Why LLM Volatility Shouldn’t Change Your Digital PR Strategy with Amanda Milligan

• Stick to core PR and SEO fundamentals instead of chasing every new LLM trend.
• Invest in niche sites and communities where your audience actually spends time.
• Ensure your brand messaging is clear and consistent across your site and third-party mentions.
• Regularly search your brand and category in LLMs to understand how you’re being represented.
• Treat LLM volatility as a signal to adapt tactically, not overhaul your entire strategy.

We’re entering unknown territory with AI.

And every time a new study comes out around LLMs and AI citations, I feel like SEOs panic and upend their strategies.

Amanda Milligan is the content and growth manager with Semrush, founder of Brand Authority Club, and, most importantly for this podcast, author of the Backlinko article titled “LLM Sources Shifted 80% in 2 Months: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Panic.“

After I read it, I immediately thought I needed to have her on the podcast.

So, relax, stick to your guns, and listen as Amanda walks us through why you shouldn’t panic over the rapid changes in AI.

Can you give a quick synopsis of your Backlinko piece?

Amanda: I think what you’re describing is correct. When there’s a lot of change and volatility, people want a quick solution and jump on the next shiny thing.

In the SEO world, the equivalent is an algorithm update — and while sometimes a pivot is merited, these moments are always a good opportunity to pause and ask: is what we’re doing working? Is it going to keep working?

In this case, LLM marketing is an emerging space. We know some things, we’re learning others. The Semrush study showing changes in the sources ChatGPT was using — that’s essentially what the piece was commenting on. Going from a few months ago, ChatGPT changed how much it was using sites like Reddit, for example.

People see that and think, “Oh my God, everything I was doing is wrong. Do I pivot? How do I fix this?”

The point of the article was: I hear that it’s scary, but that’s not really the right approach. What we should be doing anyway — especially digital PR folks who already know how to get authoritative pickups — that foundation is still what matters most. A drop in Reddit? A lot of us don’t think that’ll last.

There are certain places that people trust, and Reddit happens to be one of them — even in Google, for about a year now — because there are only so many places consumers trust to get information these days.

If you as a practitioner know your audience goes to a source and respects it, stick with it.

Don’t abandon it just because a study says it’s being used a little less right now. All of these things interplay.

The real takeaway from seeing this kind of volatility is: LLMs are changing, nothing is static.

If we stick to what’s core to what we’re trying to do — almost the common sense of it all — with some fine-tuning on the specifics, we don’t need a complete overhaul of strategy. It is good to have that adaptive mindset, but the overall strategy is going to stay the same.

Vince: Yeah, this idea of chasing Reddit citations concerns me a bit — that’s where you’re seeing a lot of the spam tactics emerge. And it feels like AI has just turned back the clock on all of it.

Amanda: It’s muddled everything, yeah.

Vince: Yeah, all the old spam tactics are coming out. It’s the “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation. People are ruining it, and for every one person doing it correctly, there are five people trying to game the system.

Amanda: It’s funny — I’m an avid Redditor and I was on yesterday and saw two examples of people calling out, “Hey, I know you made this thread to promote this brand.”

People are already catching it, and that’s so Reddit. They are the savviest at catching marketing.

And honestly, I was encouraged by that. At least the spammy stuff isn’t going to work. That’s what we’re talking about — the fundamentals of PR. It always happens because there’s this panic of “we’ve got to get in there, now, fast.” And there are people doing it really well. It’s not about spamming links or chiming in inauthentically.

The example I saw yesterday — I was in a women’s fashion over 35 subreddit — and the comment was immediately called out: “We know this is trying to promote Rent the Runway. Don’t even bother.” That ends up being a negative. So yeah, Reddit is powerful because it’s supposed to be an authentic community space. You can engage with it as a brand, but it takes a lot more effort.

What are some tips for people who want to influence LLMs the “right” way?

Amanda: What’s exciting — and this doesn’t even answer your question yet, but I’ll get there — is that LLMs are giving people more permission and buy-in to go after niche sites, even if they’re not the big flashy publications.

Because those niche sites are appearing in citations. So I think it’s great to seize that opportunity and say, “I know our audience listens to that podcast, but it’s been hard to measure the impact.”

Well, now one way to measure it is to see if it’s showing up in LLM citations.

In terms of actual tips — a lot of it is about audience research.

The core of your question is: how do you find out where your audience is online? And that’s marketing basics.

Tools like SparkToro allow you to do it faster than more manual strategies, but those manual strategies — talking to customers, immersing yourself in the community — are still invaluable.

If you join a company and you’re starting from scratch, you really do have to ask your customers directly: where do you go for information? What do you trust?

I’ve done this for my own consulting.

I’m in a CMO Slack channel that’s phenomenal — people share incredible insights.

I went in and just asked, “Where do you guys trust anymore?” And they told me.

Not because I was going to go spam it — I was genuinely curious.

So literally getting into community spaces and asking people, networking, using tools like SparkToro, even asking LLMs themselves — “Where are the sources people trust?” — and then reviewing the sources they pull from. There’s a whole cycle here. A lot of it is manual, and that’s what’s hard for people.

Can you explain a little bit about the retrieval layer versus the knowledge base?

Amanda: I can explain the basics — I’m not a super technical person, so if you want to dig into the nitty gritty, go watch Mike King’s content.

But on a basic level, every LLM operates differently, so keep in mind that when we say “LLMs” in general, if you’re really trying to optimize for a specific one, that matters. You probably care most about ChatGPT and AI Overviews — you might not care what Perplexity is doing if your audience never uses it.

Every LLM has two main components.

There’s the knowledge base — information that was input into the model from the get-go.

That’s for facts you don’t need to search for in real time, like “how fast can a cheetah run?” Then there’s the retrieval component — the model is literally going out and finding pages that answer a query, where recency and relevancy matter more. That’s where we’re seeing the most development, because just like Google constantly updates its algorithm, LLMs are figuring out the best way to surface information.

There’s a concept called “query fan-out” that gets more technical, but the basics are visible even in ChatGPT — it’ll tell you at the top how many searches it ran to synthesize its answer.

That’s why so many studies have been able to come out: you can actually see those inputs.

And that’s why SEO and digital PR are so parallel right now. You have to appear in Google at all for LLMs to even consider you — you don’t necessarily need to be in the top few positions, but you have to be appearing and covering those basics just to stand a chance in LLM answers.

What a lot of our strategy is really about is: how do we give LLMs the fodder they need in the retrieval process to understand our brands, make accurate comparisons, and provide an answer we like? That’s where the narrative strategy comes in.

Have your strategies changed in the past six months?

Amanda: It’s a little different, but links still matter. What I’ve done — and what I encourage everyone to do — is leverage this opportunity.

A lot of PR practitioners have always believed brand mentions matter, and yet it’s always been a fight to prove that.

And finally, they’re winning that fight because of this moment with AI.

So it’s not that I’ve changed the way I think about marketing — it’s that I have more leeway now to do the things I’ve always wanted to do, that I’ve pushed for but couldn’t always measure well enough. There’s an appetite now for building visibility because people see what happens. AI is the big example of: even if you can’t know for sure exactly how you’re appearing in every prompt, it’s still happening.

People are still seeing your competitor instead of you if you’re not putting in the effort.

I left to start Brand Authority Club because I was obsessed with authority and visibility — things that are so difficult to measure and yet critically matter. This isn’t how I expected it to come to the forefront, but it has. So I’m excited about that. PRs now have the buy-in for brand mentions, for going after those niche placements and pointing to a specific LLM citation and saying, “We did that. We got that placement.”

Marketing will never be perfectly measurable, but having even a little more leeway to experiment and do things you can’t measure perfectly is going to make a huge difference for brands trying to grow sustainably.

Vince: Yeah, the brand mention thing is interesting. In our State of Digital PR survey, digital PR has been way more effective for people and I think it’s all due to that. Potential clients are now coming in asking to be mentioned in AI as a KPI. But I still feel like it’s muddy — agencies are measuring this stuff way differently.

How do you think about KPIs in this AI world?

Amanda: It really is a nuanced conversation depending on who you’re talking to. For a lot of businesses, this honestly may not matter much at all right now.

And being a consultant means being honest about that. If someone comes to you saying they’re excited about AI, you need to do a little research first — does it make sense to pivot investment that way? Are you getting all your business through social? That honest conversation is important.

Still, it’s worth thinking about now because AI’s share of search is going to increase — it’s still very small overall. So the balance is: let’s start putting the fundamentals in place. If we’re thinking about how we’ll eventually appear in LLMs, what do we not have now that will hinder that?

And a lot of those fundamentals will be beneficial regardless.

A lot of what I do now is refine brand messaging. If you don’t have your messaging right on your own website — and then on every third-party site you have control over — that’s the first thing to fix. It increases the chances that third-party mentions will describe you the way you want, and increases the chances that LLMs will mention you the way you want. A lot of businesses are just running, running, running and haven’t taken a beat to ask: does our messaging need an update?

We start there.

Get the messaging right, update it everywhere you have control, and then build the investment in PR — going where your audience actually is — from there.

Do you look at entities and cosine similarity?

Amanda: Sometimes, depending on who I’m talking to. The conversation is really different with a solopreneur versus an enterprise client.

A solopreneur doesn’t care about entities — they just want to know what to do to show up.

But for those who are more SEO-savvy, yes, we’ll have those conversations about entities and experiment with how you’re currently appearing.

One simple thing I love showing people: use Reddit Answers — Reddit has a beta feature where you can type in your brand and it summarizes how Reddit is talking about you.

You can see very quickly what needs to be adjusted in terms of your messaging and brand perception.

And same thing with LLMs — search for “best [your category],” comparisons with competitors, and see what’s being pulled.

You need a pulse check of where you stand. It also signals other problems that need to be fixed outside of just your AI appearance — if you don’t like how you’re appearing there, something is off on your site or in your third-party signals, and that’s exactly what PR can fix.

Vince: To bring it full circle — back to your article about LLM sources shifting — when should we actually tune in?

When is it important to pay attention when we see, say, Reddit or Wikipedia dominating LLM citations?

When is it important to care about reports of LLM sources shifting?

Amanda: It’s a balance. Rather than ignoring it or panicking and overhauling your strategy, the middle ground is: do those searches yourself and see what’s showing up. There’s a good article coming out on Backlinko about what they’re calling “Citation Core” — basically an exercise for going through and identifying, for your niche, the sites that appear frequently in LLM results.

You could do this manually or with a tool — type in searches you’d expect your audience to use and get a sense of what sites keep coming up, what type of content keeps appearing. Video is becoming a much bigger part of Gemini results, for example. If a site has a bunch of blog posts that keep getting mentioned in your topic area, maybe you should pitch a guest post there.

It’s really just audience research with a new input.

Maybe there’s a site you’ve never considered that suddenly keeps appearing — it’s fodder for your strategy. But you still need a layer of human critical thinking on top of all of this. You decide, based on what you’re seeing, if it’s worth pursuing.

Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish we’d covered?

Amanda: I just want to reinforce the opportunity here for PR folks.

I think social and PR got the biggest boon from this transition, because there’s so much more validation now that what you do impacts all discovery.

There’s a bigger conversation about brand visibility and brand discovery outside of just SEO — we can’t be in silos anymore. It’s not enough to optimize for search algorithms; you have to appear in these other places too.

And the change in how people search is still happening — TikTok and YouTube being huge search engines is still a thing. The number one question remains: where is your audience? If you don’t know where to start, that’s where you start. Because a modern buyer might see you on social, do a Google search, ask an LLM to compare you to competitors, go back to Google, and then head to Reddit to confirm their decision.

You have to be present in all of those places.

This is an opportunity for all of us to say: all of this matters. Let’s invest in where our audience is and just do it. I know it’s been tumultuous and scary, but let’s lean into the benefits and the opportunities. Even if you can’t measure it perfectly, this stuff still matters.