How to Rank in AI Overviews: Brand Mentions vs Links | The Squared Table | Katarina Dahlin

Every time someone asks an AI for the best casino, the best sportsbook, or the best anything, some brands get named and others simply don't show up. In this episode of The Squared Table, Victor sits down with Katarina Dahlin to talk about what actually drives brand visibility in AI Overviews, and why the answer is less about chasing AI and more about doing the fundamentals well. Katarina explains the difference between being cited and being mentioned, why brand mentions across third-party sites matter more than links when it comes to AI, and how she and a group of SEOs ran a real experiment with listicles to get their names picked up in AI answers. The conversation also covers which tools to use for tracking AI visibility, why most brands should still be putting their money into SEO first, and what she would do on day one if she were building an iGaming brand's AI presence from scratch.

• The difference between being cited in AI Overviews, where your own site appears as a source, and being mentioned, where your brand name is picked up from third-party content across the web
• Why brand mentions on external sites matter more than links for AI visibility, and why AI crawlers learn who you are by seeing the same thing said about you in multiple places
• How link building still supports AI visibility, especially when the anchor text contains your brand name, and why branded links are both safer and more effective in today's environment
• Why ranking well on Google and appearing in AI Overviews are not separate strategies, and why investing in one tends to support the other
• How Katarina and a group of SEOs published around 30 listicles naming themselves as experts, and how that experiment resulted in real AI mentions
• Why you cannot rely on listicles alone, and what a sustainable brand mention strategy actually looks like across guest articles, conferences, LinkedIn, and YouTube
• What she would do first if she were building an iGaming brand's AI Overview presence from scratch, starting with mapping the queries customers would actually type into AI
• The two types of AI visibility tools available, API-based scrapers versus browser-based tools that simulate real user searches, and why the difference matters
• Why AI visibility data is never fully accurate, and why manually checking yourself in an incognito window is still one of the most reliable methods
• Why AI traffic from tools like ChatGPT still represents less than 1% of organic traffic for most sites, and why that should shape how much budget goes there versus SEO
• Why now is still the right moment to invest in SEO, for Google rankings, for AI visibility, and for brand safety protection