Key Takeaways
- LLM SEO aims to make your brand the source AI uses to answer questions.
- AI can only cite content it can access, clearly understand, and confidently extract.
- Content with real authorship, first-hand experience, and original data is far more likely to be trusted by AI.
- Repeated mentions across trusted websites and communities help AI validate your brand’s credibility.
LLM SEO is changing how brands earn visibility online.
In the past, SEO was about ranking pages in Google, getting into SERP features, and competing for clicks. Today, many users skip the search results entirely and ask AI tools for direct answers instead.
ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini now play a big role in how people research products, learn new concepts, and make decisions online.
According to Menlo Ventures, over 60% of U.S. adults have used AI tools to find information in the last six months, with nearly 20% using them daily.
If your content isn’t structured, credible, and easy for AI to understand, you risk being left out of the conversation.
LLM SEO focuses on making your brand a source that AI systems trust, reference, and cite.
After reading this guide, you’ll know how to improve LLM SEO, how to measure it, and mistakes you definitely want to avoid making when optimizing for LLM SEO.
What is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO (Large Language Model Search Engine Optimization) is the process of creating and structuring content to maximize the likelihood of being referenced, cited, or recommended by generative AI models.
While traditional SEO mainly focuses on keywords and backlinks to rank a webpage, LLM SEO focuses on entities, context, and authority.
The goal of LLM SEO is to be the source that the AI uses to construct its answer.
This is often referred to as Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) or Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
Regardless of the acronym, the objective remains that same and that is winning citations in AI generated responses.
When a user asks ChatGPT, "What is the best CRM for small businesses?," the AI looks for consensus, expert opinions, and trusted data across the web to formulate a recommendation for the user.
LLM SEO tries to make your product or brand part of that recommendation.
How to Improve LLM SEO
Optimizing for AI requires a blend of traditional technical SEO and some specific tactics to content creation and content formatting.
Here is how you can position your brand to get cited.
1. Create Content that is Easy to Access
If an AI system can’t access your content, it can’t reliably cite or reference it in live answers.
LLMs are trained on massive datasets, which means they may already know of well-known brands, products, or concepts from past training.
However, when AI systems generate current, source-backed answers, they often rely on live web retrieval.
That’s where accessibility matters. If your site is blocked, hard to crawl, or poorly indexed, your content is far less likely to be cited or linked as a source.
Start with these fundamentals:
Check Your Robots.txt File
Make sure you aren’t accidentally blocking AI-related crawlers such as GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), or Google-Extended.
Blocking these bots can prevent your content from being used in AI-generated answers.
Ensure Your Site is Indexable and Crawl-Friendly
Important content should not be hidden behind heavy scripts, login walls, or blocked resources.
Optimize for Bing
ChatGPT Search relies on Bing-powered search for live retrieval. If your site performs poorly in Bing SEO or isn’t properly indexed, your chances of appearing in AI citations decrease.
Setting up Bing Webmaster Tools helps ensure your site is healthy and discoverable.
Experiment with Llms.txt (Optional)
Some publishers are experimenting with an llms.txt file to provide a simplified overview of key content for AI systems.
This is not an official standard and adoption is not guaranteed, but it may be useful as a future-facing experiment.
2. Establish Trust and Expertise on Your Own Website
AI systems are designed to rely on information that appears accurate, credible, and well-sourced. If your website doesn’t clearly demonstrate expertise, it’s unlikely to be cited in AI-generated answers.
To improve your chances of getting cited, you must prove you are an authority in your niche and industry.
Show Clear Authorship and Credentials
Every article should have a named author, a short bio, and links to relevant credentials such as LinkedIn profiles, professional experience, or subject-matter expertise.
Demonstrate First-Hand Experience
AI systems favor content that includes original insights, examples, screenshots, case studies, or real-world observations and not generic summaries anyone could write.
Speak from your experience within your writing. "Based on testing..." as an example. LLMs love first-hand experience.
- Keran Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of LYFE Marketing
Use AI Carefully
AI tools can help with research or drafting, but content should not be purely AI-generated.
To stand out, your pages must add unique context, opinions, or data that isn’t already widely available.
Reference Reliable, Primary Sources of Data
Linking to original studies, official data, and authoritative organizations helps reinforce accuracy and signals that your content is grounded in facts.
Better yet, brands that publish their own data studies with insights from customers and internal data seem have a higher chance of being featured in AI answers.
Publishing original data also helps a lot. When you share your own stats or benchmarks, you naturally become the source people reference. AI systems seem to favor that.
- Nassira Sennoune, SEO Consultant at Rhillane Marketing Digital
In short, LLM SEO rewards websites that look knowledgeable, transparent, and trustworthy and not anonymous or generic.
3. Make Your Website Easy for AI to Understand
Once AI systems can access your site, the next step is helping them clearly understand what your content is about.
LLMs analyze text using natural language patterns and structure.
Content that is clearly written, well-organized, and properly marked up is easier for them to interpret, summarize, and reuse in answers.
Optimizing for LLMs requires a mindset shift mostly because LLMs don’t “rank” content the way Google traditionally does; instead, they retrieve, summarize, and cite content based on clarity, authority, and structure.
- Denida Grow, Founder at Mellon360
You can improve clarity in a few practical ways:
Use Structured Data where it Makes Sense
Schema markup helps describe the type of content on a page, such as articles, FAQs, products, or your organization.
For example, check the below screenshot of FAQ schema on a personal injury lawyer's website:
While schema doesn’t guarantee citations, it provides clear signals about who you are and what each page represents.
Write in a Clear, Direct Way
Use simple language, avoid unnecessary jargon, and structure headings around real questions users ask.
Rachel Amies is an AI Visibility & SEO strategist at Crazy Digital Creative and she believes marketers should write like they're speaking to their ideal client, not a search engine.
LLMs are trained on natural human language. They favour content that flows nicely and is genuinely helpful. If your page reads like it was written to impress industry colleagues (i.e. full of jargon), it won't impress Google or LLMs.
- Rachel Amies, I Visibility & SEO Strategist at Crazy Digital Creative
Wherever possible, answer the question directly in the first paragraph before adding any further detail.
As Dominik Poppe, CEO at The New View puts it:
Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude tend to cite content that is clear, authoritative, and easy to extract.
Unlike traditional SEO, LLM SEO is less about keywords and more about providing precise, self-contained answers.
Use Proper HTML Structure
Clear H1, H2, and H3 headings, short paragraphs, bullet points, and tables help AI systems break content into logical sections.
Well-structured pages are easier to extract answers from than long, unformatted blocks of text.
In short, content that is easy for humans to scan is usually easier for AI systems to understand and reuse.
4. Get Mentioned on Other Trusted Websites
AI systems don’t rely on what a single website says about itself. They look for confirmation across multiple sources to decide whether a claim is reliable.
If your website says you’re the best option in your category, that’s treated as a self-claim. When other reputable websites repeat similar descriptions or mention your brand in the same context, that claim becomes far more credible.
In simple terms, AI trusts information that shows up consistently across the web, not just on your own site.
To strengthen these external signals, focus on the following:
Focus on Digital PR and Third-Party Mentions
Aim to be included in “best of” lists, product reviews, comparison articles, and industry publications.
These pages help establish how your brand is described outside your own marketing and website.
Be Present in Forums and Communities
Platforms like Reddit, Quora, and Stack Overflow reflect real user questions and opinions.
If you want Large Language Models to notice you, you need to go where they are. Overwhelmingly, the best place to go is Reddit. The other platform where we have seen success is Quora. It's simple to use. Just take a look at Quora questions in your vertical industry and answer them.
LLMs consider Quora and these other platforms to be quality content sources, ideally designed to list your business in Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
- Bob Bentz, President of Purplegator Marketing Agency & Consultants
When your brand is discussed naturally in these spaces, it helps reinforce how AI systems understand your relevance and reputation.
It’s important to note that many forums and discussion boards have strict rules around promotion.
In some subreddits and communities, direct self-promotion is discouraged or not allowed at all. Marketers should always read and follow community guidelines before participating.
The most effective approach is to focus on being genuinely helpful: answering questions, sharing expertise, and contributing value without pushing a product.
Done correctly, community participation can build brand awareness and positive sentiment over time.
For a deeper dive, see Reddit’s own guide on building a successful Reddit marketing strategy.
Build Strong Associations with Your Niche
Try to appear on third-party sites alongside well-known competitors and industry terms. Repeated associations help AI systems understand what category your brand belongs to and when it should be mentioned.
The more often your brand is referenced accurately and consistently by others, the more likely AI systems are to treat it as a reliable source.
What is the Difference between Traditional SEO and LLM SEO?
Traditional SEO helps your website rank, whereas, LLM SEO helps your brand get cited in AI generated answers.
Traditional SEO focuses on getting a page to appear as a clickable link in search results. Success in SEO is measured by rankings, traffic, and clicks.
LLM SEO focuses on getting your brand or content cited, mentioned, or recommended directly inside AI-generated answers.
Success is measured by visibility in those answers, even when no click happens. The user often receives a single summarized response without visiting a website.
How to Measure LLM SEO Performance
Measuring success in Generative AI is more difficult than traditional SEO because there is currently no official analytics tool from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.
However, there are some ways to track your progress:
1. Monitor Referral Traffic
Check Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and claude.ai.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Navigate to "Traffic acquisition" in GA4.
- Add "session source / medium" to the right of the "Total" column
- Look for all the "Referral" traffic sources that are from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude
Manual Testing
Regularly prompt the major LLMs with queries relevant to your business (e.g., "What are the top tools for social media management?") and record if your brand is mentioned or cited.
Note: This is probably the least effective way of measuring LLM SEO success.
Share of Model
New tools like Profound are emerging to track Share of Model which is a metric that estimates how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses compared to competitors.
Brand Search Volume
As LLMs recommend your product, users often turn to Google to navigate to your specific site. An uptick in branded search queries can correlate with LLM visibility, but it's not as concrete as using Google Analytics or AI visibility tools.
Common LLM SEO Mistakes to Avoid
In the rush to adapt to AI search, many marketers make errors that hurt their visibility.
Vague Content
LLMs struggle with ambiguity. Content that uses fluff phrases like "innovative solutions" or "cutting-edge technology" without explaining what the technology is will be ignored.
Be specific. Use concrete nouns, data points, and clear definitions.
No Clear Authorship or Credibility
If an article looks anonymous, AI models assign it lower trust scores.
Always attribute content to a real person. If you are a YMYL (Your Money Your Life) business this is non-negotiable.
You must prove the author is qualified to give advice.
Here is a great example of this from Manna Wealth Management, a financial advisory practice in Miami, Florida.
They published a blog post on retirement planning and at the end of the blog you'll see the author bio with a professional headshot, position, and links to their social profiles.
Publishing without Distribution
You cannot simply publish a blog post and hope ChatGPT finds it.
You must distribute content across social media, newsletters, and industry forums.
LLM SEO FAQ
How is LLM SEO different from GEO/AEO?
They are effectively the same concept. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are industry terms describing the practice of optimizing for AI answers.
LLM SEO is simply the broader term for optimizing for the language models themselves.
How do I get cited by ChatGPT?
To increase your chances of being cited by ChatGPT, your content needs to be easy to discover, clearly written, and trustworthy.
Being indexed and visible in Bing improves the likelihood of appearing in live citations, since Bing is a key source for web retrieval.
Mentions from authoritative third-party sites, such as established publications or Wikipedia, further strengthen credibility and increase the chance of being referenced.
Does structured data help with LLM SEO?
Yes, structured data can help with LLM SEO by clearly describing what a page is about, such as identifying products, organizations, authors, or FAQs.
While schema doesn’t guarantee citations, it reduces ambiguity and makes it easier for AI systems and search engines to correctly interpret and reuse your content.
What content format performs better for AI answers?
Direct, structured formats work best. Use:
- Bullet points and numbered lists.
- Comparison tables.
- "What is" definitions followed immediately by the answer.
- Short, punchy paragraphs.
Conclusion
While this shift away from the traditional 10 blue links may seem intimidating, it is also a massive opportunity for brands that value quality and authority.
LLM SEO isn't about gaming an algorithm; it's about becoming the undeniable expert in your field.
By focusing on technical accessibility, establishing deep trust, and structuring your content for clarity, you ensure that when the world asks AI a question, your brand is the answer.
