Branded content
Branded content is material a brand makes or pays for that people want to read, watch or hear for its own sake, like a guide or a video series.
Branded content is material a brand makes or pays for that people want to read, watch or listen to for its own sake. A guide, a short film, a podcast, a recipe series. It promotes the brand by being worth someone's time, and the product often sits in the background.
For marketers it's a way to be remembered for something people chose to spend time with, instead of something they skipped past.
Branded content and advertising
An ad asks for attention to sell something. Branded content earns attention first and lets the brand come along with it. The line between the two blurs when a brand pays a publisher to run its story, which is why publishers label those pieces as sponsored or paid partnerships.
For example, Fernhill Coffee makes a six-part video series on the farms it buys from. Nobody is asked to buy anything. People watch it because it's interesting, and they come away knowing Fernhill as the roaster that knows its growers.
Why it matters for AI answers
AI platforms read the web to write their answers, and branded content is part of what they read. A useful guide on your own site, or a well-sourced piece on a publisher's site, can become one of the pages an answer cites when someone asks about your subject.
What a platform can use is what's in the text. A video series helps less if its page holds nothing but the video. Put a written summary, the key facts and a transcript on the page, so a bot reading the HTML finds what the film says.
A piece that's clearly sponsored still describes you in someone else's place, so check that it says what you'd want an answer to repeat.
In AnswerOrbit
Sources shows which pages the answers used for your prompts, sorted by who owns them: your own website, your other domains, your competitors, and everyone else. That tells you whether your branded content is being read, and the Pages tab shows each page's type.