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As AI-driven search overtakes its traditional counterpart, LLMO is becoming essential for digital visibility. Our expert offers some tips for thriving in the new era.
The whiplash is coming.
For the better part of a quarter century, digital marketing teams have obsessed over driving potential customers to their websites. We’ve chased the algorithms. We dived deep into analytics dashboards. If we were lucky and diligent, we succeeded at driving website traffic.
Now, if companies don’t act quickly, move beyond SEO and embrace LLMO, they risk seeing all of that work over the last 25 years being washed away. Semrush’s research shows that visitors from AI search will surpass visitors from traditional search by 2028.
The starter’s pistol just went off, and everyone is loitering at the starting line.
If you don’t start moving in this direction today, your firm could be on the path to digital invisibility.
Large language model optimization (LLMO) is the process of optimizing content to appear in answers generated by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Unlike traditional SEO, LLMO prioritizes authoritative third-party citations, semantically complete content chunks and formats like Q&As and listicles that are easily parsed by LLMs. As AI-driven search overtakes traditional search, LLMO is becoming essential for digital visibility.
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When you enter a prompt into an LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity, you get an answer. The LLM creates that answer from information it’s been trained on. When your preferred AI tool provides a source for its answer, you want your company to be one of them.
But this isn’t just about content on your website. LLMs typically favor credible, third-party sites — think media outlets, Wikipedia, LinkedIn and even Reddit. Really, anything with a gatekeeper.
The LLMs favor authoritative content and thought leadership. If you have proprietary data or statistics, even better. You can’t write a 1,500-word blog post with a bunch of grammatical mistakes, publish it on your website and declare it “authoritative” just because it’s long.
This is one of the secrets of LLMO here in the early days — this is hard work. The good news is that, if you’re willing to do that hard work, you can surge to the forefront of how companies in your industry show up in LLMs.
Think of Googling a recipe: You see some enticing options, you click on a link or two, and you’re thrust into a long-and-winding SEO-ified tale of the chef’s upbringing and how this is the chicken their mom made when they were a kid. Perhaps entertaining, but more likely, annoying. This is what SEO has done. For the user, they went to a search engine looking for answers and instead we typically got something that took up our time and may or may not have provided the answer.
With LLMs, the user experience is so. Much. Better. Ask a question, get an answer. Sure, it might not always be the right answer, but search engines didn’t necessarily show you the right answer either, right?
Paradoxically, using AI to search for answers is a more human experience. If I ask my friend a question, they give me an answer. You know what a friend doesn’t do? Give me 10 different options, eight of which he’s being paid to tell me about.
LLMs interpret context, nuance and intent, prioritizing helpfulness over keyword match. Unlike traditional search, LLMs synthesize their answers from multiple sources. This fundamentally changes how people discover content and how it needs to be optimized.
LLM search is just better for the user, which means that’s where they’re going to turn for answers. In turn, this means that’s where you need to show up.
Clinging to your current SEO strategy is a path to failure. There are some similarities, but LLMO is fundamentally different in how you structure content, where you get that content published and what your goals are.
Perhaps most importantly, the business model of an LLM is different from Google’s. Rather than relying on ad revenue, the LLMs are subscription-based, a monumental shift that completely changes how information is delivered to the user and how the user responds.
Here’s the scenario: Someone types into Perplexity, “What cybersecurity consultants are best for health systems?” or “Which cybersecurity consultants help with SOC 2 Type II audits?” You want your firm to be in that answer.
You can get there through ongoing entity (not page) optimization, third-party citations and content clarity; these are the new “ranking factors.” Let’s break them down.
LLMs consume content in “chunks” rather than full pages or websites, so you’re optimizing your content differently than you would for SEO. This means you need to create passages that are complete and semantically rich. For instance, in this very small example, I wrote “LLMs consume content…” rather than “The bots consume content…” or “They consume content…” because the LLMs are not looking at the paragraph before; they’re scanning individual chunks of content. This also means you don’t have to write ludicrously long blog posts just to hit some mythical magical word count.
Third-party citations are huge for LLMO. LLMs are going to trust an established, credible website more than they are your company’s. Think big, information-rich websites like Wikipedia, LinkedIn and media outlets. These sites have significant audiences and some type of gatekeeper, whether that gatekeeper is an editor or a snarky mob. This means that media relations should be right at the heart of your LLMO strategy. Placing articles with a clear and specific point of view with media outlets will drive your “share of model” in LLMs.
Here’s a chart showing publishers that have made deals with the LLMs to use their content as “training data.” Sites and publishers including The New York Times, Conde Nast, Reuters, the Washington Post and Reddit are all being paid to allow LLMs to train on their content.
LLMs reward your brand for content clarity. This means the content should be structured for AI comprehension, not just human readability. Listicles, Q&A formats and wiki-style pages are easy for LLMs to read and so, even if the idea of yet another listicle makes you want to pull your hair out, you need to embrace these content formats in this new era.
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In a very interesting way, what’s old is new again. After 25 years of obsessing over a black box algorithm, marketing your business is returning to the idea of brand building and thought leadership to build credibility and reach. LLMO rewards clarity, authority and insight — which is what human beings are looking for too.
If you infuse more humanity into your marketing and try to truly be helpful, you will be heading into the right direction in the age of LLM discovery. It’s all about becoming the trusted voice in the answer.