What you’ll (hopefully) learn by the end of this post:
- Concrete definition of LLMO and how it relates to SEO
- The benefits of integrating LLMO into your existing marketing strategy
- LLM optimisation techniques to try at home
What Is an LLM?
It stands for large language model. A large language model is an advanced AI technology that has learned human language from vast amounts of diverse training data. By digesting all this text data, LLMs can understand, process, and produce text that sounds just like (or eerily close to) human-sounding language.
The most popular LLMs being used today are ChatGPT by OpenAI, Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic, and Perplexity.
And that’s where you come in, you tech-savvy marketer.
Did you know…
Large language model optimisation is also being called…
- Generative engine optimisation or GEO
- Answer engine optimisation or AEO
- Generative AI optimisation
- AI search optimisation
- AI Overviews optimisation
- AI optimisation (although we try to shy away from this one as it is just a bit too vague)
What Is LLM Optimisation, and Why Should You Care About it?
In short:
- People are increasingly using LLMs instead of search engines to find their answers
- Adopting LLM optimisation practices aligns with your current SEO strategies
- Early adoption of LLMO gives you a competitive edge and boosts your brand authority
LLMO means performing a series of techniques in such a way that platforms like ChatGPT will surface your content in their answers. This increases your visibility and exposure through mentions and citations, thus increasing your inbound traffic.
While Google still reigns as the number one search platform in the world, AI experts and marketing geeks postulate that we are simply at the early stages of an evolutionary shift in the way people search online. Considering we’re living in an increasingly AI-driven world, optimising for LLMs is becoming as essential as traditional search engine optimisation.
Why Should We Care?
Marketers should care about large language model optimisation (LLMO) because it represents the future of online visibility and customer engagement in an AI-driven world. With the rise of AI-powered search tools and chat platforms (like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, et al.), users increasingly get answers directly from these models rather than traditional search engines. This shift means that traditional SEO alone is no longer enough to ensure a brand is discovered and trusted.
By optimising for AI platforms, you’ll be positioning your B2B company as a trusted, credible source, which gives your brand a strong foothold long before your competitors have caught on.
By ignoring the call to jump on the LLM optimisation bandwagon, you may eventually see your traffic dwindle, as AI systems start to take more of the search market. Besides, if you’re already using SEO techniques, early adoption of LLMO is also relatively seamless.
What Are the Benefits of Large Language Model Optimisation (LLMO)?
Visibility this, visibility that. Yes, we know we’ve said it a million times already, and we’re about to do it again. When you optimise for generative AI, you make your content visible in LLM responses.
But there’s a lot more to look forward to.
More People Will Visit Your Site
Visibility is obviously not the be-all, end-all of LLMO. When we said more brand visibility, we meant that when a user queries an AI tool, that tool will mention you directly in their answer and/or cite your page with a direct link.
This simple act of citing its sources drives qualified referral traffic and potential leads directly to your optimised pages.
You’ll Be Perceived as a Real-World Authority
Generally speaking, if you’ve been following Google’s guidelines on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for SEO purposes, you’ve already been doing what you need to boost your credibility and authority.
Writing for E-E-A-T tends to get amplified when you’re optimising for LLMs because the more comprehensively you cover a topic, the more authoritative and trustworthy you are.
Your Competitors Will Have Something to Worry About
Investing your marketing bucks in effective LLM optimisation in these early days of the AI era (in case you didn’t notice, we’re in a new era) means you’ll be way ahead of your competitors when they eventually get around to it. And by that time, they’ll all have to get in line behind you.
How do we know we’re still in the early days of the AI era? Because we still have to create content like this.
You’ll Produce More Helpful Content
Content marketing is a fundamental LLMO practice because the whole point of AI is to be helpful and friendly (conspiracies and capitalism aside). When you write a page that’s clear, factual, semantically relevant, and contextually rich, it’s doing its part to create a better and more helpful user experience that keeps your audience engaged.
And when you provide your audience with this much grade-A beef, you can bet that you’ll be rewarded with credibility.
And When You Think About It, You’ll Be Making AI a Better Place
Not to be too delicate about it, but there’s a lot of crap floating around the internet. We don’t just mean badly written, either. There’s plenty of stuff that’s old, outdated, and incorrect that’s still being presented as factual, topical, and interesting.
When you take a GEO approach to organic search practices, you’re feeding LLMs with better content, which allows them to produce outputs with fewer errors and hallucinations.
Should You Focus on Generative Engine Optimisation Instead of Search Engine Optimisation?
Not yet.
SEO and LLMO (or GEO, AEO, blah, blah, blah) is a winning duo.
And we said earlier, people are still using Google waaaaay more than ChatGPT, despite all the hype it’s getting. The stats vary greatly depending on the criteria and who you ask, but most sources place ChatGPT’s daily search volume at anywhere from 66 million to 1 billion—we know, such a huge difference, right?
No matter which end of the scale you look at, it sounds like a staggeringly high daily number until you realise that Google takes in somewhere in the range of 8 billion to 16.4 billion queries every single day.
That’s right, children. The most visited AI tool doesn’t even come close to Google. So, does it make sense to completely jump ship on your existing SEO practices and focus on increasing your visibility on a less popular platform?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question.
Don’t think of it as one replacing the other. Traditional SEO should still be your main squeeze because Google is still the supreme being. But, generative AI tools are getting more and more popular, and it’s only a matter of time before LLMO will be as essential as SEO.
In short, traditional SEO still needs your attention, but you should also consider integrating LLMO practices to increase visibility in AI tools such as ChatGPT.
LLMO vs Traditional SEO: What's the Difference?
If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’re a marketer who has at least some understanding of digital marketing and how SEO works. But you might be wondering just how different it is from LLM optimisation, because if anything, we keep comparing the two.
Take a look at a side-by-side of the differences:
Looking at each column, you may have noticed that LLMO and SEO aren’t that dissimilar. So, by making small adjustments to your existing SEO keyword strategy and content, you can increase your visibility in both traditional search and AI tools like ChatGPT.
So, now that we know what LLM optimisation is, how it benefits your B2B business, and how it’s distinct but not separate from SEO, let’s turn our attention to the more practical application of a large language model optimisation (LLMO) marketing approach.
How Can You Optimise Your Website for Generative AI Visibility?
We recommend marketers focus on these main areas:
For starters, let’s look at the structure of your content. LLMs can more easily parse content that’s structured and formatted to be clear, straightforward, and helpful. It’s not just what you write, but how you write it that counts.
Tips for structuring content:
- Respect the hierarchical nature of your header tags, so that AI platforms understand just by scanning them what the topic and subtopics are. FYI, humans like to do this too.
- Consider phrasing your headers and subheaders as questions that the content below them will immediately answer.
- Aim for paragraphs that are 3-5 sentences. The top of the paragraph (and the page) should contain the most vital information, especially if you’re directly answering a question.
- The use of bullet points, lists, and tables is helpful for both readers and AI systems.
- When your sections start to get a little long, include short summaries at the top to help AI quickly get the gist.
As loyal SEO marketers, we know that keywords are pretty much the most important thing on your page. But LLMO strategies care less about keywords as search terms and more about the meaning, context, and intent behind them.
Sophisticated AI models understand semantic relationships, which means that your writer should focus on creating content that covers a topic in great detail, and uses related topics and terms. The writer also needs to adopt a more conversational tone and use long-tail and question-based headers.
You should also consider using real brand names and the names of real-life experts. Linking to these experts also adds to your own authority.
Of course, going back to the structure-y bit about AI-friendly content, be sure to establish topical authority and put the most important parts of the page closer to the top. And use your headers wisely.
Moving on from content. Technical SEO is as important for search engines as it is for LLM visibility. Both marketing tactics require technical excellence for the same reason: if they can’t access your content, they can’t show it to people.
Not being able to access or crawl content can look like quite a few things, so be sure to run a full technical audit (or ask your dev person or SEO agency to do it for you) to rule out page speed issues.
What else might be turning your page invisible:
- Switched on Robots.txt blocks, paywalls
- Broken links, poor internal linking structure
- Poor Core Web Vitals
- Missing or incomplete schema markup
- Missing (or bad) sitemap
- Content that’s heavy on JavaScript
- Duplicate pages without correct canonical tags
- Insecure HTTP connections (i.e., missing the ‘S’ in HTTPS)
Structured data, and particularly schema markup, helps AI better understand what it’s looking at. Think of it as going almost overboard with the explanations to make sure that the guy asking for directions totally understands what you’re saying. You can never be too clear or too careful in this case.
Common GEO wisdom recommends you use FAQ, HowTo, Article schema, and if you have an ecomm site, also consider Product schema.
If this is a bit too technical for you, you can always ask your GEO marketing agency or web builder to create and add schema for you. Alternatively, you can also ask your favourite LLM to write your schema.
An LLMO / GEO Checklist for Marketers
Want the to-dos without the spiel? If you’re about to start a brand-new page of content, why not use this awfully condensed checklist to get started?
Content
- Hierarchical, question-based headings (H1, H2, H3)
- Concise, direct answers immediately following each question heading
- Bullet points, lists, tables, and summaries
- FAQ/How-To section
- Original, high-value, data-backed content
- Credible citations, recent sources, quotes from experts
- E-E-A-T principles
- Update content regularly
- Natural language and conversational, long-tail queries
- Entity-based keywords, semantic clusters
Technical SEO and Schema Markup
- Schema markup (FAQ, HowTo, Article, Organisation schemas)
- Page speed and mobile responsiveness
- Clean HTML with proper heading hierarchy
- Check for robots.txt, paywalls, etc.
A Wait and See Attitude
We may have burst your bubble about the quality of AI data you’ve been looking at. But even though AI traffic doesn’t give you the whole story, the fact that you’re even getting AI traffic in the first place is a pretty big deal.
Once your reporting is set up, the only thing left to do is to keep up with GEO practices and continue monitoring the metrics. This way, we can respond quickly to trends with more optimised content and technical improvements.
Final Thoughts on LLMs
Whether you’re calling it LLMO or GEO or AEO or AI optimisation (a term that we’ve been told under penalty of wrist-slapping not to use), one thing is for certain: that despite its lower market share of daily search queries, AI isn’t going anywhere, and your team would be missing out on an opportunity to capitalise on a trend whose only trajectory is skywards. Show your product or service to the new world, baby!
