I just found this article on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/13/move-over-seo-profound-is-helping-brands-with-ai-search-optimization/<p>They raised $3.5 million and claim to "help brands show up more frequently and favorably in AI Search."<p>They say they do this by using "proprietary algorithms and extensive datasets to query major LLMs and Retrieval systems at scale"... Which raises an eyebrow.<p>However, I think there is something to the idea of "LLM optimization" (mostly because Perplexity's founder keeps talking about its importance).<p>But LLM responses are non-deterministic. For example, if I ask "what are the five best running sneakers?" multiple times, it'll provide different answers each time.<p>So is this all just bullshit? Or, given how big of an industry SEO turned out to be, do you think it makes sense to take this seriously?<p>(If so, how would you go about optimizing your content to show up in LLM responses?)