value and opportunity

Visibility on LLMs

Management summary:

This post does not offer any actionable investment content. Rather I wanted to find out if my blog is visible on the various LLMs and if I want to be visible. I would be very interested in how fellow “creators” think about this and how they approach this topic.

Visibility of Value and Opportunity on different LLMs

Just out of interest, I asked several LLMs about the 5 best Investment blogs for European stocks. The results were quite interesting.

Google Gemini for instance distinguishes significantly in which language one asks and which model you use. A German language prompt gives a very different answer (mostly German language Blogs) than an English prompt and “fast” mode gives very different results from “thinking” mode.

Here are the 5 top blogs in Fast mode for the German prompt: (“Welches sind die 5 besten Investment Blogs für Europäische Aktien, insbes. Nebenwerte ? “):

And here the results for the same prompt in “thinking Modus”:

There is some overlap and I am on both of the lists, which is great, but still interesting.

A few days earlier I tried a slightly different prompt (“Nenne mir bitte die 5 besten Investment Blogs die sich mit Europäischen Aktien beschäftigen. “)

And I got very different results:

What is also interesting is that Gemini doesn’t look for Substacks when I ask for blogs. Asking specifically for Substacks, gives once again different top 5 for the fast and thinking model, but the V&O Substack does not appear when asking for Substacks.

When I ask Gemini in English for blogs, I get the following result for “fast” mode:

In Thinking mode, this is the output:

So I show up in both, but the other 4 are different.

Overall it is quite interesting that asking in German language automatically selects mostly German blogs and how much the results differ from fast to thinking mode.

Of course, different LLMs give different answers. The very same German prompt from above  gives this result overview in ChatGPT:

The English prompt gives the following result:

ChatGPT interestingly does not care too much in which language you ask, the overlap is higher than for Gemini. But it has remembered my 10 factor Scoring model and without asking has somehow mixed that into the decision.

Claude interestingly doesn’t seem to know my blog at all. I have to say I am disappointed 😉

The LLMs know Value and Opportunity

So after putting out content for 15 years, Gemini and ChatGPT LLMs clearly know about my blog, but it is really interesting how differently they answer to the very same questions. Also that language plays such a role for the results is kind of interesting for me.

Interestingly, if I use the normal Google search, my blog is not visible at all, at least not on the first 10 pages, irrespective of what kind of searches I do. This mirrors  a little bit the traffic statistics form my WordPress overview where Google as a source for traffic more or les disappeared a few years ago. Only when I ask for a certain analysis, for instance Eurokai specifically on the Value & Opportunity blog, I see my blog in the results. Otherwise no chance.

I have to admit that I have also become quite lazy to add a lot of Keywords etc but in general, Google search as such seems not to be “my friend” anymore. Some years ago, especially the more general articles received significant traffic, even years after I wrote them, but that has gone totally away.

How to optimize for LLM visibility  ?

I feel very lucky that I don’t have to optimize for traffic, otherwise I could imagine that trying to optimize LLMs is not so easy. I have briefly researched the topic and it seems that for now, LLMs seem to emphasize a longer track record and credibility.

One of the nice things is that one can ask the LLm to explain. Google Gemini’s answer is quite flattering I have to admit:

If I wanted to make more advertising for my work, I would basically copy& paste that answer.

Of course, I also wanted to know why I don’t appear on Claude’s list. This is what Claude tells me:

Typically for an LLM, it apologizes. What I find interesting is that Claude indeed seems to start looking in high traffic locations and then doesn’t go much further.

Do you actually want to be visible to LLMs ?

One question one has to ask is of course as a writer & creator: Do you want to be (fully) visible to LLMs or not ?

Despite my visibility on Gemini and ChatGPT, the LLMs do not refer a lot of traffic back to the site. I can see Gemini with a little traffic and ChatGPT with no referrals at all. So they know about the blog, but they don’t refer a lot of people to the blog. Maybe the answers are already good enough if my content gets shown. Outside my Email list, most traffic still comes from Google search and TwiX.

If you want to monetize your content directly, it is clearly not good when LLMs can read your stuff and summarize it perfectly. I was for instance quite astonished when a TwiX user asked Grok to summarize my Biontech post in TwiX and Grok did so with a pretty decent summary.

On the other hand it seems that at least for Gemini and ChatGPT, you need to show them your content in order to get recognized. I guess a good compromise could be to show some of the content so that the AI can learn about what one writes but then keep newer stuff behind a paywall or so.

Another strategy would be, not to share anything on the web in order to protect one’s “intellectual property”. As for now, the LLMs don’t give a lot of traffic back, so why should you be visible at all ?

In my case, I am lucky that (so far) I can monetize my content very indirectly.

For me, the main payoff comes through constructive feedback and, every now and then a nice email from a reader or even better, some personal contact and someone says “I read your blogs for x years and really like it”.

My other goal is also“make the world a little bit of a better place” by maybe teaching some people how to “invest” instead of just “gambling” blindly and help them to hopefully better secure their financial future. For this goal, getting my content “indirectly” distributed through LLMs is clearly helpful.

If someone asks if xyz-Shitco is a good investment and somehow in Gemini’s neural net it identifies a  “red flag” that it has maybe learned through my posts, this could be a very powerful “amplifier”. But this is clearly hard to measure.

Summary:

For now, I am quite flattered, that 2 out of 3 LLMs find my content good enough to put me into the Top 5 European Small Cap blogs. That is clearly niceclearly a nice feedback. 

Most of all, I feel very lucky that I don’t have to directly monetize my content. I think this will be less straightforwardstraight forward than in the “search machine age”. There will be some solutions for sure but I guess “cause and effect” might be less linear than in the old times.

I would be very interested in how fellow “creators” think about this and how they approach this topic.