@tjrobertson52

I wanna talk about a brand new type of marketing agency that has emerged since the advent of large language models and whether or not it makes sense to hire one of these agencies as a business owner. So if you're at all familiar with S E. O, you've probably heard of link building agencies.

These are agencies that help place links around the internet pointing to your website, which can help you rank in traditional search engines and links are still relevant for showing up in large language models, although I would argue less so. What has become more important because of large language models are brand mentions or more accurately brand recommendations.

However, brand mentions is a term that most people are using right now and this is because when someone goes to a large language model looking for a recommendation for a specific product or service, that large size model searches all over the internet for recommendations. So the entire game now is having recommendations for your brand show up in these searches. This is a large part of what we do for our clients, but it should be no surprise now that entire mention building agencies are now popping up.

These are agencies much like link building agencies that will charge you per mention they build for your brand and this makes complete sense but like any new industry, there's gonna be a lot of grift. So I wanna tell you what you should be looking Out for most of the agencies I've been seeing will just charge a flat rate per mention they build for your brand. And to me that feels like a red flag because in practice, most brand mentions are effectively useless.

But some brand mentions could be worth literally tens of thousands of dollars. So I'd like to help you evaluate how valuable a specific brand mention is. First of all, as I alluded to earlier, if the mention isn't an actual recommendation, it's not very useful.

Just having your brand name on the page doesn't do anything. It needs to be at least an implicit recommendation for your brand. Second, it needs to be on a page that large language models are citing when people are asking for recommendations for the product or service that you offer.

And that's part of what these mention building agencies are offering. Part of the service is to identify these highly cited pages. However, you need to have some way to verify or they need to be able to prove to you after the fact that the large language models are citing that page and then recommending your brand.

A few things to look at when verifying this. Make sure it's a large language model that people actually use. We personally only care about ChatGPT, Google's AI overviews and Google's AI mode.

And make sure the prompts you're tracking sound like prompts that someone would likely type into a large language Model when looking for your product or service, it's very easy for the agency to get you recommended for some oddly specific prompt that no one's ever gonna type. At our agency, we identify about 50 prompts people are likely to search for, and then we continue to measure against those prompts every day.

And what you'll see when you do this is that there's typically a handful of pages that get cited over and over again for a large percentage of these prompts. If you can get your brand as the top recommendation on one of those highly cited pages, it can be worth many thousands of dollars. But it's not easy to do.

And this is why it's a red flag to me when I see a flat price per brand mention. You don't want to pay $200 for someone to go to a Reddit thread and leave a comment.