Does Third-Party Content Actually Drive LLM Brand Mentions More Than Your Own Site?

And so like a big thing that people are doing right now is they're just, they're producing a bunch of these same like more scammy listicles and they're just trying to get them published everywhere.

And they're making the case that this is really what drives GEO.

And again, they're saying that if you have content on your own site, that LLMs don't pay attention to the content on your own site anymore.

It's all about what other people are saying about you.

And from what we're seeing, that's just not true.

Like we have counter examples to like pretty much every case here.

So I want to talk through, well, first of all, this narrative came from a post I saw on LinkedIn last week from the Air Ops team.

actually the CEO at AirOps, where he references this and I believe the agency Graphite's studies where they say third-party sources drive 85% of brand discovery, basically saying that third-party content is what's influencing brand mentions and LLMs and your own site content is only, I guess, influencing 15% or not, something like that.

I take issue to this overall as just like a narrative that third-party sites are driving the majority of brand mentions.

And I think this...

Like the issue I take is if you look at the methodology, I think what happens is if you look at a big site, like let's say Peloton or Salesforce, and you look at just some of their top software queries, like for Salesforce, it would be like best CRM software.

Or if you look at Peloton, it would be like best exercise bike.

And you don't see citations from that company for that query.

It would lead you to believe that there's something external that's driving the brand mention for those businesses.

But in reality, from what we look at, in these really competitive industries, there's just really large brands and you don't necessarily need your own site content.

to basically drive the awareness that Salesforce is one of the top CRM tools or that Peloton is one of the top exercise bikes.

It's just kind of known because there are a ton of other sites talking about these companies and saying that these are some of the best options.

But I think where this gets... challenging is like, what do you do if you're a smaller business? Like, what do you do if you are the Toro TMS that's just starting off in trucking management software? Like, you read this kind of study and then you immediately come to the conclusion that our content strategy needs to be getting all these other sites in the transportation industry talking about Toro instead of producing our own content.

And It's just not true.

That's not what we see.