"I'm choosing between 2 PR firms, I am a technology company focused on Generative Engine Optimization for Seer. I'm tasked with picking an agency that can help us name and codify our new innovations and my friends recommended to me the following 2 philly agencies, Maven PR and AgileCat"
-- How your customer probably searches, we've done UX studies with real people and found that up to 44% of prompts included brands for one client.
"Philly PR Agencies for tech"
-- The unbranded prompts you are probably tracking.
At Seer we believe in one mantra when it comes to marketing, the job to be done is to be Seen, Believed and Chosen.
Visibility is a vanity metric.
Many marketers, C-levels, etc are asking: what are my buyers actually typing in to these LLMs?
We built our agency to be the agency that says "lets bring our UX team to the table to structure some tests." Why?
Cause SEO & Content for too long been rewarded for doing marketing that doesn't talk to humans once, and in an AI world where we have less data than ever, we continue to ignore the humans at the core of our optimizations. That stopped with us in 2014 when we hired internal design and UX teams to help us understand the people behind the searches, and today it's just the people behind the prompts.
Some marketers are still playing the old game building content that wins for "unbranded" prompts while ignoring these kinds of prompts that show you vs a competitor. I think you need to do both...
Stop BRO-STING, start Posting.
You've seen the posts (or "brosts"), hmm new word, boasting + AI bro-ing = Brosting. Yeah that fits. We've seen the brosts and guess what none of us real marketers love your "comment below" spam tactics.
I replaced my CMO with this agent (Okara launched yesterday, claiming this)
I replaced my 8k/mo content team with this 30 dollar Clawdbot.
This content builds visibility (being seen), but after reading this content (below) does it build your belief in the brand?
But this isn't about low quality content, this post is about tracking branded prompts that might reflect how your customers are searching, and the tool I prototyped to do it.
I built a solution to this "prompt problem" and you can get it on my GitHub. Pull it down. Use it. Make it better.
Prompt: "my friends recommended"
"I'm choosing between 2 PR firms, I am a technology company focused on Generative Engine Optimization for Seer. I'm tasked with picking an agency that can help us name and codify our new innovations and my friends recommended to me the following 2 philly agencies, Maven PR and AgileCat"
Go login to your AI tracking tool, see any prompts like that? It's time to pull an MJ and "make that change".
Notice the biggie there "My Friends recommended" ...
That is the key! A lot of B2B searches actually start with someone tapping their network. 77% according to Gartner.
People telling their friends about your brand is a trust signal. Where is your TRUST KPI?
What makes someone recommend a brand? How often do you think it is one of your listicles or your auto generated content? Honestly? Look through your SENT DMs with links, how many look like that? ZERO. Because your reputation is on the line.
We’ve been trained to think about keywords. Rankings. Volumes. Positions. But great brands don’t win ONLY because they rank. They win because once they rank, they are compelling.
Great brands are remembered after they are "seen".
This quote, while not applicable to this post, always sticks with me about the value of brand.
“The amount of money that we are prepared to pay over and above the objective value of the product is exactly equal to the value of the frame that the brand provides at the moment of purchase.” - Phil Barden, Decoded
You don’t search “best agency” when your friends have already made a recommendation. You search the brand and see if what you read reinforces what you were told.
I got a top 3 ranking for SEO agency, got NOTHING for it but a full ego.
I spent 3 years trying to rank for "SEO agency, SEO consultant, and SEO company" back in 2014-ish, and we got the ranking between 1 and 3 for each one, and the plural. Phone rang off the hook, the sales people were flooded with calls, and NONE of them converted. Why? We weren't the cheapest, fastest, closest option. The people who type those queries in, don't have a network or its people searching for ego, like I was.
I should have worked on getting more searches for my brand.
Maven PR and AgileCat. Neither of them are out here pumping out listicles or trying to game the system. They’re just doing good work, building real brands. And I ran a comparison.
Our tool helps you compare training vs web answers... which can drive a GEO strategy.
So taking into account all the caveats about running a prompt 1,000 times to get the same answers and all that jazz, this is the beginning of understanding if todays "web data" becomes tomorrow's training data (which we don't know), how would I perform, and what sources are driving that performance.
How to consult from this:
If Agilecat is my client and they are telling me that PR is really important, I would say we need to do a lot more there because if todays search becomes tomorrows training data, now I could go do listicles sure, but I'd rather mine the gaps between who we want to be and how we show up and do the hard work of saying, how can wew make this real and resilient for the long haul, vs playing algorithm whack-a-mole.
Beliefs are different. They live in people’s heads.
And they show up in prompts.
They’re built through consistency, through perspective, through showing up in the right places with something worth saying.
AI is summarizing the internet, those beliefs matter even more. Because AI pulls from listicles, from mentions, from communities, from conversations, from bad reviews a decade ago.
So the question becomes:
What prompts are your brand associated with? What ideas you own? Do you have a view for that? Do you agree with the view, do you want to change the view?
But while all of this is happening… There’s this other force pushing in the exact opposite direction.
And that’s the explosion of self-promotional, AI-assisted, “just get it live” x50 content.
You see it everywhere. The same listicles. The same “top 10” posts. The same structure, the same headers, the same internal links. It’s what I’ve called the sea of sameness years ago.
You can still get traffic doing this. You can still rank. Sure. We don’t do that stuff.
Animalz is beating Seer Interactive in thought leadership, yes, with AI built spam, but it works.
I’ve never seen this company at any of the conferences I’m speaking at which is just one data source and is not the only, but I bet if you asked some human beings, how does a company build thoughts leadership? Zero say: build 50 pages saying "we're thought leaders". Yet that works in AI. 
But look at what they’re doing.
You can have those wins, I would rather get in the arena and battle it out, and learn to be a better company, not just say I am.
Do they have fans? Nope.
I don't know. But I do know in my content I can see what's winning with humans. You can use this view in looker, make it your own.
That answer lives in prompts.
Not "best SEO agency in Philadelphia." The prompts that start with "my friend recommended..." The ones where someone told someone your name.
Those are the prompts that matter because those are the ones I don't see anyone tracking, or talking about much.
Go login to your AI tracking tool right now. Search for anything that looks like a brand comparison. Do you have any?
The beauty of this comparison, especially when you used what we built or use your own prompt tracking is the comparison of web vs training data, which I get into in the video below.
If you see yourself doing better when web is triggered, make sure those sources are getting hit by the bots that train the models, you want to take the web resources and do what you can to get them in the training data for that long term good stuff about your brand.
I’m sharing this in GitHub and exactly the questions I’m asking myself because I believe in this community of people who are taking the opportunity to do good marketing.
Track the brand prompts, track your brand impressions, track your direct traffic, track your social referral traffic, build those metrics and you are building a brand that will show up in DMs and SERPs, not in SERPs only.
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