Nomination is whether AI recommends you for a specific use case, rather than only listing you. It is the ANSWER category that sits right at the point where a customer describes their situation and asks the engine to pick. This playbook is the practical guide to becoming that pick. For the background, see the Nomination pillar guide.
The principle is straightforward: an engine can only recommend you for a scenario it has clear evidence you serve. So winning Nomination is the work of making your fit for specific use cases unmistakable in the sources an engine reads. That work is answer engine optimization (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimization (GEO). One prerequisite before you start: you have to be surfaced in the category at all. If you are missing from broad answers, fix Appearance first, because you cannot be nominated for a job you are never named for.
1. Find Out Which Scenarios You Win and Lose
You cannot fix a recommendation you have not seen. List the use cases, segments, and scenarios you actually serve, the ones customers describe when they are close to buying, and run a scenario prompt for each, logged out, in your target markets, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI answers. For each, note whether you are recommended, merely mentioned, or absent while a rival is nominated. The pattern is usually uneven: a brand often wins the scenarios it talks about clearly and loses the ones it has never named.
2. Name Your Use Cases in the Customer's Words
The most common reason a brand is not nominated is that its content never says, in plain terms, which situations it serves. A page that describes "flexible workflows for modern teams" gives an engine nothing to match against "best tool for a 5-person real estate team." Publish use-case and segment pages that name the scenarios explicitly: the team size, the industry, the constraint, the job to be done, in the words a customer would use. Specific beats clever, because the engine is matching a described need to evidence, not vibes.
3. State Where You Are the Best Choice, and Why
It is not enough to mention that you can serve a scenario. Say that you are a strong fit for it and give the concrete reason. An engine nominates the brand whose sources make the clearest, best-supported case for a given need. Tie each use case to a real strength, so the engine has both the match and the justification it needs to put you forward rather than just include you.
4. Keep Your Scenario Map Current
Brands expand into new segments and use cases faster than their content and third-party sources catch up. If you now serve enterprise but every source still frames you as a small-business tool, the engine will keep nominating you for the old jobs and skipping the new ones. Revisit your use-case content as you grow, and update the listings and profiles an engine reads, so the scenarios you are nominated for match the scenarios you actually serve.
5. Earn Third-Party Recommendations for Your Scenarios
When a credible source recommends you for a specific use case, that carries more weight than your own claim. Pursue roundups, guides, and reviews that name you as a good fit for particular segments or jobs, for example "best payroll for remote teams" pieces if that is a scenario you win. These targeted, scenario-level mentions move Nomination more than general brand coverage, because they match the exact shape of the customer's question.
6. Re-Measure by Scenario
Nomination shifts as you publish, as competitors claim scenarios, and as models update. A use case you win today can be taken by a rival who publishes a sharper guide next quarter. Re-run your scenario prompts on a regular cadence and watch which jobs you are gaining and losing, rather than checking the category in general.
Where the Work Gets Hard
Any single scenario is manageable. The difficulty is covering every use case you serve, across every engine and market, scoring each recommendation consistently, and repeating it to catch movement. A few scenario checks tell you little, because answers vary from ask to ask. Running the full set properly is a real undertaking, which is the honest reason most teams have it measured for them even when they write the use-case content themselves.
A HiBot audit gives you the baseline and the ranked list of scenarios, so your effort goes where it moves the score the most. You can map your own use cases to prompts with the Nomination worksheet, and see the full arc in Matched to Need. Download the ANSWER whitepaper to see the method, or request an AI visibility audit at hibot.com.
