Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Ann Smarty, co-founder of Smarty Marketing · Recorded August 12, 2026
Ann Smarty has been doing SEO for more than twenty years, and somewhere in the last eighteen months the question people bring her changed completely.
“I haven’t had a lead in months that would come to me saying I want to be on Google,” she told me.
That is a strange sentence to hear from someone who has spent two decades in organic search. It is stranger still when you hear where she lands at the end of the conversation, which is that she still starts every single engagement with SEO anyway. Whether the client asks for it or not.
This episode is the path between those two facts. Listen to the full conversation on your podcast app of choice, or hit play on the episode above and follow along.
Twenty years in, the request changed
Ann’s résumé covers most of the jobs this industry has invented. SEO journalism, community management, analyst work. Today her company runs SEO audits and GEO together, because in her words she does not do those separately anymore, they overlap too much. And Reddit, which she is quick to point out was not a strategic bet.
“We’ve been on Reddit for more than fifteen years and suddenly Reddit became a thing,” she said. “So we started selling it as a separate service.”
The leads coming in now want to be in ChatGPT. They are not asking about rankings. Part of that is noise, she says, the sheer volume of people telling businesses they need to be in LLMs. But part of it is that businesses are tired.
“You cannot put any price on rankings anymore, because you can be viewed, never clicked, and it just doesn’t make sense to businesses.”
What LLM consensus actually means
Here is the concept the whole episode hangs on, and it is the thing worth stealing.
“I refer to that as LLM consensus. This is when LLMs are able to find a lot of different sources about you and they are very consistent in their messaging. Don’t be like me. My footprint is a mess.”
That last part is not false modesty. Ann has twenty years of bylines, author bios and profiles scattered across the web, and a lot of them still name projects that stopped existing two decades ago. Many roles, many inconsistencies, and every time she goes to fix some of it, she finds more.
The fix she describes has a clear order to it. Your own website first: up to date, a genuinely detailed about page, contact details, the trust factors. She saw LLM answers change after she went back and updated a personal site that was twenty two years old and had barely been touched in five.
But the website is table stakes. The real work is auditing every other source that says something about you and making them agree. Same value proposition, same differentiation, same story. She notes that an LLM consensus audit can be run in-house, it just takes a lot of time, and the older the business, the longer it takes.
Then you go find the channels that show up in LLM training data and citations for your competitors but not for you. Usually that means Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and a handful of high profile publications that are harder to get into but not impossible.
“It’s definitely not just your website these days. Or even not just your rankings.”
This is the same terrain Grant Simmons walked through on entity SEO, and the same terrain Jason Barnard covered on entity optimization. Three practitioners, three vocabularies, one underlying problem: the machine has to be able to build a coherent picture of you from independent sources.
Reddit runs on a six-month clock
I asked Ann what her Reddit work actually looks like, because the version most people imagine is finding relevant threads and dive bombing in with links.
That is not what she sells.
“We definitely focus on long term, transparent, branded existence on Reddit, which unfortunately takes more time than the first method that you mentioned.”
How much more time? Six months, on average, before the community starts picking up, the subreddit starts ranking in Google, and it starts appearing in LLM citations. Once that exists, you can branch out into other subreddits and build presence there in a way that does not get you removed.
I asked her the inverse question, how a Reddit project crashes and burns fastest. Her answer was not about new accounts.
“I saw very well established accounts, almost ten years old, being suspended on Reddit when they start trying to do something differently and quickly there.”
Ten years of account history, gone, because someone decided to start linking to the website in every comment. And her reason for refusing that work on behalf of clients is a business reason, not a moral one:
“Because we work on behalf of clients, we just cannot afford that freedom and flexibility to game stuff and experiment with things. So we have to be more careful than anyone else.”
She is running a brand’s official presence. Anything spammy lands on the client’s reputation, not hers.
One more thing from this stretch that surprised me: when I asked what a brand new business should do first, her opening answer was directory submissions.
“Don’t dismiss directory submissions that easily these days. They are being very well used by LLMs, which is like they made a very good comeback from, I don’t know, twenty years ago.”
Twenty years of the industry rolling its eyes at directory submissions, reversed, because the LLMs read them.
I asked that question with a specific project in mind. I am working with a new company building clean energy for AI data centers, and a brand new entity has the hardest version of this problem. There is no footprint yet for the models to find, let alone agree on, so every profile you claim in the first month is doing double duty.
The part nobody warns you about: you lose the brand
This was the line I keep coming back to.
“Being a brand is great, but no one talks about how you actually lose control over it, because stuff starts ranking for your name.”
Ann’s sequencing advice follows directly from it. Establish the organic footprint first. Claim the profiles, get the name consistency right, build a system for contributing everywhere. Then go find your audience.
The order matters because growth creates its own problem. Once people know you exist, they search your name, and so do the LLMs.
“Before they recommend a brand in an AI answer, they will do the branded search. They will find stuff about you that your customers may not want to know.”
She has watched startups enjoy a month or two of momentum and then watched the discussion start on Reddit, at which point the fun stops. If you go outbound before you own your branded results, you are just paying to accelerate the discovery of whatever is already out there.
Her own consistency advice is refreshingly unglamorous. She cannot afford polished video, and her team is slammed with client work, so she has exactly one non-negotiable on the calendar.
“The bare minimum for me is my live stream is on my calendar. I make sure every Wednesday I join it, and I talk about what happened in the industry and what to do about that. And that alone drives a lot of business, just because I do that every week consistently.”
“Do the bare minimum you can afford. Just do it consistently.”
When the argument is internal, not technical
“We used to be an island,” Ann said, describing the era when SEOs had no idea what else was happening at a client as long as the keywords moved.
That island is gone, and she has the meeting calendar to prove it. She is in with sales. She is in with customer support. Because LLMs search spontaneously, and they will go looking on Reddit for exactly the things a company was hoping to keep out of Google.
This is where I keep landing with clients too. Your outside customer support reps are ChatGPT and Claude now, whether you staffed them or not. SEOteric’s Matt Brooks puts it plainly: train them, give them the materials. They will answer questions about you either way. The only thing you control is whether they answer with your intel or someone else’s.
“You would not believe how much of reputation problem is caused by miscommunication between what the website says and what sales people promise, and that causes so much problem on Reddit, and thus everywhere else from there.”
Her example is pricing. If there is an upfront cost and you are not talking about it upfront, people will find it on Reddit, and then the AI overview will state your upfront price back to the searcher. There is no hiding it.
“So that alignment inside companies becomes the key to LLM visibility. And it’s a fight.”
Then the most honest thing she said all episode:
“In fifty percent of cases I cannot win that battle, because those executives are still like, no, that’s how we make money, we cannot say that.”
So she changes strategy instead of pretending. She has a lawyer client who charges more than competitors, for a clear and defensible reason, and is not allowed to say what it is. The reason is that they take harder cases. Since she cannot say it, she builds trust and authority a different way, hosting AMAs, and works around the elephant in the room.
That connects straight back to what Jon Henshaw said about turning inward and fixing the product. Sometimes the highest leverage SEO work is not on the site at all.
Inside the agency, AI is mostly a research assistant
Given how much of the conversation was about AI answers, I expected Ann’s own operation to be heavily automated. It is not.
Her team’s two big workstreams are community management and digital PR. On the community side, AI does tracking, analysis and sentiment. The posting is human.
“We write manually there. We don’t automate the actual posting.”
On the PR side, AI helps with ideation direction, competitive research, internal linking, outreach suggestions and journalistic research. But she draws a line at originality.
“It’s not a good way to invent something actually original and unique. So we use it for direction, but most ideation comes from brainstorming ideas by people.”
For her own entity audits, she connects tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to Claude to surface angles she would not have thought of. Then she does the slow part by hand, spending three days to a week just looking at the data before she writes a roadmap.
“Unless I dig deep and see actual search results, actual queries, sort them, filter them, I don’t feel like I get a good understanding of the SEO positioning health of the website and where I should go.”
She wondered aloud whether that makes her old school. I would call it the reason her audits are worth buying.
Why she still opens every engagement with SEO
Ann’s closing argument is the cleanest summary of the current moment I have heard.
“SEO is my first step in auditing LLM visibility, for several reasons. And the main thing is that it has the most reliable data still.”
We cannot see what people are prompting. That data does not exist for us. Keywords are the closest available proxy for the questions being asked, which makes search data the only place to reason from with any confidence.
And the correlation holds. If a site is well represented in organic search, it tends to show up in AI answers.
“We don’t have a better predictable path into LLM answers except for organic rankings.”
Then she immediately refuses to oversell it:
“SEO is still the most predictable path into LLMs. Not the only one. Definitely not one hundred percent overlap there, but thirty percent overlap is better than no overlap at all.”
She applied the same skepticism to her own flagship service. Smarty Marketing reports on LLM citations for a client’s official subreddit, and she is the first to say a citation is not the prize.
“Just one mention in a Reddit thread would not make you visible in AI answers. It can be a citation, but who cares about citations? They are not even clicked. The goal is for the brand to be in the answer.”
Which brings the whole thing full circle. One citation is not consensus. Consensus is many sources agreeing, which is the thing she opened with, and the thing most AI visibility advice skips.
So even though almost nobody comes to her asking for Google anymore:
“I always say I will look into organic search anyways, whether you want me to or not, because there is definitely more data there than anywhere else.”
Where to find Ann Smarty
- Smarty Marketing: smarty.marketing – SEO audits, GEO, and Reddit reputation work. There is a free fifteen minute call on the site. Her pitch for it: “I’m a terrible salesperson, so chances are I will not even try to sell you anything, but I will be helpful.”
- Newsletter and weekly live stream: AnnSmarty.com – she announces the Wednesday stream there with the join link and the topic.
- Her LLM consensus write-up: What most AI visibility advice misses
- Reddit marketing and reputation management: service details
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/annsmarty
- X: @seosmarty
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