As search marketers, we’ve long understood the need to track branded and non-branded keywords separately. In the AI/LLM world, especially as we’re pushed to measure not just links and citations but brand visibility itself, the impact of brand mentions in prompts is even more important (yet, ironically, seems to have gotten less attention). We conducted an experiment to investigate just how important brand mentions in prompts are in driving brand visibility in LLM output. There’s an even bigger question, though – is brand vs. non-brand even adequate for natural-language prompts? Breaking the brand/non-brand binary Every search query or LLM prompt is either brand or non-brand, right? Logically, yes, but consider a prompt like “Who makes the most expensive luxury cars?”: The result from Google Gemini is above — I’ve asked it to keep the answer short, but the bold highlights are all Gemini’s. What’s the first thing you spot? Brands.…