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Generally agree. 1. Grounded vs ungrounded. 2. Ungrounded and brands are in the answer 3. Grounded and brands are in the answer. 4. Some prompts where brands are not in the answer. Goal 1: Your entity is accurately portrayed ungrounded Goal 2: Your entity is accurately portrayed grounded 1/N

Goal 3: Your entity is mentioned in topics you care about grounded Goal 4: Your entity is mentioned in topics you care about ungrounded Goal 5: Your entity recommended in decision making grounded Goal 6: Your entity is recommended in decision making ungrounded 2/N

In other words, I agree with the Waikey/Dan Petrovic method as well - and frankly worry that others are copy+pasting queries from GSC, overinflating bot activity. Thinking back, we swapped the order of goals 3-4 with 5-6, as they were closest to ROI. 3/N

The SEO industry has lazily tried to apply the 'old' paradigm of 'rank tracking' to LLMs, and frankly, it doesn't work well because it doesn't reflect how LLMs operate.

I'd argue at this point rank tracking doesnt even particularly reflect how Google operates either

Traditional search engines rank documents in a linear order based on their perceived relevance to a query, LLMs contextually and non-deterministically generate an answer in language, not rankings.

Some search professionals herald the dawn of conversational AI because humans can interact with 'real' language instead of queries; yet still want to try and measure results with the former, rather than the latter.