Brand Mentions for AI Visibility: Olesia Korobka on Where to Build Them, Niche by Niche

AI answer engines don’t read the schema on your website. That was Olesia Korobka’s point when I interviewed her on the Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast in February 2025, and it changes where an agency spends its effort. If the new crawlers ignore your markup, the weight shifts to what other sites say about your client, and where they say it.

Olesia calls herself an SEO entrepreneur. She runs fractional SEO roles for SaaS companies, an agency, and newer ventures, and she founded WhiteLobby, which works on brand visibility across Google, Bing and AI answers for competitive industries such as iGaming. Her specialty is technical SEO and knowledge graphs. This recap pulls out the agency playbook: where brand mentions for AI visibility actually come from in each kind of niche. For the full episode walkthrough, read the Unscripted SEO recap of Olesia’s episode.

Every niche runs on the same three-part skeleton

Olesia has worked SaaS and startups, finance, insurance, local businesses from roofing on up, and more recently iGaming. Her conclusion after all of them is that the niches look more alike than different. Each one needs a technical layer so your content can be found, a content layer of text and images, and a third layer she won’t call backlinks:

“I backlinks is not correct way to say that, but like third party content that references to you properly in a way that helps you to get, have authority and to have more voice outside there.”

That third layer is the one that changes most from niche to niche. The first two are the same work everywhere.

iGaming is a game of links, technical B2B gets a few sources and Reddit

Here is how Olesia splits it. In iGaming, the on-site content is weak across the board:

“They don’t have that much quality content, for example, everyone steals from each other and they just reiterate the same old tune and it’s practically all spam.”

So the competition moves off-site. “In iGaming niche, you need to have more mentions and more links. In some of the gaming niches, it’s just the game of links, actually.”

Highly technical companies sit at the other end. You can’t place them everywhere, because almost nowhere is relevant:

“You have like a few sources I can use and Reddit and something like that, and that’s it. So you are restricted in where you can get those links and mentions from.”

And the audience narrows it further: “target audience sometimes sticks to one or two forums and that’s it. And YouTube.”

She is not anti-link. “I think that you need them. You need these mentions, you need these references.” I pushed on the same point from the other side. A DR score tells you nothing about whether anybody visits the linking page, or whether the link sits in an interview people actually listened to versus a page four layers deep that you hope Google crawls. Anchor text, the context around it and the page itself all count. If you want a way to find where a client is already being talked about, the unlinked mentions and footprint triangulation play in our strategy library is the place to start.

A knowledge panel without a website

This is the part of the episode most agency people will want to argue with. For SEO, Olesia says a website is vital. For a brand, it’s optional, at least as far as the knowledge graph goes:

“You may have this knowledge panel in Google without any website, just by incorporating knowledge about you on the third party websites and in social media.”

She describes her own off-site work as building a brand’s “fortress of mentions and correct mentions and content on the third party side so that they can be recognized and they can be heard and they can be findable.” Note the word correct. Volume of mentions isn’t the goal if half of them describe the client wrong.

Your entity home still has to say something

None of that means you skip the site. Olesia learned the entity home idea from Jason Barnard and uses it on every project: an about page, or sometimes just the home page, that states plainly who the company is. She sees it matter most for B2B startups that have no consumer content at all. Their visitors are investors and partners checking whether the company is real.

“You are less credible somehow, so you don’t look serious if you have only Instagram profile. No one will treat you as a serious company.”

I see the opposite failure in audits all the time. The about page says “we’re great at customer service and we’re there when you need us,” which describes a home cleaner and a decor shop equally well. An LLM assembling a profile of your client gathers scattered signals and tries to make them agree. Vague platitudes give it nothing to agree on.

Olesia’s take on why this keeps happening: “All the most powerful things are so basic actually when you look at them, no?” If you want the step-by-step version, our entity optimization and knowledge panel strategy walks through it.

The new crawlers skip your schema, so the mentions carry the weight

Schema still helps Google. The AI answer engines are another story:

“We now have new game players which don’t really use schema, like with the AI output. Like they use schema for organizing their own knowledge, but they don’t use the schema on your website. So at least at the moment.”

Her fix for that gap, at recording in February 2025, was to add an llms.txt file: “Put that LLMs.txt, new file, new standard for LLM so that they understand what you are actually doing.” Treat that as one practitioner’s call on a then-new proposal, not a measured result. What’s harder to argue with is the logic underneath. If a crawler won’t read your structured data, what other sites say about you is most of what it has to go on.

Brand mentions for AI visibility: an agency checklist by niche

Use this when a new client comes in and you need to decide where the off-site effort goes.

1. Fix the entity home first. One page that names the company, what it does, who runs it and when it started, in specific words. Then check that the about page actually says something a competitor couldn’t copy.
2. Sort the client by niche type. Spammy, link-driven verticals like iGaming need volume of mentions and links. Technical B2B needs depth in the few sources that matter, plus Reddit and the one or two forums the buyers use.
3. Audit for correct mentions, not just mentions. Pull what third-party sites say about the brand and flag every description that’s wrong or vague.
4. Judge each link by whether anybody sees it. An interview with an engaged audience beats a high-DR page nobody reaches.
5. Cover the AI layer. Add llms.txt if you want, but don’t count on schema alone. The mentions are what the AI engines read.
6. Put support docs where people can find them. Olesia’s aside about customers cursing at AI support bots to reach a human is funny, but buried support content is also a visibility problem.

You can see how WhiteLobby fits into our list of vertical marketing agencies, and find more about Olesia at olesiakorobka.com. Asked where people should find her, she said: “In Google, whatever pops up there for you, just use it. I have optimized myself a bit.” Listen to the full episode on Castos, and for the personal take on the knowledge base half of the conversation, read my piece on why you should stop buying blog posts by the month.