is ranking in llms actually kind of easy, or am i just missing the part where it gets hard

So people keep talking about ranking in LLMs like its this whole new universe, but when I poke at it, it feels weirdly basic. Like, if the model is pulling from a few sources it trusts, then doesnt it mostly come down to being consistently cited and not being a mess.

And yet I see folks overthinking it, doing these huge prompt experiments, rewriting everything to sound like an LLM, stuffing pages with "best" and "top" and all that. I did a small test a while back where I cleaned up one location page, made the entity stuff clearer, tightened up the about section, made sure NAP was consistent, and it started showing up more in AI answers. Not even sure that was the cause, but it lined up.

Where do you think people misstep the most with LLM ranking, assuming you are trying to show up for geo intent like "near me" or "in Austin" type queries. Is it mostly source selection, like you need to be in the right indexes, or is it more about how the page reads and resolves entities.

Also, is anyone seeing a difference between models on this, because Gemini feels like it grabs different stuff than ChatGPT, but idk if thats just me.