LLM SEO: The Skills Your Marketing Team Is Missing

Where a roundup includes you with errors, a factual correction with evidence has a high acceptance rate. Publishers generally do not want to be wrong, and this is the single highest return outreach available in this discipline.

It is also worth recording the reason for every rule you keep. A disallow line with no explanation gets preserved indefinitely through migrations and redesigns because nobody dares remove something they do not understand. A one line comment saying who added it and why turns a permanent mystery into a decision that can be revisited.

Finally, be prepared for the teardown to produce a finding nobody wants. Sometimes the competitor is genuinely better documented because they have been answering customer questions in public for years while your team answered them on the phone. There is no shortcut around that, and the only useful response is to start doing the same thing now rather than looking for a technical explanation that would be easier to fix.

Visibility in this channel is not a number you can look up. There is no console that reports how often an assistant named your company last month, and the tools that claim to supply one are sampling rather than counting. That does not make measurement impossible. It makes it manual, and manual is fine as long as you are honest about what you are measuring.

Whether It Is Worth Doing Yet That depends on your category. If your buyers research before they commit, the exposure is already there and waiting is a choice with a cost. If people buy from you on price or proximity without research, this can safely sit lower on your list.

One thing worth measuring separately is how recent your reviews are relative to your competitors on the same platform. Volume comparisons are the usual instinct and recency is the more informative one, because a profile with steady recent activity describes a business as it operates now while a larger historic total describes one that used to be busy.

Writing to Be Quoted, Not to Persuade Most marketing copy is constructed to move somebody through an argument. Generated answers do not consume arguments, they extract claims, which means the persuasive structure most copywriters were trained in produces text with nothing to attach a citation to.

Why That Breaks the Old Playbook The old playbook assumed that if you occupied a high position, you got the visit. That link between position and visibility has weakened. Ahrefs looked at 15,000 long-tail prompts across four assistants in July 2025 and found roughly 80 percent of the cited pages did not rank for the original query at all.

Set a Cadence and Stick to It Monthly is enough for most categories. Run the same prompts, the same number of times, and keep every answer. The value compounds because you can look back and see when a competitor entered the shortlist and which source appeared alongside them.

What robots.txt Controls It is a request, honoured by mainstream crawlers, that certain user agents avoid certain paths. It has no enforcement behind it and it does not secure anything, but the major providers respect it.

Rule Out the Mechanical Explanations Before concluding the gap is editorial, confirm you are readable. Check robots.txt for the relevant crawlers, check your server logs for what those agents actually receive, and load your key pages with scripts disabled to see what survives.

Check Whether You Are Even Present Go to each of those recurring sources and look for yourself. The usual outcome is not that you are described badly. It is that you are absent, or listed with an old address, or categorised under something nobody searches for.

The missing skill is the reflex to ask for the sample size and the publisher before repeating a figure, and to attribute it when using it. Teams that skip this end up presenting a vendor's marketing to their own board as market data, which is a difficult position to recover from.

Compare What Each of You Wrote Where a competitor's own page is cited, open it next to your equivalent and read both as a machine would. Count the sentences on each that could be lifted, attributed and remain true and useful out of context.

Build the Task List From What You Found The teardown usually produces four workstreams, in this order of cost: fix any access problem, claim and correct your listings on the recurring sources, rewrite your equivalent pages to lead with specifics, and start the slower work of earning coverage on the sources where you cannot simply claim a profile.

The complication is that AI systems use several distinct agents for different purposes. One may crawl for training corpora, another may fetch pages live when composing an answer, and a search provider's traditional crawler may feed both search results and an AI summary.

The terms are used almost interchangeably. Generative engine optimization usually emphasises assistants that write an answer, while answer engine optimization is sometimes used more broadly. Ask any agency what they mean by their term.