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Benchmarking Brand Discoverability: LLMs vs. Tr...

Avatar for JR Oakes JR Oakes
April 28, 2025

Benchmarking Brand Discoverability: LLMs vs. Traditional Search

This presentation by LOCOMOTIVE Agency compares brand discoverability in LLMs versus traditional search engines. The research shows that traditional Google search returns more unique brands per query than any LLM provider, with significant diversity in brand recommendations between different AI models. The data reveals patterns between SEO metrics and visibility across both systems, suggesting companies might benefit from tailoring their strategies for different AI platforms, particularly considering how various search modifiers (like "best" or "enterprise") produce different brand recommendation patterns across systems.

Avatar for JR Oakes

JR Oakes

April 28, 2025
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  1. JR Oakes JR Oakes is the VP of Strategy for

    LOCOMOTIVE Agency. He has been an SEO since 2011 and was formerly an architectural glass artist. His focus areas are in SEO, machine learning, language, and user experience. jroakes locomotive.agency
  2. From Industry Terms to Intent-Rich Keyword Expansion Extracted key base

    terms by category and expanded with relevant modifiers.
  3. G2 Industries 1.9k Search Modifiers 63 The Final Data Set

    G2.com gave us a structured way to extract a cohesive set of B2B SaaS industries, with search data (Ahrefs), and data on search modifiers. Brand Results 1.9M Companies Found 57k
  4. 11 Context Tools / MCP RL RAG Memory There are

    a number of ways that model output can be transformed to contain additional information. These are not measured here.
  5. Top Brand Mentions Top 30 Domains Mentioned in LLM Models

    Top 30 Domains Mentioned in Organic Models
  6. Top Industries Since the time of claude-2.0 and gpt-3.5, LLMs

    have increased their mentions of brands in commercial query responses.
  7. Top Domains Mentioned in Under 10k Visitor Bucket Many niche

    brands with low awareness, but LLMs find them.
  8. Metrics for SEO Matter for LLMs Having a better performing

    site for traditional search, potentially leads to better visibility outcomes for LLMs as well.
  9. B2B Blues Many brands in niche industries have to pay

    to to get tailored messages to a small audience. The bigger brands don’t need it.
  10. Do Models Care about Social Media? Google has a slightly

    stronger preference for companies with social media. Or, companies with social media tend to have more visibility in Google.
  11. Modifiers We have a frequent modifier set (63) for B2B

    SaaS that we aligned to tested search terms. We can look at the data through this facet.
  12. Other AI ≠ Google AI Other LLMs display wildly different

    results than Google search and AI Overviews for many industries
  13. Average Unique Brands per Response by Provider Google Organic has

    the most Unique Brands returned per search term, beating out all 3 model providers. Anthropic and OpenAI are still behind Google Gemini.
  14. Diversity There is a lot of diversity in brand recall

    from model to model so opportunities to test and optimize by platform.