Ann Smarty on LLM Consensus, Reddit and Brand Search

Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for over twenty years and has stopped getting the request that used to define the job. Nobody asks to rank on Google any more. They ask to show up in ChatGPT. Her answer starts somewhere uncomfortable: the query set that matters most is your own brand name, and it is the one you control least. Key takeaways Growth is what costs you control of your name. The moment people search for you, other people’s pages start ranking for you. LLMs run a branded search before they recommend you. Whatever that search surfaces is what ends up in the answer. LLM consensus means every source saying a consistent thing. She is candid that her own twenty-year footprint fails this test. Reddit takes about six months and punishes promotion. She has watched accounts nearly a decade old get suspended for turning promotional. Citations are not the win condition. Being inside the answer is. Citations mostly do not get clicked. On this page Losing control of your own brand name What an LLM consensus audit actually is Six months on Reddit, and how to lose the account The blocker is internal, not tactical Chapters and timestamps People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Losing control of your own brand name Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how it actually you lose control over it because stuff starts ranking for your name and that is the most important search query, that’s your brand name, variations, brand name reviews and all of that.— Ann Smarty Which sets her sequencing: establish the organic footprint first, then go outbound. Outbound manufactures branded search, and branded search you have not prepared for is branded search someone else answers. Everyone is searching for brand names, including LLMs. Before they recommend a brand in an AI answer, they will do the branded search, they will find stuff about you that your customers may not want to know.— Ann Smarty That is the retrieval path, stated plainly. It is the mechanism behind the advice, heard elsewhere on this show, to go and fix the product. What an LLM consensus audit actually is You have to have I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess.— Ann Smarty The self-indictment is the useful part. Twenty years of bylines and dead project references produce an inconsistent record, and cleaning it is not a project with an end date. Don’t dismiss directory submissions that easily these days. They are being very well used by LLMs, which is like they made a very good comeback from I do...