How Long to Smoke a London Broil: One Google Answer, Two Different Pull Temps
Google's AI Overview says to pull a London broil at 125-130°F before searing in its opening line, then 110-120°F in its own bullet list two paragraphs later. Both halves agree on 130-135°F without a sear. The two pull temps for the same step never get reconciled.
Google’s AI Overview gives two different pull temperatures for the same step, in the same answer. Its opening line says a reverse-seared London broil comes off the smoker at 125°F to 130°F. Its own bulleted breakdown, two paragraphs down, says the same step happens at 110°F to 120°F. Both halves agree on 130°F to 135°F if the sear gets skipped entirely, so it’s only the searing number that splits. Hey Grill Hey pulls its London broil in about 45 minutes at 225°F. Extraordinary BBQ runs the same chamber temperature for 1.5 to 2 hours to hit 135°F. SmokinItForums smokes at 210°F until the meat hits 128°F, then rests it under foil. Smoked Meat Sunday stops around 110°F in roughly an hour. None of those four actually disagree once the sear split gets factored in. It’s Google’s own answer that can’t settle on one number.
London broil describes a method as much as a cut, but nearly every source in this search lands on the same starting point: a beef top round steak, boneless, usually an inch to an inch and a half thick, one and a half to two and a half pounds. That’s a similar weight range to the flank steak already measured on this site, but noticeably thicker. Flank steak runs about half an inch. London broil is closer to double that. It shares flank steak’s other traits though: almost no taper, very little fat between the fibers, and a grain pronounced enough that every source in this search repeats the same closing instruction, slice thin against the grain.
Where the AI Overview splits from itself
The two conflicting numbers don’t come from nowhere. The opening paragraph of the AI Overview cites Hey Grill Hey, two YouTube clips, SmokinItForums, and Extraordinary BBQ as its sources. Its bulleted temperature list, two paragraphs later, cites a different and smaller set: Smoked Meat Sunday plus two more YouTube videos. That reads like two separate passes over overlapping but not identical source pools, each one landing on its own number, stitched into a single answer that never checks itself against its own earlier paragraph. Nothing in the AI Overview flags the disagreement. A reader who only skims the bold numbers in the bullet list would pull at 110°F. A reader who reads just the opening sentence would pull twenty degrees higher.
Why the spread here is smaller than on flank steak
On flank steak, the choice between searing and smoking straight through explained a ninefold difference in total time, because a half-inch-thick steak barely holds any margin between rare and overdone. London broil runs almost double that thickness, and the actual total-time spread across every source measured here, 45 minutes to 2 hours, is closer to threefold. The bigger lever on this cut isn’t the sear decision, it’s chamber temperature. SmokinItForums runs 210°F. Hey Grill Hey and the AI Overview’s baseline both run 225°F. Extraordinary BBQ’s 1.5-to-2-hour cook fits a chamber closer to 250°F for a thicker piece. A London broil carries enough mass that a 15 to 40-degree swing in chamber temperature moves the clock more than whether the last 10 to 15 degrees get finished on the smoker or in a hot pan.
Pull temperatures by method
| Method | Chamber temp | Pull temp | Approx. total time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reverse sear | 210-225°F | 110-130°F, then seared (Google’s own answer splits here) | 45 min-1.5 hr smoke, plus a hot sear |
| Smoke straight through | 225-250°F | 130-135°F | 1.5-2 hr |
Whole-muscle beef is safe at 145°F, the same floor already cited on this site’s tenderloin and brisket pieces, but nobody in this search pulls a London broil anywhere near it. Extraordinary BBQ’s own guidance warns that cooking past medium, 140°F and up, turns the meat dry and tough, and the AI Overview repeats almost the same warning. A cut this lean and this grain-heavy loses its texture well before it clears a safety threshold that thicker, fattier cuts can absorb without much penalty.
Where London broil sits next to this site’s other reverse-sear cuts
The flank steak piece on this site found that sear-versus-no-sear was the dominant variable on a very thin cut. The tri tip piece found a thicker cut still finishing the same smoke-then-sear split in under two hours. London broil sits between them: thicker than flank steak, thinner than a typical tri tip, and lean enough on both counts that chamber temperature, not the sear choice, ends up doing most of the work in explaining why one recipe takes 45 minutes and another takes two hours.
What this means for the timeline
Pick a chamber temperature before lighting the smoker, 210°F if the source list above is any guide, up through 250°F. At the low end, expect closer to 90 minutes to reach 128°F, foil-rested, roughly the SmokinItForums approach. At the higher end, a 45-minute cook to medium-rare is realistic on a thinner piece, closer to Hey Grill Hey’s number. If reverse-searing, treat 130°F as the safer pull target rather than the AI Overview’s lower 110°F figure. Pulling at the low end of a split answer risks finishing hotter than intended once a hard sear adds its own 5 to 10 degrees of carryover on a cut this lean. A probe left in the thickest part catches that faster than watching the clock.
What I haven’t measured
This site hasn’t run a London broil through its own smoker yet, so the ranges above come from cross-checking this search against how other lean, moderately thick cuts have behaved on pieces already measured here, not from a chamber logged for this one. Two questions stayed open. Whether the AI Overview’s two pull temperatures reflect two genuinely different source clusters or just an inconsistency in how the summary got generated is one; nothing in the answer itself resolves it. Whether a store-cut London broil at the thin end of the typical range, closer to three-quarters of an inch, would behave more like flank steak than like the thicker pieces most of these sources describe is the other. See how this site tests and labels its content for what measured versus researched means here.
The same reverse-sear split shows up again on a much thicker, bone-in cut, where the extra mass stretches the smoke phase without changing which variable drives the pull temperature. See how long to smoke a tomahawk steak.
