I said it out loud, in a meeting, with a straight face. I don’t care about your branded search in Google Search Console. I’m filtering it out so I can focus on unbranded keywords.
That was maybe ten years ago and it still makes me wince.
I got to say it out loud again this week, to Ann Smarty, which felt like the right penance. She has been doing this about as long as I have and she now spends most of her time on the exact thing I threw away. The full episode is up on Unscripted SEO.
The sentence I’d like back
The logic wasn’t crazy at the time. Branded search looked like credit you didn’t earn. Those people were coming anyway. Filter it out, prove the unbranded growth, get paid.
Then HCU happened. Then LLMs happened. And Ann put the cost of that thinking in one line I’m going to be quoting for a while:
Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how you actually lose control over it, because stuff starts ranking for your name.
That’s the whole thing. Your brand name is the query that matters most and it’s the one you have the least control over. Reviews, complaints, comparison pages, a Reddit thread from a bad quarter. All of it ranks for you eventually.
And now it doesn’t just rank. It gets read. Ann’s point was that before a model recommends a brand in an AI answer, it runs the branded search first, and it finds things about you your customers may not want to know.
So the thing I filtered out of my reports is now the front door.
Ann’s version of the fix
She calls it LLM consensus. LLMs trust you when a lot of independent sources say a consistent thing about you. One good page doesn’t do it. Fifty pages that disagree definitely don’t do it.
Then she did the thing that made me actually believe her:
I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess.
Twenty years of bylines still pointing at projects that died two decades ago. She keeps fixing them and keeps finding more. She’s not selling the clean version, she’s telling you what the cleanup costs.
The order she gave was: fix your own site, then make every other source agree with it, then go find the channels where your competitors get cited and you don’t. Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, a few real publications.
She also said don’t dismiss directory submissions anymore because LLMs read them. I laughed. Twenty years of making fun of directory submissions and they walked right back in the door.
This lines up with what Grant Simmons and Jason Barnard both told me on the show, in different words. Three people, three vocabularies, same problem. The machine has to be able to build one coherent story about you out of scattered parts.
Reddit isn’t a channel, it’s a lease
I asked Ann how a Reddit project crashes fastest, mostly because I wanted the fun answer.
She said established accounts. Almost ten years old. Suspended, because someone decided to get promotional.
Her average timeline for building a real branded subreddit presence is six months before it picks up and starts showing up in citations. Six months. That’s not a campaign, that’s a hire.
And she won’t do the sneaky version for clients. Not for ethics reasons, for liability reasons. Because they work on behalf of clients, they can’t afford the freedom to game things and experiment.
She’s running someone’s official brand presence. If it blows up, it blows up on them. That’s a clean way to explain to a client why you’re telling them no.
Half the time it isn’t an SEO problem
This part I did not expect from a technical SEO.
Ann said she’s in meetings with sales and support now, because the gap between what a website says, what a salesperson promises, and what support actually delivers ends up on Reddit. And then it ends up in the AI answer. That alignment inside companies, she said, becomes the key to LLM visibility. And it’s a fight.
Then she gave a number I appreciated way too much. In fifty percent of cases she can’t win that battle.
Half. And she doesn’t pretend otherwise, she just changes the strategy. She’s got a lawyer client who charges more than everyone else for a perfectly good reason, they take harder cases, and isn’t allowed to say it. So she builds authority with AMAs instead and works around it.
That’s the honest consultant answer and I don’t hear it enough. Sometimes the right move is to stop pushing and go build somewhere else.
It’s the same note Jon Henshaw hit on the show. Sometimes the best SEO available to you is fixing your broken product.
What I’d spend the $2,000 on now
I once charged a client $2,000 to hand write meta titles and descriptions. They demanded bespoke, human written, every single one, and they wanted to pay for the hours.
It was worth it then. It is absolutely not worth it now.
Not because AI writes better titles. Because $2,000 buys so much more than titles now, and you can still get the titles done well.
The way I’ve landed on adopting AI is small. Cure one headache a week. Tell your team to take the worst repetitive thing on their plate and kill it with whatever tool they want. That compounds. Trying to replace people doesn’t.
Ann’s agency is a good reality check on the hype here. AI does her sentiment tracking, monitoring, competitive research and ideation direction. The Reddit posting is human. The original PR ideas are human, because in her words AI is not a good way to invent something actually original and unique.
And for her own audits she still spends three days to a week reading actual search results by hand before she’ll write a roadmap. She wondered if that makes her old school. It’s why her audits are worth buying.
The data problem underneath all of it
Here’s my ongoing complaint, and Ann’s whole argument depends on it holding up.
Search Console hides between thirty and eighty percent of your query table. So you got a thousand clicks and you can see where two hundred of them came from. That’s not a report. That’s sticking your finger in the wind and guessing which way it’s blowing.
Meanwhile Microsoft Clarity told me that of 80 GA4 visits, the 40 sitting in the direct bucket were bots.
That used to be a cleanup problem. It isn’t anymore. Some of those bots are running around with wallets and they can spend money. Stop treating them like strangers.
My unlock has been connecting MCP to Search Console, GA4, Clarity and keyword data, and then asking for the raw numbers side by side instead of asking for analysis. Show me the data. I’ll do the thinking. If I have to open GA4 one more time I’m going to hit my head on the desk until I pass out.
Ann is making the same bet from the other direction. She starts every engagement with SEO because it’s the only place with data you can reason from. We really cannot look at LLMs and figure out what people are even prompting, she said. We don’t have that data.
Search everywhere optimization
Ann says she hasn’t had a lead in months ask to rank on Google. They ask to be in ChatGPT. She looks at organic search anyway, whether they want her to or not.
Her line on it is the most honest thing anyone has said to me about this:
SEO is still the most predictable path into LLMs. Not the only one.
She put the overlap at thirty percent. Not a hundred. In a market where everybody is selling certainty, she gave me a number that makes her own service look smaller.
She was just as blunt about her own flagship offering. They report Reddit citations for clients, and then she says citations aren’t the goal, they don’t even get clicked. The goal is being in the answer.
This is why I’m writing a book called Search Everywhere Optimization. The acronym doesn’t need to change. It was never really about the engine. It’s search everywhere now, and if we sit around pining for the good old days, we’re just not going to get paid.
One last thing from Ann, and it’s the least glamorous advice in the episode. She can’t afford polished video. Her team is buried in client work. So she has exactly one non-negotiable, a live stream every Wednesday, on the calendar. And that alone, she said, drives a lot of business, just because she does it every week consistently.
Do the bare minimum you can afford. Just do it every week.
Full episode with Ann Smarty is on Unscripted SEO. Find Ann at smarty.marketing, her newsletter and Wednesday live stream at AnnSmarty.com, her own write-up on LLM consensus, on LinkedIn and as @seosmarty.