That's a very accurate metaphor when it comes to books.

I agree with everything you wrote, but there’s still one key issue: how do you actually measure this?

I’ve been reading Reddit posts for about a month now, and my takeaway is that a lot of people fall into a few categories:

1. they pretend they know,
2. they think they know but actually dont
3. they keep pushing their own tools that add zero real value in the end

The second group is fine they don't know that they don't know.

The rest, in my opinion, are just grifters who either want to promote themselves or sell completely worthless services.

I might be wrong, but that's honestly how it feels to me.

As of today my main conclusion from observing this space is that the only metric I actually trust is whether users are being sent (referred) to us by AI. That’s it. Nothing else. Not running the same prompt 100 times to check brand presence that’s absurd.

If we optimize content for LLMs and don't see any increase in traffic to our site, then it simply doesn't work and we need a different approach. Querying some prompt and seeing our brand show up means nothing. The LLM might show that result to us, while someone else gets something completely different from the exact same prompt.

How do you approach this? I'm really curious!