More and more business owners are concerned about the lack of visibility in AI/LLM answers.
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There’s no single, well-defined playbook as to which steps they should take to get surfaced by LLMs. Instead, there’s an incredible amount of noise in the industry as agencies are trying to sell single tactics that are proclaimed to be efficient: Reddit, Listicles, organic rankings… Each of these is often advertised as your best way to get into AI answers.
While all those tactics are helpful (when done right), individually, none of them will drive long-term visibility across a wide variety of prompts and all LLM platforms.
LLM visibility cannot be quikcly/easily built or scaled, and that might be your strongest competitive advantage by the way. In the world where everyone is trying to fake it, there’s a clear benefit of building something real.
There’s no one single tactic to elevate your brand’s presence in AI answers because there are two important components working here (driving one another):
Your brand needs to be “known” by LLMs in a clear way (what you do and how you are different from direct competitors)
Your brand needs to be consistently present across several URLs AI agents find and use to create an answer when searching.
This notion of a business clearly positioned around the web is referred to as “LLM consensus”, and there’s no one tactic to achieve it.
Ensure consistent messaging about your business everywhere
The first step to LLM visibility is ensuring that all the pages that rank for your brand name or variations consistently and clearly describe your business and its value proposition in the same way, to avoid confusion. This “LLM consensus audit” should be as extensive as possible, because AI agents search further than top 10 ranking URLs:
Your website: On-site “About” pages are usually very outdated and weak
Official profiles across social media platforms
Your local reviews (Trustpilot, BBB, Google Maps, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc.)
Niche directory listings
Any other pages mentioning your business
The essential details that should remain consistent from URL to URL include:
Date and year when the business was founded
Current address
Consistent description of the business and the key identifying factors (that make your business different from direct competitors).
Partnerships, collaborations, sponsorships (with other brands/entities)
Awards, achievements, and milestones
Some examples of business details that can make your business stand out (and get surfaced more often):
Manufactured in [America]
Family-owned
Locally farmed
XX+ years in business
Awarded in [year] as “XX”, etc.
If you keep repeating these unique identifying factors across the web consistently, they will ultimately become part of the LLM training data and help your business get included in more relevant answers.
Identify “gaps” in visibility
The next step is identifying the most influential domains and URLs where your business lacks visibility (and where your competitors are included). For bigger businesses that try to be visible across a wide variety of prompts, tools like Peec.AI and Amadora.AI can be useful. For smaller businesses that care about 3-10 prompts, manual prompting and analysis are also doable.
For your target prompts, take notes for:
Most cited domains (in many cases, those could be Reddit, YouTube, etc.) and create a long-term visibility strategy around those.
Most cited URLs. Those are likely to be listicles on well-established domains. If several of your competitors are listed but your business consistently fails to be included in those, create a plan on how yours can be included as well. Usually, this involves a well-crafted outreach or a relationship-building strategy with journalists/bloggers and editors of the publication.
Each of these steps can take many months. But there’s no easier plan to get consistently surfaced in AI answers. It is neither easy nor fast.
So stay away from marketing agencies that advertise easy and quick solutions because those usually involve short-term visibility or manipulations that can cost your business long-term visibility.
Don’t forget to monitor AI visibility progress using some measurable KPIs and clear metrics.
And feel free to have a quick free chat if you need help!
One of the most effective things you can do to help with AI visibility is secure earned media / earned third-party citations that echo what you’re saying in your owned content.
If you and a competitor do everything right with owned content, but your competitor has secured more authority through earned third-party citations, the competitor is highly likely to earn the AI recommendation.
The consensus framing is the useful part, because it puts a name on something that looks like five unrelated problems on a small site.
At the ecommerce end I keep hitting a step before your audit list. Of 197 online stores I reviewed this summer, 39 had broken or missing schema. That is the one place a business states its own facts in a machine readable form, and on those sites it was either empty or contradicting the page it sat on. Before anyone worries about what Trustpilot and the directories say, the store itself has not stated a founding year, an address or a description that a machine can read without guessing. There is nothing for a consensus to form around yet.
Your point about smaller businesses and 3 to 10 prompts is the part I would push on. When the manual check shows the brand is simply absent rather than described wrongly, do you still start with the consistency pass, or do you go straight to the cited URLs and treat the owned properties as cleanup afterwards?