Gianluca Fiorelli: And one thing that I want to touch on with you is, for a B2B brand, reputation is everything. Because they can offer the best products, the best tools, everything, but there is no way they can grow without a reputation. 

The reputation is at the base of trust, especially in B2B. And depending on the kind of B2B, especially B2B where money and contracts are very big, it's essential, obviously.

So, did you see some differences between LLMs in how they treat these kinds of reviews, especially reviews in the review field? How do they treat reviews?

There is always this thing that ChatGPT, I think Perplexity or ChatGPT, is using substantially only Reddit and so on, but did you see something different depending on the LLMs?

Viola Eva: Yes, it's a great question, and I agree with you that reputation matters a lot.

And again, I want to repeat: I think for a lot of our clients, it's really about accuracy. And I think this is always true, but specifically because we work with tech and professional services, and people update their software, they update their features, they update how they're selling.

And so a lot of them actually don't have a visibility problem. They have an accuracy problem.

So, for example, an LLM will say they don't have an integration, even though they now have it. Or an LLM will talk. A lot of our clients are also sales-led, so their pricing is not on the website. But of course, people ask an LLM about pricing, and what happens is that the only source about this is a Reddit thread from seven years ago where an upset user talks about your pricing.

And all of a sudden, the LLM gives an answer about pricing, but it's incorrect.

And so that aspect of accuracy, I think, is something that people really struggle with. And I think specifically in the SaaS space, where people move so quickly.

I have one example that I talked about before. One of our clients, Betterworks, used to do OKR software, so goal-setting software, and they've now transitioned into employee performance management software, and they've transitioned into that, I believe, for four or five years.

In the beginning, all the LLMs would always call them human capital management software. If you're not in HR and you're not in HR tech, you might think, “Oh, employee performance management and human capital management are kind of the same.” It's not the same. It's a different product. It's different expectations. It's a different workflow.

And the number one reason why they got cited incorrectly is that there's a content site called TechTarget, which had an article that's called “What is Betterworks?” that was ranking incredibly well, and where they were described in the wrong way.

So, to your point, what we see a lot of is Reddit information being an issue for our clients. We see listicles from competitors that knowingly or unknowingly talk about them in the wrong way. We see listicles and articles from content sites, again, that knowingly or unknowingly talk about them in the wrong way.

Then we see, unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, their own web properties, their own old content, their own stuff, talking about them in the wrong way.

And the priorities change a little bit, but what we've noticed is that there are usually two or three sources that really break it for them. Sometimes it's Reddit. One time, it was this TechTarget article. Another client really struggled with being described incorrectly, and in the end, it was their very own Google Business Profile that was wrong and made everything wrong.

And so we notice there are usually two or three sources that have such a dominance. And if they're wrong, basically everything starts coming out wrong.

And to be honest, for Reddit, we haven't found a very good answer yet, because the thing is, if the Reddit thread's very old, it might already be closed too.

Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.

Viola Eva: So Reddit, and then competitors knowingly or unknowingly describing companies incorrectly, is what we're really grappling with right now.

And I agree, I find ChatGPT pretty listicle- and Reddit-heavy. Not all of the LLMs are the same in that way.

But yes, that's what we're grappling with right now: how do we make sure these third-party sites actually talk about our clients correctly?

Gianluca Fiorelli: I think the problem is also what I call the Mad Cow Syndrome, in the sense that a lot of the content is based on what the LLM is suggesting the writer to write.

And if the source that LLMs are citing is incorrect, the content based on LLM sources is going to be incorrect. And the writer, if he's not going directly to copy-paste what the LLM has written, is going to paraphrase what the LLM is suggesting. So it's going to be like the dog that bites its own tail.

Viola Eva: 100%.

Gianluca Fiorelli: It's a situation that is somehow making us feel as if our work is maybe not the sexiest thing, but the most important thing is governance. Governance is becoming central in our work.

Yes, the case of rebranding or repositioning is an interesting one because I saw it also with a client of mine. They were more of a sort of Canva competitor, but they wanted to move on to a more enterprise-type client. They even changed the brand name. 

The problem was that they were so known for what they were offering before that it's extremely hard, also because of a cutoff of training data, to make LLMs understand that there is this passage and that we are not what we were.

And in this case, the strategy we were following is to recognize our past. To own the narrative about the past, but to somehow explain very well that that was in the past, even, for instance, the old brand name.

Instead of doing the classic thing, like, you know, which is, I'm citing because they are my friends; it's not a problem, but it's fun. Lumar, formerly known as Deepcrawl, which is actually the entire name: Lumar, formerly Deepcrawl.

Instead of doing that, using structured data, for instance, and using the alias for the brand, using as alias the old name of a brand, and so on, to really push the machine to understand the changes of our branding.