Let’s Talk About “Mental Availability” in the Context of SEO/GEO: A Hamsterdam Marketing Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam Marketing! 🐹

This is a project where we examine marketing topics to learn about their fundamental concepts and apply them to the context of SEO/GEO.

This week, we’ll be looking at mental availability.

This is a tangential topic to my brand positioning and differentiation posts.

In short, if positioning is what you want the brand to mean, and differentiation is why someone should see it as different, then mental availability is whether the brand actually comes to mind when someone is ready to buy.

Mental availability matters to AI search because an AI recommendation can create brand recognition even when it doesn’t generate a click. A user may see a brand recommended by an AI assistant, remember the name, and days later search it up or visit the site directly. That means AI influenced their journey even though analytics attributes the eventual visit to organic search or direct traffic.

Search Engine Land recently reported on Similarweb data showing that users who saw a brand recommended by ChatGPT were 2.5x more likely to visit that brand’s website within a week (55.9% of those AI-influenced visits arrived through branded search). Ahrefs describes the same phenomenon as “indirect traffic,” where users see a brand mentioned by AI and visit its site later on.

Mental availability may be one of the missing concepts connecting brand marketing to SEO/GEO.

In a classical marketing sense, mental availability is the probability that a brand comes to mind in a relevant buying situation.

That becomes relevant to modern search because SEO/GEO essentially operates across two different retrieval systems: first the AI assistant retrieves the brand, then the human retrieves the brand from memory later.

This means that AI visibility doesn’t need to produce a click to produce value.

Imagine someone asks Gemini: “What are some good resources for staying current on marketing trends related to GEO and AI search?”

Gemini mentions “Hamsterdam Marketing” among several resources. The person reads the answer but doesn’t click anything.

Three days later, they think, “What was that Hamsterdam thing?”

Then they search up “Hamsterdam Marketing” or “Hamsterdam SEO.”

Or they remember the URL and go directly to the site.

GA4 may record that visit as Organic Search or Direct, while the original Gemini exposure disappears from the attribution path.

Yet, Gemini did something important: it put “Hamsterdam” into the person’s memory.

That is mental availability.

We also have evidence for this behavior.

A June 2026 research paper, “From Prompt to Purchase: How AI Brand Recommendations Move Consumers on the Open Web,” connected users’ ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations with their web activity. For previously unengaged users, an AI brand recommendation was associated with +4.3 percentage points for same-name Google searches, +2.4 percentage points for visits to the brand’s own site, and +1.0 percentage point for brand-specific retailer page visits. Essentially, the authors found that while AI created the exposure, Google frequently captured the subsequent action.

That study was observational, so it doesn’t establish causation. Having said that, the behavioral pattern strongly supports the idea that AI exposure can influence activity later attributed elsewhere.

This also supports the earlier findings from Similarweb, noted in the introduction: brand exposure in AI assistants can lead to downstream interactions with the brand that aren’t attributed to AI.

Considering this, SEO/GEO can create branded search demand.

If a user asks ChatGPT for the “best running shoes for flat feet,” the AI assistant might recommend brands like Hoka. The user might then remember that brand and later search on Google for “Hoka shoes for flat feet” or just visit the website directly.

In this example, the initial AI interaction changed the user’s search vocabulary. Instead of continuing to search generically, they began looking at a specific brand.

This type of search journey was described in Search Engine Land as a loop rather than a funnel: the AI assistant establishes the consideration set, then users conduct more specific searches and continue refining their queries.

Mental availability provides the psychological explanation for part of that transition: while AI puts a name into memory, search retrieves it later.

This should change how we think about zero-click search.

A zero-click interaction is generally seen as an impression leading to no traffic gained.

However, if we take the perspective of mental availability, it suggests another model where an impression leads to a brand being encoded in someone’s mind, resulting in a delayed branded search or site visit.

That doesn’t mean every zero-click interaction has value. But it does mean that zero-click shouldn’t be interpreted as zero influence.

Thus, AI visibility can influence consideration before analytics ever records a website session, and mental availability gives us a marketing framework for understanding why.

Mentions may matter differently from citations.

Suppose Claude says, “According to research, AI referrals convert at a higher rate,” and cites an Ahrefs article.

Compare that with “Ahrefs research found that…,” where Claude cites the same article.

Both instances count as citations, from a traditional GEO perspective, but from a mental availability perspective, those instances are very different, with the second having much more value for brand recognition later.

Thus, brand mentions should arguably sit above raw citation counts when evaluating the brand-building effects of SEO/GEO.

In terms of supporting evidence, Search Engine Land reported a 2026 analysis of roughly 16 million AI appearances in which about 40% of AI citations did not name the source brand in the generated answer. These are so-called “ghost citations” and they don’t prove the user actually encountered the brand.

That’s basically a problem of mental availability: the content was available to the machine, but the brand wasn’t necessarily made available to the human user.

SEO/GEO can therefore help build the memory associations search later captures.

The goal isn’t only ranking for a keyword but rather building an association between the brand and the circumstances that cause someone to search in the first place.

These buying situations are often described through Category Entry Points, or the thoughts and situations that cause someone to enter a category. Such situations often become queries and prompts, which raises the strategic question of not only, “Which keywords should we rank for?” but also “During which situations should our brand come to mind?”

Suppose a software company wants to be associated with the prompt: “I need an analytics platform that’s easy for a small marketing team.”

A holistic SEO/GEO strategy can help the brand create such associations in Google results, comparison articles, Reddit discussions, YouTube, industry articles, and ChatGPT or Gemini responses.

Each relevant appearance can reinforce the brand’s association with being an analytics platform for small marketing teams. That increases the likelihood of its mental availability with its target audience.

Mental availability therefore changes what “successful SEO/GEO” means.

We shouldn’t expect the effects of GEO to live entirely inside AI referral traffic.

Rather, we’d want to watch the whole user journey:

• AI recommendation/mention share
• AI citations
• Branded search impressions and clicks
• Brand plus modifier queries
• Direct traffic
• Homepage traffic
• Branded conversion rates
• Self-reported attribution

For example, Semrush recommends examining AI mentions/citations alongside branded searches and direct traffic because a user can encounter the brand in an AI response but only visit it later, leaving no detectable AI referral.

Takeaways

AI search is turning SEO/GEO into a brand-building channel as well as a traffic-acquisition channel.

A brand can appear in an AI-generated answer, become associated with a need or category in someone’s memory, yet produce no click whatsoever. Still, that brand appearance may influence what the person searches for later.

That means the AI assistant may deserve credit for creating the demand, while Google or a direct visit receives the attribution for capturing it.

That makes mental availability a useful concept for explaining the gap between AI visibility and the traffic numbers we actually see.

See you next time!

I hope you’ve found this discussion around mental availability helpful.

Stay tuned for a new Hamsterdam Marketing lesson soon.

And if you want a hand with your brand strategy, get in touch with me. I’m an independent SEO/GEO consultant based in New York City.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!