We Finally Know the #1 Ranking Factor for AI and LLMs. Across 100 industries, 16 LLMs, ChatGPT's web interface, and Google AI Overviews, I found the same pattern over 20,000 times: The top-recommended sites have backlinks and brand mentions on pages that are more relevant to their industry. And yes, that includes brand mentions without a link. -- This kind of research involves more complexity and more layers than usual. So, I _highly_ suggest you take 12 minutes and watch the video. Seriously. I can almost guarantee you will learn a lot about how LLMs work. -- If you understand how LLMs are trained, this is _exactly_ what you would expect. But, until today, we've had to rely on our intuition for that guidance. That's no longer the case. We now have concrete evidence that this is the primary ranking factor for AI and LLMs. In the end, for AI search visibility, your SEO, link building, content, PR, and reputation teams all need to be on the same page about who you're trying to reach and how you want to be referenced. -- That's also what I built OppAlerts to help you do. It brings semantic similarity to your brand monitoring, competitor research, and link prospecting, so you can find opportunities most relevant to your business and target market. Tomorrow, I'll have the blog post with all of the data. Next week, I'll have a much longer video - probably about an hour - helping you and other marketers understand how AI and LLMs work at a much deeper level. This 12-minute video is a small sample of that. Follow to stay tuned for all the updates around this and future research as well. If you don't want to watch the video, or want a text version, the blog post is in the top comment.