These topics covered everything from wooden toys to outdoor toys. After checking the search volume in Semrush, I discovered that the topics themselves were low volume.
Using Semrush, I identified direct toy manufacturer competitors to Fisher-Price and Melissa and Doug.
The Profound team took our list of topics and competitors and began tracking performance across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot.
Each day, Profound generated various prompts for each topic that would likely generate brand mentions. It would capture the responses, brand rankings and citations for analysis.
Over a week, trends started to emerge.
We can see improvement in visibility compared to the previous seven-day total for the topics that were important to my Fisher-Price products.
Brand visibility calculates the percentage of AI answers across all topics that mention your brand.
We can get visibility into the brand’s performance per AI search model.
Drilling into topic visibility, we can see Fisher-Price is the market leader across six of the nine topics.
You can see how easy it is to get clarity from the topics important to your business goals.
You can visualize the rank competition for each topic as well:
Now, imagine that you want to focus on a specific topic and get even more granular.
This is where you can start thinking about content strategy for improving your brand visibility for a specific topic important to your business.
Let’s look at the topic: “Top Toys for Two-Year-Olds.”
In Semrush, this commercial keyword alone has a search volume of 480 per month in the U.S.
While that’s not a massive number of searches, expanding it to a full topic would likely incorporate hundreds of additional searches.
Fisher-Price is already performing well on this topic, with a visibility score of 84%.
Taking “Top Toys for Two-Year-Olds,” we can look at the visibility and share of voice over time.
These visualizations can provide useful insights for companies that want to track how their various AI search-driven content and digital PR experiments are performing.
Keep in mind that:
Let’s double-check our work by plugging this topic into our AI search tools:
ChatGPT
Perplexity
Copilot
Each of these searches produces citations that include Fisher-Price toys on their lists.
Notice that all of the citations are from publications and not the manufacturers.
The real magic and tactical importance of this process occurs when you analyze the citations that the conversational searches use and link to:
The data is all included, but Profound offers this near visualization of the citation nodes at a comprehensive and individual topic level.
You can look at the specific URLs cited by volume and filter by search model. You can also see which URLs are cited for multiple search prompts.
Now, you can develop your own digital PR list with specific publications and URLs to target.
Digital PR and content strategy for AI search
AI search tools’ outputs are dynamic.
They always change based on:
How we phrase our search.
The personalized output based on an individual’s interactions with the tool.
The constantly updated content on the web.
It’s a true moving target.
When you track the citation change over time, you can see the volatility:
Despite the volatility, at a macro level, you can see clear trends:
Tinybeans significantly leads the pack with 5,823 citations, more than 30% higher than the second-place Amazon (4,460). This suggests Tinybeans has established itself as the primary authority in toy-related content according to the AI search models.
The top 10 features an interesting mix of traditional media, marketplaces, manufacturers and social platforms, with ecommerce (Amazon, Target), content publishers (Tinybeans, Forbes*, Parents) and social platforms (Reddit) all represented.
Big brands like LEGO and Melissa & Doug appear at the bottom of the top 10. This is pretty good proof that third-party content about toys generates more citations than direct brand content.
Tinybeans strengthened its dominance, and its two top-cited pages now control 35.2% of citations (up from 33%).
The Black Friday deals page experienced the largest share gain (+3.0pp), jumping from 8% to 11% of citations. This dramatic shift reveals that AI models are heavily weighting seasonal relevance in citation selection.
Both Forbes’ citations lost significant ground (-4.8pp combined), while specialized content gained visibility share. I think this could be either a result of Black Friday gearing towards focused, category-specific content over broad gift guides or Bing demoting sites like Forbes the way that Google did after its site reputation abuse manual action.
If I were Fisher-Price, I would make sure that my toys are included in Tinybeans.com’s articles (as well as Parents.com and WeAreTeachers.com).
I’d be developing that relationship and partnering with them when possible.
Profound is starting to surface those insights for content strategy, too.
The bright side is that any brand can potentially see its visibility grow immediately.
If your digital PR tactics are effective, your products can be served up by AI search results instantly.
You don’t need to earn the same type of authority required for a similar type of query on Google.
But any wins you earn could be wiped away by competitors, publishers or changes to the AI search tool that are outside your control.
It’s a double-edged sword.
In the future, brands should have an AI search channel team that operates in coordination with SEO, digital PR and content.
That team would monitor performance with a tool like Profound to report on visibility across core business topics and the citations populating them.
Right now, the most valuable thing any organization can do is put the people, processes and creativity in place to build an agile AI search team within your marketing department.
With these AI search tools, these people can pivot and adapt – and they’ll need to adapt.
The tools will change over time, and we’ll also see content teams evolve.
Most importantly, as people become more comfortable with conversational search, their queries and search methods will more naturally leverage the power of the tools.
It won’t happen overnight, but it will be faster than anticipated.
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