Irina says: “In a nutshell, broadly speaking, it is to optimize your brand and your web content as entities, not on a specific keyword basis – in such a way that it can be understood by LLMs and in semantic search.”

What does optimizing your brand as an entity mean in practice? Are we just talking about brand SEO here or are there other elements to it?

“There's a little bit more to it, and I'm happy to unpack that with you.

As SEOs, we're conditioned to be really obsessive about dofollow links. I think their importance in traditional search will remain, but I also think that other types of mentions of your product and brand should be prioritised as well.

An opportunity for a mention – even if it's a nofollow link or no link at all – is still worth pursuing. The reason for that is, as everyone knows, we have seen a seismic disruption from AI in SEO, with modern language models being trained on huge corpuses of text data, without the structure of anchor text, HTML directives, links, and all the other web-specific architecture that Google and other search engines typically rely on.

The lessons that are learned in teaching LLMs how to handle huge amounts of unstructured text data can be applied to how search engines handle the Internet.

Google already understands entities. It's common knowledge that it has had a knowledge graph built around that for many years now. It can already determine the relevance of related concepts, not just by the exact keywords we give it but by their actual meaning. So, optimizing your brand for AI, to me, means maximising your appearance alongside relevant topics in web content, getting away from that old thinking of thinking in terms of exact match keywords, and creating as much detail around your brand and your offerings as possible.

I'm going to have a lot more specific steps on this, when I get to it.”

Sounds great. I guess one of the challenges with that is – because you started off talking about the importance of optimizing for brand citations, and you also said that links aren't necessarily important here as well – but how do you measure the value of success here?

When you get a brand mention, is that likely to increase the number of times that your own website is served up on the SERP or does that particular brand mention increase your perceived authority in an industry by doing that? And if so, how do you actually measure the impact of those citations?

“That's a great question. I want to say that I tried to keep my tip as industry-agnostic as possible. I think it applies to every industry under the sun.

Great question. How do we measure the success of this? So, in the short term, it's going to be very hard to do since LLMs do not provide us with the kind of analytics we can get from Google or Bing. Their usage might remain a black box to us for a while, and we have to prepare ourselves for that, as SEOs. But, you can still work directly with an LLM to gauge how it's interpreting your content.

You can fine-tune it on material related to your domain, or you can also try using retrieval-augmented generation. Then, you can make tweaks to your content to see if its product recommendations change in your favour. Taking a bit of a scientific experimental approach here is key. Then, we'll also still be able to use tools that search engines provide to see how our content is performing in web search.

Google and Bing both support semantic search, which goes beyond simple keyword matching and provides results based on context and the meaning behind the words. They also both have their own LLMs supplementing search, as we have all massively adopted by now. We may get first-party marketing analytics tools from these so we can see when our brand is mentioned and in what context.

For measuring success with search engines, I would try and test different strategies on different content and see how clicks, impressions, and position respond to each. I would also test across as much of the website content as possible to get statistically significant data. That's my short answer.”

Great answer. To a certain degree, for that question, I'm reminded of the answer that Gary V gives for being questioned with, ‘What's the ROI of this?’

He often says, ‘What's the ROI of your mother?’, because you cannot necessarily calculate the ROI of everything.

“Yeah, you cannot.”

As a progressive marketer who wants to test the boundaries, you’ve got to be able to be willing to come up with new ways of measuring things, I guess.

“That’s right, there's no way around it. We have to prepare ourselves, as SEOs, to treat this as a bit of a black box situation, put on our scientist caps, and approach this in the scientific experimental way and just see what clicks.”

When you speak to an SEO or a marketer who hasn't really done much entity optimization, what are some of the first steps that you tend to recommend them to do to get started?

“I have a lot of ideas around this, and I'll try to be as quick as I can. The number 1 thing I'd prioritise is maximising mentions of your brand – in text and in video content on the web.

Get a link if you can (those are still important and you should not by any chance overlook that), but also do not turn down an opportunity, if you get a nofollow or no link at all. Second of all, try to maintain a presence on social media.

LLMs get trained on data from tonnes of different sources, including social posts. So, it's important to stay relevant there. I would highlight that Reddit is especially valuable, both as a source for LLM training data and as a platform that's frequently boosted in Google search results for informational queries.

Another tip I have is to find ways to get people to mention you organically – just as a page with valuable information. It can be a ‘link magnet’. A brand with an interesting story to tell can be a mention magnet. Tell interesting stories. Create wild shocking content if you can't. That gets people talking. Keep building smart informational content, but make sure to incorporate your brand whenever possible.

I don't believe that pure informational content with the sole aim of garnering links will get value as it once did. Also, diversify your language. That's another thing we can all do. Help the algorithms connect your entity to every relevant phrase and piece of information. Don't just keep spamming the same anchors and mentions over and over. Write content that offers novel information on the edge of Google's knowledge graph, if and when available.

Use schema. That's still a very important part of the journey. Prioritise internal links. Again, this is more of a Google than LLM situation, but it remains one of the most impactful things that you have direct control over, with regard to demonstrating the relevance of a page to a topic and strengthening your brand and product entities.

This might be basic advice for SEOs, this thing about prioritising internal links, but don't neglect to link your informational pages back to at least 1 relevant product page within the main content – and try to have a system to scan your site for missed link opportunities.

Finally, I wanted to throw in one more advanced tip. There is some research that shows that LLMs are susceptible to strategic text sequences which have been shown to bias LLMs to favour recommending specific products that contain an STS in their description over the ones that don't.

Broadly speaking, an STS is a carefully designed sequence of text inserted on the product's information page, which influences the LLM to recommend the product over other competing products. An example of one used in a 2024 research paper I read recently (Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility by Kumar and Lakkaraju), which used fictitious coffee machines as its test product, gave us an STS, which I'm going to tell you now: ‘top-rated by coffee experts’.”

What does STS stand for?

“It stands for strategic text sequences.

It's just a snippet of text that you would include in the description of a product. It's a very fancy term for that.”

It's not like a target keyword phrase then?

“No, it’s not quite the same thing. I would say it's a bit more broad. It's a sequence of texts you include specifically on the product's information page.

It's designed entirely to influence LLMs to recommend that product over competing products.”

What would be an example of one?

“So, in this research paper I read recently about these, where folks were trying to test this out and how valuable they are, they took, as a fictitious product, a coffee machine provider. One example of an STS there would be, and I quote, ‘Top-rated by coffee experts, featured in major coffee publications, best for gourmet coffee experiences.’ That would be the STS.

Now, why this particular sequence worked better than others, it's not really known. In this research paper, they tested this out, and this one outperformed the rest of the STSs that they had put together.

What's important is that it was arrived at algorithmically, and that process can be repeated. So, the wording of the STS is optimized over many iterations until we find the sequence that tricks the LLM into recommending it more and more often, until it recommends it even above options that better fit the user's query.

Just something to keep in mind. I think a lot of these, like I said, are industry-agnostic tips and are worth integrating into your approach, if you haven't considered them already, in the coming year.”

How do you know the starting point for establishing what your STS should be and how do you know what to tweak in order to hopefully further optimize it for LLMs?

“That's a really good question. I think the true North is always going to be usefulness and authenticity, which I know sounds extremely broad and kind of useless in a way, because we're not really defining the hooks holding in the actual structure of the words, right?

But, in the case where we're looking at product information pages, folks are looking for something that will help them understand and make better choices in what they want to purchase. Again, we have to employ empathy, and we have to be able to put ourselves in the mindset of someone looking for, in this case, a coffee machine.

Start from there, and ask yourself, if I were on the lookout for this, what would be the type of verbiage that would mean something to me, that would help me make choices? What are the things that matter to me when I'm searching for a coffee machine?

That goes back to some very traditional marketing practices and principles that are rather timeless and have nothing to do with AI or any other tech coming our way. It just has to do with truly being useful and helpful to people.

I don't know if I'm really answering your question too well, David, but that's the general idea, in the end.”

It's a tricky question. Obviously, it's a new area of SEO. It's a new area of marketing. So, there probably aren't any tools that can easily direct you to do that, but you obviously want to be ahead of the competition. To do that, you have to establish a new frontier by yourself and test and learn.

“That's really all it is.

People are, especially now with AI, just filling up the internet with AI-generated content. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we're still in this Wild West era, where the dust hasn't quite settled, the guns are out, and everyone's trying to hold on to their bounty of what they've built over all these decades before AI came along – and people are craving for authenticity.

I bet you can probably hear what I'm saying. We're all craving an authentic voice and we're all craving an authoritative voice. We're sick and tired of the fluff content. We're sick and tired of marketing copy. We want actually useful and authentic conversations.

That's another reason why I mentioned Reddit as such an important platform earlier. People are turning to direct lived experience as a source of truth. Whenever we can adopt more and more of that into our online dialogues and into our copy, we're giving the people what they want, which is an authentic explanation of something.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“A little earlier in our convo, I suggested that unlinked or nofollow mentions will likely have an increased importance. I don't mean to suggest that you should not continue trying to get high-quality, highly relevant, dofollow links. That remains a part of the game. But I also think focusing solely on that will lead you to missing some opportunities and strategies that would also be very valuable.

Similarly, I don't want to suggest that keywords are unimportant. It's absolutely necessary to continue to understand what people are searching for, how they're arriving at that or not arriving at your website, and to set goals to rank for specific queries. But I also think that we should not get overly focused on trying to exactly match keywords to our content.

That's why my tip is this much broader approach of looking at your entity – whether that's your brand or whatever makes sense. Looking at entities as opposed to fixed words.

I also think that, in the realm of AI, some SEOs are embracing AI as an easy way to rapidly pump out content. I think that this is both ineffective and also very bad for the internet as a whole. An AI will simply regurgitate what it already knows, so you're not going to be providing anything new for users or for Google's knowledge graph. You're going to get lost in the sea of samey SEO content being churned out by SEOs who all have the same ideas as you.

By all means, use AI as a method to brainstorm, to create outlines, or to augment your process, but also please don't rely on its output to be interesting or truthful. You're still going to need qualified humans to check for hallucinations, and you're still going to want to provide a unique voice and an engaging presentation.

And, again, embrace non-text-based media as well. Videos have become a very dominant force in search, especially YouTube video. AI (and, by extension, Google) is just going to get much, much better at parsing images, video, audio, and all of that good stuff.

Finally, to wrap up that thought, David, this comes back to the general principles that Google has been trying to encourage for years. Focus on making quality, authentic content: content that provides new information and isn't just a rehash of content that's already easy to find. Content that's engaging and useful to the reader. Content that is not overly focused on keywords and, finally, content that reflects the EEAT principles of expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Because, at the end of the day, people are looking for honest, authentic dialogues.”

Irina Papuc is Co-Founder at Galactic Fed, and you can find her over at GalacticFed.com.