Ranking #1 for a keyword does not mean your brand will get recommended by LLMs

SEO teams can no longer bulldoze their way to success. This guide demonstrates what happens when you rank #1 in classic search and LLMs still don't care about your brand.

There’s two ways to “show up” on LLMs

Brand Recommendation: Your brand earns enough entity co-occurrence with [THING] that it gets recommended when people are looking for said [THING]

URL Citation: Your content gets referenced and linked, but that does NOT mean your brand will get recommended!

Ranking #1 in classic SEO does not guarantee visibility in the AI search era

In this example, I ranked my client #1 in the classic blue link position for alternatives to salesforce service cloud with a self-serving listicle that ranks ourselves at the top of the list.

In the past, SEO teams would report on rankings and traffic. Everyone clapped 👏

But not today. You can see (via the screenshot below) that despite being the #1 ranked page, the AI summary is recommending Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Freshworks, HubSpot Service Hub and Zoho Desk.

Why was my client not recommended? Because a lack of co-mentions.

You can’t bulldoze your way into brand visibility

SEO teams can no longer bulldoze their way to success.

Brands cannot “hack” their way into getting preferential LLM treatment with old school ranking techniques.

In the example above, my client needs to drive up their review profile on Gartner and G2, get mentioned on all the other competitor listings, and ultimately build a better digital footprint in relation to Salesforce Service Cloud alternatives.

Prompts that don’t recommend brands are not always worth tracking

Example: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using an intranet?

In this dashboard below from Scrunch AI, my client’s page is earning a URL citation 100% of the time but their brand is getting recommended 0% of the time.

It’s worth noting that competitors are not getting recommended either.

Why is that? Because the answer does not require a tool or a vendor.

This is a straightforward question that gets answered by a mix of search grounding and LLM training data.

The answer just gets scraped, summarized and served.

Reporting on LLM citations alone often leads to the wrong conversations

Showing clients how often their content gets cited by LLMs often leads to questioning about declining CTR and traffic — but as John-Henry eloquently puts it, the game has changed and there’s still value in controlling the narrative.

You need more data points (from more sources) to tell the full story

Here’s a quick and dirty mental model of how I’m thinking about this.

For a deeper dive into reporting GEO success, check out my recent AirOps webinar on The Dark SEO Funnel.

We are moving away from single page, keyword driven SEO to topical coverage and ecosystem visibility.

For a deeper dive into scaling authority in modern SEO, check out this excellent guide below by Kevin Indig and Amanda Johnson 👇

Topic-first SEO: The smarter way to scale authority