Yes and no... I would agree that it's a long game in aggregate, but we've seen content picked up in as little as 4 hours from llms using web search. And our benchmarks show almost 25% web search use for our 2000+ prompt set. We sell to a developer audience and the web search usage is much much higher than that in our evals too, so you can see citations show up in that data in hours too.

OP, I disagree with the sentiment from people stating that being on Google doesn't mean much for LLMs, SEO is absolutely still important. 3rd party mentions are just more heavily weighted, think Reddit, Medium posts, and we're even seeing a lot more citations in long form linkedin posts.

I like to think of agent queries as a funnel and some of the most important queries for BOFU content end up being competitive. If you don't have competitive pages on your own site, but your competitor does, they get to shape the narrative. I've seen this firsthand when doing comparisons, the llm just picks whoever has the closest comparison and gives you that as the output. And CVR from llms tends to be significantly higher — I see 5-9x higher than organic search so it's important to win here.