Alignment for LLM visibility is incredibly complex, but doable

I’ve straddled both the brand marketing and SEO industries for the past decade now. That dynamic has made it particularly interesting to watch how the concept of brand alignment has seeped into the search marketing vernacular. 

To quote my favorite baseball player, Yogi Berra, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” 

I’ve watched and I’ve observed how the conversation about brand alignment for LLM visibility has gone from “nice to have” to an absolute necessity. LLMs can expose a weak brand alignment while rewarding a strong brand alignment with increased visibility. 

With that, I want to kick things off by better explaining exactly what brand alignment looks like and how you can achieve it.

What happens if you don’t have brand alignment?

I once had a call with a potential enterprise-level client whose company had recently run a Super Bowl ad. I knew five seconds into the call that I probably didn’t want to work with this client. 

My take on their situation was that they were in what I call a “maturity inflection point.” This is when a brand has an amazing product or service and they release it in the right way, in the right place, and at the right time. Don’t underestimate how powerful a good product can be when its stars all align. 

What inevitably happens in such cases is that too much of the success of the company is attributed to marketing (and the marketing was never really that great to begin with). In reality, the success was simply due to the momentum of the initial magical moment where the product was released into perfect conditions. 

Brands in this situation hit a wall almost without exception. They need to take the next evolutionary step into who they are, who they focus on, and how they communicate because their marketing tactics haven’t caught up with where the market and audience are (hence why I call it a “maturity inflection point”). 

When this happens, brands have two choices: 

1. They can pivot and evolve (i.e., mature)
2. They can pay more money to perform

When you lose traction because your marketing’s efficacy was riding on the momentum of the product, you have to either evolve or pay more to play more. 

(I know we’re not talking about LLM visibility yet, but I promise you we have been this whole time.) 

The potential client I was speaking with was stuck in this very problem, and they were not happy when I recommended option one—pivot and evolve. They also didn’t like option two—spending more money (but that had already happened well before our Zoom call). 

The major hangup was an inability to understand how…