Interviewer: If an LLM can answer questions about the future, does that mean it can predict the future?

I’m working on an enterprise brand’s website, and something interesting stood out in its Google Search Console Gen AI report: The most cited page on the company’s website in AI Overviews & AI Mode, with 5x more impressions than the homepage, is its “About” page. It’s a comprehensive, detailed page about the company’s history, background, and evolution over time. It’s not a “special page” created for LLMs or AI agents. It’s written for humans, visually appealing, and contains detailed information about the brand in a format that both humans and LLMs can easily understand. So what’s the big “GEO” takeaway here? Create comprehensive “About” pages with detailed, accurate information about your company’s history. In other words, the same recommendation many of us in SEO have been making for years, especially since E-A-T became a bigger part of the conversation in 2017 (and long before that, in many cases). Why do I think this is a more sustainable approach than creating separate pages specifically for LLMs? Because those pages create an easily gameable surface. Notably, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic haven’t explicitly asked website owners to create separate, LLM-specific versions of their content, use Markdown, etc. I would change my perspective if they did (they won’t.) The problem: it’s inevitable that bad actors (and plenty of brands) will use these pages to inject prompts, exaggerate claims, or give AI agents promotional information that doesn’t match what real users see, with the goal of manipulating what AI says about their brand. My prediction is that as this behavior becomes more widespread (it’s already spreading thru the GEO world like wildfire), the AI companies will increasingly develop ways to ignore, discount, or otherwise treat these pages as untrustworthy. And depending on how these systems evolve, the consequences might extend beyond the individual pages themselves. The unfortunate part is that even well-intentioned companies simply trying to “help” LLMs understand their content better could become collateral damage. Even if their LLM-specific pages contain exactly the same accurate information as their human-facing website, they could still get caught up in broader efforts to crack down on this type of content, or flag the sites using “manipulative” approaches. This is why I’m extremely cautious about employing tactics like this in the first place. Meanwhile, there’s a much simpler way to work on this: Take all that time and effort you’re spending creating special content for LLMs and use it to improve the information available to actual humans on your website. Make your company’s history, expertise, people, products, and reputation easy to find, understand, and verify. You’re still giving LLMs the information they need; you’re just doing it in a way that’s actually useful to your human readers, too. And unlike tactics designed to exploit how AI systems currently work, this is an investment that’s unlikely to become a liability when those systems inevitably start cracking down.

old SEO: get your startup on the first page of Google new SEO: get your startup into the 3 products AI recommends same game, but veeeeeery different rules

I’ve never understood how studies that look at citation overlap across LLMs account for the fact that citations can also be different *within each LLM* for the same prompt every time the response is generated.

To publish something on a paywalled site is to make it invisible. If AIs can't find it, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist. These two sentences aren't 100% true yet, but they will only get truer.

Outside of recent issues with rank tracking, one of the biggest bummers with those tools this year is that their organic traffic trajectories look much closer to impressions than clicks. A site can surge in SEO visibility (rankings) but see very little new traffic b/c of AIOs.