As a marketer, I need to know if there are particular issues I ought to do to enhance our LLM visibility that I’m not at present doing as a part of my routine advertising and website positioning efforts.
To date, it doesn’t look like it.
There appears to be large overlap in website positioning and GEO, such that it doesn’t appear helpful to contemplate them distinct processes.
The issues that contribute to good visibility in serps additionally contribute to good visibility in LLMs. GEO appears to be a byproduct of website positioning, one thing that doesn’t require devoted or separate effort. If you wish to improve your presence in LLM output, rent an website positioning.
Sidenote.
GEO is “generative engine optimization”, LLMO is “massive language mannequin optimization”, AEO is “reply engine optimization”. Three names for a similar thought.
It’s value unpacking this a bit. So far as my layperson’s understanding goes, there are three most important methods you may enhance your visibility in LLMs:
1. Enhance your visibility in coaching knowledge
Giant language fashions are educated on huge datasets of textual content. The extra prevalent your model is inside that knowledge, and the extra intently related it appears to be with the matters you care about, the extra seen you’ll be in LLM output for these given matters.
We will’t affect the info LLMs have already educated on, however we will create extra content material on our core matters for inclusion in future rounds of coaching, each on our web site and third-party web sites.
Creating well-structured content material on related matters is among the core tenets of website positioning—as is encouraging different manufacturers to reference you inside their content material. Verdict: simply website positioning.
2. Enhance your visibility in knowledge sources used for RAG and grounding
LLMs more and more use exterior knowledge sources to enhance the recency and accuracy of their outputs. They’ll search the online, and use conventional search indexes from corporations like Bing and Google.
OpenAI’s VP Engineering on Reddit confirming the usage of the Bing index as a part of ChatGPT Search.
It’s honest to say that being extra seen in these knowledge sources will seemingly improve visibility within the LLM responses. The method of turning into extra seen in “conventional” search indexes is, you guessed it, website positioning.
3. Abuse adversarial examples
LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation, and it’s attainable to trick these fashions into recommending you after they in any other case wouldn’t. These are damaging hacks that supply short-term profit however will most likely chunk you within the lengthy time period.
That is—and I’m solely half joking—simply black hat website positioning.
To summarize these three factors, the core mechanism for bettering visibility in LLM output is: creating related content material on matters your model desires to be related to, each on and off your web site.
That’s website positioning.
Now, this will not be true without end. Giant language fashions are altering on a regular basis, and there could also be extra divergence between search optimization and LLM optimization as time progresses.
However I think the alternative will occur. As serps combine extra generative AI into the search expertise, and LLMs proceed utilizing “conventional” search indexes for grounding their output, I believe there’s prone to be much less divergence, and the boundaries between website positioning and GEO will change into even smaller, or nonexistent.
So long as “content material” stays the first medium for each LLMs and serps, the core mechanisms of affect will seemingly stay the identical. Or, as somebody commented on one among my current LinkedIn posts:
“There’s solely so some ways you may shake a stick at aggregating a gaggle of knowledge, rating it, after which disseminating your finest approximation of what the most effective and most correct outcome/data would be.”
I shared the above opinion in a LinkedIn submit and acquired some actually wonderful responses.
Most individuals agreed with my sentiment, however others shared nuances between LLMs and serps which can be value understanding—even when they don’t (in my view) warrant creating the brand new self-discipline of GEO:
That is most likely the most important, clearest distinction between GEO and website positioning. Unlinked mentions—textual content written about your model on different web sites—have little or no impression on website positioning, however a a lot greater impression on GEO.
Engines like google have some ways to find out the “authority” of a model on a given matter, however backlinks are probably the most vital. This was Google’s core perception: that hyperlinks from related web sites might operate as a “vote” for the authority of the linked-to web site (a.okay.a. PageRank).
LLMs function in another way. They derive their understanding of a model’s authority from phrases on the web page, from the prevalence of explicit phrases, the co-occurrence of various phrases and matters, and the context wherein these phrases are used. Unlinked content material will additional an LLM’s understanding of your model in a approach that gained’t assist a search engine.
As Gianluca Fiorelli writes in his wonderful article:
“Model mentions now matter not as a result of they improve ‘authority’ immediately however as a result of they strengthen the place of the model as an entity inside the broader semantic community.
When a model is talked about throughout a number of (trusted) sources:
The entity embedding for the model turns into stronger.
The model turns into extra tightly linked to associated entities.
The cosine similarity between the model and associated ideas will increase.
The LLM ‘be taught’ that this model is related and authoritative inside that matter area.”
Many corporations already worth off-site mentions, albeit with the caveat that these mentions needs to be linked (and dofollow). Now, I can think about manufacturers enjoyable their definition of a “good” off-site point out, and being happier with unlinked mentions in platforms that move little conventional search profit.
As Eli Schwartz places it,
“On this paradigm, hyperlinks don’t have to be hyperlinked (LLMs learn content material) or restricted to conventional web sites. Mentions in credible publications or discussions sparked on skilled networks (hiya, data bases and boards) all improve visibility inside this framework.”
Observe model mentions with Model Radar
You should use our new instrument, Model Radar, to trace your model’s visibility in AI mentions, beginning with AI Overviews.
Enter the subject you need to monitor, your model (or your opponents’ manufacturers), and see impressions, share of voice, and even particular AI outputs mentioning your model:
I believe the inverse of the above level can also be true. Many corporations at this time construct backlinks on web sites with little relevance to their model, and publish content material with no connection to their enterprise, merely for the visitors it brings (what we now name website popularity abuse).
These techniques provide sufficient website positioning profit that many individuals nonetheless deem them worthwhile, however they may provide even much less profit for LLM visibility. With none related context surrounding these hyperlinks or articles, they may do nothing to additional an LLM’s understanding of the model or enhance the chance of it showing in outputs.
Some content material varieties have comparatively little impression on website positioning visibility however better impression on LLM visibility.
We ran analysis to discover the varieties of pages which can be most definitely to obtain visitors from LLMs. We in contrast a pattern of pageviews from LLMs and from non-LLM sources, and in contrast the distribution of these pageviews.
We discovered two large variations: LLMs present a “choice” for core web site pages and paperwork, and a “dislike” for itemizing collections and listings.
Quotation is extra vital for an LLM than a search engine. Engines like google typically floor info alongside the supply that created it. LLMs decouple the 2, creating an additional have to show the authenticity of no matter declare is being made.
From this knowledge, it appears nearly all of citations fall into the “core website pages” class: a web site’s dwelling web page, pricing web page, or about web page. These are essential elements of a web site, however not all the time large contributors to look visibility. Their significance appears better for LLMs.
A slide from my brightonSEO discuss exhibiting how AI and non-AI visitors is distributed throughout completely different web page varieties.
Inversely, listings pages—suppose large breadcrumbed Rolodexes of merchandise—which can be created primarily for on-page navigation and search visibility acquired far fewer visits from LLMs. Even when these web page varieties aren’t cited typically, it’s attainable that they could additional an LLM’s understanding of a model due to the co-occurrence of various product entities. However provided that these pages are normally sparse in context, they might have little impression.
Lastly, web site paperwork additionally appear extra vital for LLMs. Many web sites deal with PDFs and different types of paperwork as second-class residents, however for LLMs, they’re a content material supply like every other, they usually routinely cite them of their outputs.
Virtually, I can think about corporations treating PDFs and different forgotten paperwork with extra significance, on the understanding that they will affect LLM output in the identical approach every other website web page would.
The purpose that LLMs can entry web site paperwork raises an attention-grabbing level. As Andrej Karpathy factors out, there could also be a rising profit to writing paperwork which can be structured at the start for LLMs, and left comparatively inaccessible to individuals:
“It’s 2025 and most content material remains to be written for people as an alternative of LLMs. 99.9% of consideration is about to be LLM consideration, not human consideration.
E.g. 99% of libraries nonetheless have docs that mainly render to some fairly .html static pages assuming a human will click on by them. In 2025 the docs needs to be a single your_project.md textual content file that’s meant to enter the context window of an LLM.
Repeat for all the pieces.”
That is an inversion of the website positioning adage that we must always write for people, not robots: there could also be a profit to focusing our power on making info accessible to robots, and counting on the LLMs to render the data into extra accessible kinds for customers.
On this approach, there are particular info constructions that may assist LLMs accurately perceive the data we offer.
For instance, Snowflake refers back to the thought of “international doc context”. (H/T to Victor Pan from HubSpot for sharing this text.)
LLMs work by breaking textual content into “chunks”; by including further details about the doc all through the textual content (like firm identify and submitting date for monetary textual content), it’s simpler for the LLM to grasp and accurately interpret every remoted chunk, “boosting QA accuracy from round 50%-60% to the 72%-75% vary.”
Understanding how LLMs course of textual content gives small methods for manufacturers to enhance the chance that LLMs will interpret their content material accurately.
LLMs additionally practice on novel info sources which have historically fallen outdoors the remit of website positioning. As Adam Noonan on X shared with me: “Public GitHub content material is assured to be educated on however has no impression on website positioning.”
Coding is arguably probably the most profitable use case for LLMs, and builders should make up a sizeable portion of complete LLM customers.
For some corporations, particularly these promoting to builders, there could also be a profit to “optimizing” the content material these builders are most definitely to work together with—knowledgebases, public repos, and code samples—by together with further context about your model or merchandise.
Lastly, as Elie Berreby explains:
“Most AI crawlers don’t render JavaScript. There’s no renderer. In style AI crawlers like these utilized by OpenAI and Anthropic don’t even execute JavaScript. Meaning they gained’t see content material that’s rendered client-side by JavaScript.”
That is extra of a footnote than a significant distinction, for the straightforward cause that I don’t suppose this can stay true for very lengthy. This drawback was solved by many non-AI internet crawlers, and can be solved by AI internet crawlers briefly order.
However for now, if you happen to rely closely on JavaScript rendering, a superb portion of your web site’s content material could also be invisible to LLMs.
Ultimate ideas
However right here’s the factor: managing indexing and crawling, structuring content material in machine-legible methods, constructing off-page mentions… these all really feel just like the traditional remit of website positioning.
And these distinctive variations don’t appear to have manifested in radical variations between most manufacturers’ search visibility and LLM visibility: typically talking, manufacturers that do properly in a single additionally do properly within the different.
Even when GEO does finally evolve to require new techniques, SEOs—individuals who spend their careers reconciling the wants of machines and actual individuals—are the individuals best-placed to undertake them.
So for now, GEO, LLMO, AEO… it’s all simply website positioning.
