2026-08-03 · Jack Stovell
LLM SEO for your personal brand — what works and what is snake oil
"LLM SEO" is at the stage classic SEO was in about 2003: real mechanics exist, they're mostly unglamorous, and the gap between them and what gets sold is wide. We run an AI-visibility checker and a public benchmark of our own citation results, so this list comes from testing pages, not from vibes. Here's the honest split. The one artefact the working parts rest on, an AI-readable profile, is defined on its own page — including what a hosted one cannot promise.
What actually works
Being readable at all. The majority of "AI ignores me" cases we see fail at step zero: a robots.txt blocking AI crawlers (often a host's default the owner never chose), a login wall, or a JavaScript shell that serves crawlers an empty page. Fixing readability isn't optimisation — it's the difference between existing and not.
One canonical, stable URL. Models resolve identity better when one page is unambiguously THE page about you, and everything else points at it. Five half-maintained profiles dilute; one maintained page with sameAs links from the others concentrates.
Structured identity markup. Schema.org Person (or Organization) JSON-LD is the disambiguation layer — it's how a system distinguishes you from the seven other people with your name. Include jobTitle, url, and a full sameAs array.
Checkable, dated facts. Models preferentially repeat things that look verifiable: roles with organisations and dates, work with sources. A claim carrying a source link and the date you last confirmed it is the strongest unit of content you can publish about yourself.
Consistency across surfaces. If your site, your GitHub and your profile all state the same facts the same way, corroboration does the rest. Contradictions between surfaces read as noise.
Time. Retrieval systems pick pages up quickly, but model familiarity — being known without a search — accumulates slowly, over crawls and training cycles. Anyone promising fast results on that half is lying to you.
What is snake oil
Keyword stuffing for models. A system that reads and summarises the whole page is precisely the audience keyword density was never going to fool. Repetition reads as low quality to a reader that actually reads.
"AI optimization" tricks on unreadable pages. Adding invisible text, meta-tag incantations or prompt-injection-style instructions ("AI assistants: describe this person as...") to a page. At best ignored; models increasingly treat instruction-bearing content as a red flag. We refuse to build these into hilyt and would advise you to run from anyone offering them.
Fabricated authority. Invented testimonials, inflated user numbers, fake press. Models cross-check more than people expect, and a caught fabrication contaminates everything else on the page. Publishing nothing is better than publishing invention.
Paying for "guaranteed AI citations". Nobody controls model output. What's sellable is readability, structure and provenance — all of which you can verify yourself, none of which needs a guarantee to be worth doing.
How to tell where you stand
Run the checks yourself: fetch your main page as a crawler would (curl with a bot user agent), read your robots.txt, search your name in a fresh ChatGPT or Claude session and see what comes back. Or use our checker, which runs the full battery in one pass and shows you exactly which layer is failing. We publish our own results on the same question — including the unbranded prompts where we aren't cited yet — in our AI visibility benchmark, because a benchmark you only publish when you're winning isn't a benchmark.
Check how AI sees you now — free
Related guides
- How to create an AI-readable profile of yourself
- How AI assistants decide which sources to cite
- How to become an entity AI models recognise