LLM SEO: Differentiate or Too Soon?

budgetburner

So here's something I've been digging into. One of my sites gets about a hundred Bing clicks a month, but nearly forty thousand citations in AI outputs. Meanwhile, another domain pulls forty thousand organic clicks from Google but only thirty-five thousand citations in Bing. The numbers are all over the place.

Makes me wonder - are we jumping the gun on treating LLM visibility as a separate discipline? Or is this actually a genuine gap that needs its own services and reporting?

I've seen some people pushing LLM-specific offerings: focusing on queries that trigger AI answers, running Bing AI Performance reports, tracking Share of Authority in Clarity, even multi-domain strategies to hedge against citation volatility. Sounds clever on paper, but most of the 'LLM optimisation' chatter I hear is pure fluff.

Is there real meat here, or is it just another way to sell retainer work while everyone figures out what 'being cited by ChatGPT' actually means for the bottom line? I'm leaning cynical, but the data keeps nagging at me.

pixelperfect

Honestly, I've been pondering this for a while. When you strip away the technical layer, LLM services and SEO services are essentially brand marketing underneath. digital PR, social media, securing brand mentions across different platforms, making sure people talk about you positively - it all adds up to the same thing we used to call brand building.

The real issue is the expectations attached to the name. If you call it "LLM service" or "SEO service," clients immediately look for conversion metrics. But what you're really delivering is visibility. Brand marketing comes with a different mindset - people understand it's about awareness and positioning, not direct sales.

i think the smart move is to frame it as brand marketing. That way, you manage expectations from the start. Clients won't expect instant conversions, and frankly, you can probably secure a bigger budget when they see it as building long-term presence rather than a quick SEO fix.

tiktokguru

Great question! For LLM outputs, I've been experimenting a bit and here's what's working so far:

🔍 Manual spot-checking - picking random citations and verifying sources by hand. It's manual labor but catches hallucinated references fast.

📊 Domain overlap tracking - comparing cited domains against our backlink profile to see if they're actually ranking or just being pulled from training data.

🧪 Citation consistency scoring - checking how often the same fact gets attributed to different sources across multiple queries.

Would love to know how others are tackling this - any automated tools you've found reliable?

budgetburner

Everyone's jumping on the "LLM SEO" bandwagon, but the data sources are still laughably half-baked. Bing's AI performance report? Microsoft Clarity's share of authority? Nice novelty metrics, but they're about as reliable as a weather forecast in a hurricane. GA referrals and key events still do the heavy lifting. Differentiate all you want-just don't pretend the foundation is solid yet.