from the Cancer Research UK website first and an article from Forbes third down in the citations list. Evidently, a thorough digital PR strategy depending on search terms and product consumers’ use cases is necessary to build off-site authority for AI search.
Organic Forums
Another important pillar of building off-site authority is visibility, content, discussions and mentions on online forums, and most notably, Reddit. AI models know that Reddit is an established, large and authentically human source of information that gives an indication of how users truly feel about a brand outside of their own marketing material. In addition to this, the subdivision of discussion into ‘subreddit’ feeds means that AI can pull by criteria such as niches, interests, context and location, knowing the content is authentic.
With the premise of the site being organic community discussion and Q&A forums, AI engines know that the vast majority of the content is authentic human research, opinion or discussion, further reinforcing the trust in Reddit as a source, which is why it is increasingly being cited by LLM’s. For example, linking back to our example of Danone, mentions of their brand and products across relevant health, nutrition and parenting communities will help LLMs to naturally see the brand as one they will recommend in their AI overviews.
Social proof and social media
AI engines are increasingly citing indexed user-generated content from social media and community forums because it has high and consistent levels of trust. UGC is more authentic, opinion diverse and widespread across social media sites than brand-posted or brand-sponsored content. Third-party content that validates the brand is more trustworthy than content from the brand itself In addition, fake engagement from bot accounts is hard to generate on a large scale and can be detected by AI engines, so it is naturally filtered out.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a partnership with Reddit, meaning content from Reddit is licensed for the training and information generation of ChatGPT. This means there’s real-time, ultraspecific discussions and opinions being fed into this AI engine, allowing ChatGPT to give the most up-to-date information on prompts. This specific example of an LLM crawling and indexing conversations and social discussion is also the case with other AI engines and social media sites.
In addition to a brand, product or topic being talked about by users online, AI engines also favour transcripts and video descriptions from YouTube, so it’s important to utilise a range of online platforms. This could be through paid video sponsorships, non-skippable pre-roll or mid-roll ads or collaborations between aligned channels or creators.
To refer back to Danone, consumers discuss topics such as bloating, probiotics and gut health on Reddit and TikTok. This organic conversation is rich with perspective and opinions. AI engines favour this type of content as it’s genuine experience and discussion, rather than brand-posted content. In the context of plant-based eaters, vegans and flexitarians discuss on Reddit, comment on YouTube videos and engage on TikTok around eating and comparing milks.
On-Page Content
The next section to consider in terms of building brand authority to support your AI visibility is your on-page content. Being seen as the industry leader in your area, with helpful content that provides true value to the user, is essential to be seen as a priority to the LLMs.
EEAT
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and is a framework that evaluates the quality of content on a website, particularly in relation to “Your Money or Your Life” topics (like health, finance, or safety) where bad advice can cause real harm.
For LLMs, being able to identify these components within content provides an integral trust filter to help validate a brand as a safe, quotable source of information. So, ensuring your website clearly displays content that meets the framework above helps to support your website’s ability to be cited.
Experience: Any firsthand experience with the subject at hand counts towards this factor, from both a more data-driven or technical point of view, as well as the experience of the user. This could include first-party clinical data and lab insights or lived experiences and real consumer case studies. For example, for Danone, publishing first-hand operational data on their website from clinical studies would help to support their experience, as well as highlighting real-world consumer stories, such as reactions to a range of milk alternatives.
Expertise: Expertise refers to proving that the provider of content on a website has the level of skill, knowledge and technical understanding of a topic for LLMs to deem them an expert source to cite. For example, the website should attribute all health, nutrition and scientific content to real human experts. For Danone, this would be their PhD nutritionists, food scientists and medical advisors. Danone have conducted and published more than 50 years of research on breastmilk and nutrition, the contents of which would be classed under this area of the framework. This page has links within other Danone pages such as the ‘Human Milk Research’ hub page on Nutricia Research.
Authoritativeness: This is how reliable you are as a source of information in the eyes of LLMs. If you’ve given out accurate advice across trusted publications, online forums and social media sites that received positive feedback, you will be seen as a more authoritative source. Many of Danone’s brands have high levels of authority within their segments. Danone Waters France, UK & Ireland and USA have all achieved individual B Corp certification, which improves their authoritativeness through industry recognition and reward. After Danone’s water divisions gained B Corp certification, the multinational itself gained B Corp certification in 2025. Mentions in academic journals, health institutions and trusted health news outlets, along with evidence of this on their website, would be key to maximise authority.
Trustworthiness: Finally, trustworthiness refers to how honest, safe and accurate your website is. Along with focusing on general website safety, including keeping a secure website via HTTPS encryption to protect private user data, the information contained on the site must be accurate and verifiable. Product lists, clinical trial data, funding sources and manufacturing standards should all be clearly displayed, along with transparency in terms of who has written and reviewed content. Earning genuine user reviews also helps to improve trust and reputation. Danone websites include granular privacy policies detailing why data is collected, how it is kept whilst guaranteeing that personal data is never sold or rented. As with most websites, Danone’s main site is HTTPS encrypted to protect user data. Not only this, but the server ensures that no user can access a HTTP unencrypted version of the site by redirecting them to the encrypted site by default, which makes the website secure and trustworthy.
In addition to privacy transparency and details, many Danone brand sites feature live chats and direct contacts for medical and product inquiries. In addition, many pages display transparent product review sections showing unedited feedback from verified consumers, which raises website trust.
Internal Links
Linking to related content across your website shows coherent and comprehensive coverage of an industry, brand, issue or topic. This is known as ‘internal linking’. If you link between the pages and reference other content, you build what is known as a ‘topical cluster’, which improves the E-E-A-T rankings of the entire bank of content. This also supports crawlability, which we will explore later in the blog.
External Links
In website content, brands should reference or include links to experienced, expert, authoritative and trustworthy sources, which raises the quality of the content and provides more context to the user, therefore making it more likely to be cited or mentioned by AI search.
Helpful Content
Helpful content builds brand authority by providing real expertise and trust to both users and LLMs. It boosts AI visibility because large language models want to cite well-structured, credible, and deeply informative sources over weak or superficial pages. Cluster content off main pages, FAQs and detailed blogs are a few examples of the clear facts and expertise that are needed to help increase the AI visibility of your site.
For example, Danone has educational, science-backed, and consumer-centric content to help and inform consumers, as well as build brand authority for AI search. From probiotic and gut health education on Activia to early-stage care on the Aptamil and Cow&Gate website, along with over 1,000 fantastic recipes.
Technical
Technical setup is important for AI visibility, because AI models can’t cite or recommend content they cannot easily find, read, or trust. Structuring your website in a way that can easily be crawled and indexed is essential to success in terms of AI visibility.
Schema
One area of ‘technical’ building of brand authority is implementing schema markup. This is code in the backend of a website that clearly displays to LLMs what the brand, content and website actually is, without the bots having to crawl every detail of the page. Many different types could be utilised depending on the nature of your website, which an experienced technical SEO agency will be able to help you to strategise and implement.
Crawlability and Indexability
A second area of technical brand authority building is ensuring crawlability, which essentially is whether the AI or search engine can “read” and understand the content on the page (which is what schema markup helps with).
Making sure your site loads quickly is one way to improve crawlability, as is ensuring there are no faulty links on the site. Another way to improve crawlability is to ensure there are not multiple ‘hops’ within redirects, as this slows crawling down as page loading times increase and wastes search engine crawl budget. Optimising a mobile website’s speed and layout helps search bots read more pages without wasting time loading and parsing. To improve indexability, ensure there is no duplicate content, and the site has an up-to-date sitemap.
The key step after this is ensuring the content is also indexable. This refers to whether the information is worth being fully analysed and stored in the search engine’s database. A search engine, such as Google, has to be able to find, access, read and understand the page and then deem the content informative, useful and that it meets the aforementioned E-E-A-T criteria, before deciding to utilise that content in their AI results.
Summary
Brand authority is incredibly important for AI visibility, as search engines and AI systems use trusted, relevant sources to inform recommendations and citations.
Brands can build authority through off-site authority, including reputable mentions, digital PR, backlinks, forums and original research. On-page content should answer consumer questions, demonstrate expertise and reference credible sources. Technical brand authority building for AI search involves methods like schema markup, crawlability, indexability and internal linking that help search engines understand, access and connect content.
Together, these create strong, comprehensive topical authority around a brand and its products for AI to find, access, read, trust and recall.
We understand the world of AI visibility can feel overwhelming, as it’s evolved significantly in such a short space of time. As a GEO agency, we can support you and provide expert guidance to maximise visibility across the entire SERP, including AI overviews.