Do Y'all Even Know My Name?
People ask how to show up in AI. If your brand name is missing from Google Search Console, start there. Workshop worksheet included.
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People often come to Knowatoa asking, “How do I show up in AI?” We look at their brand, and one thing we find right away is a lack of presence in keywords.
Before you can show up in AI, you have to show up in SEO. To get started showing up in SEO, you need people to recognize your brand.
Ahrefs looked at about 150 million US keywords on May 30, 2025. Weighted by search volume, 45.7% of Google searches are branded. Counted as unique queries, it’s 36.9%. SparkToro and Datos found just over 44% across 332 million searches in December 2024.
45.7% of Google searches are branded.
Nearly half of searches start with a name the searcher already knows. If nobody knows yours, you miss that half before ranking starts. That figure is all of Google, and names like YouTube and Amazon dominate it. It is not a target for the branded share of your own Search Console traffic.
One test: open Google Search Console and look for every query that includes your brand name. Misspellings count. If the brand were “Plausible”, you would count impressions for “Plausible” and for the ways people misspell it.
You’ll know it’s working when you start seeing more brand-related keywords in Google Search Console.
This means people are starting to know about your brand and what you do.
How Transistor got known first
Justin Jackson and Jon Buda launched Transistor, a podcast host, in 2018. Justin had already spent years on Twitter, a newsletter, and his own podcast. He told Andrew Warner on Mixergy that those became the first hundred customers. He then asked podcasters he knew to switch and tell their listeners.
A year after launch, Transistor was at $20,000 a month. The signal was not a ranking report. People already knew the name because they had heard Justin and friends mentioning it.
If your brand name does not appear in Search Console, you are not getting brand searches you can see. Google hides a query when fewer than a few dozen people searched it over two or three months. Under that line, no one is searching for your brand often enough to show up.
