Why LLMs Know You By Name But Don’t Suggest You

Optimizing for your name is not enough: Why LLMs don’t suggest your Brand

Training LLMs on your name as a professional or Brand is essential to survive the future of AI but this process it not instant. Here’s what you should know about optimizing you brand or name for LLMs

Indexing vs Inclusion in LLMs

Google can index pages in a couple of hours. This means that when you write a new piece of content, you can start seeing impressions and even clicks in a matter of days.
However, LLMs don’t work the same. Maybe you dominate the Brand and rank for a lot of keyords but this doesn’t mean that LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini will start suggesting you to its users queries such as “What is the best”.

Live Search (Data Lakes) vs Learned Data in LLMs (Data Rivers)

LLMs can work in 3 ways:

  • They do live search and build answers based on available information on search engines (data rivers)
    Example: “Who is CEO”
  • They reply based on their learned data from trusted sources and information properly optimized and connected (data lakes)
    Example: “What are the best companies for X?”
  • They do a combination between live data and learned data.

Unlike Google, LLMs will not present a brand as an option unless this brand is highly authoritative. This type of authoritativeness is not the same as the one SEOs are used to from SEO tools. But a proof E-E-A-T that goes beyond search: besides being present with relevant content, Brands need to have a consistent presence online and an unmistakable identity. If you do not fit these parameters, you will forever stay in the lake.

This is why you can ask who a person is, and ChatGPT can give you great complete reply. But when you do the opposite and ask for “best professionals in X” it won’t include you in the answer.

Jason Barnard explains the concept of Data Lakes and Rivers here.

How long does it take to get suggested by ChatGPT and Gemini after you optimized your brand for the Ais

At this point, the time span is getting shorter and shorter. Up to a few months ago, LLMs could take 1 year to “open the damns” and move your brand from live search to learned data. Now? It can take 3 to 6 months. And eventually it will be even less.

However, this will create a problem considering the immense amount of data getting pushed in search engines every single day. So at some point LLMs will stop “accepting” learned data and will reply based on live search for most direct informational queries.

What this means is that for certain queries that rely on a more “controlled reply”, you may be out of the game if you didn’t optimize on time to be included in the “learned data”. An example to this is: “best professionals in X” – in this case the LLMs will do their best to provide you with replies that are true and properly confirmed meaning they will not rely on live search.

Getting your Brand from Live Search to Learned Data

Considering now that you or brand will need to be part of the Learned Data to survive the uprising of AI, you need to act fast. The estimations is that with LLMs updating their content faster and faster, they will soon just stop.

So the number one thing you have to retain is: apply the next steps now!

  1. Very simple: use EEAT for your services, product pages and expertise guides and blog articles.
  2. Work on your bottom of the funnel pages: your About Page, Case Studies and company FAQs.
  3. Define a very good definition of who you or your company are. Throw it in an NLP tool and make sure machines can understand it exactly as you intent. Copy the description into a document and use it intensively wherever you exist online.
  4. Use the description on all points of your existence online.
  5. Put yourself out these. Write for third party websites, go on podcasts and interviews.
  6. Make sure your interviewers or article hosts describe you and link to you properly.
  7. Rinse and repeat (steps 5 and 6).

It may sound like a lot of work, but it is worth it if you have a business that relies immensely on its online presence. And honestly, even if it doesn’t, the future belongs to digital so if you don’t exist in the web, you won’t exist in the real world.