Last updated on:
30.10.2026
LLM SEO
LLM SEO is the practice of getting a brand into the sources that AI models cite. How it differs from classic SEO and which signals actually matter.
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LLM SEO is the practice of making a brand appear in the answers that large language models produce. Systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews do not invent facts about companies. They assemble answers from sources they were trained on or retrieve live, which means visibility depends on being present in those sources.
How it differs from classic SEO
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links. LLM SEO competes to be part of a single synthesised answer, where there is no second place. A page can rank well and still never be cited, and a brand can be cited without ranking at all, because the model drew on an article elsewhere that mentioned it.
What actually moves it
Mentions in editorial sources carry more weight than technical optimisation. According to an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands (2025), brand mentions correlate roughly three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do. The practical consequence is that being written about matters more than being linked to.
What you can control
Three things. Where your brand is mentioned. How your own pages state facts, since definitions that stand alone are easier to quote. And whether the sources that AI systems read are saying something accurate about you, or nothing at all.
The honest limitation
Nobody outside the model providers knows the weighting, and it changes without notice. Anyone selling a guaranteed method for AI visibility is selling a guess. What is measurable is whether your brand appears in the sources at all, and that is the part worth working on.
Related: AI visibility · AEO · brand mention
About the author
Julian Kirfel
Co-Founder & CMO
Julian Kirfel is Co-Founder and CMO of Linkbroker.de and an expert in scalable SEO strategies, digital PR and link building. As a former board member with marketing responsibility and founder of several e-commerce brands, he brings deep operational understanding. During Linkbroker's build-up phase, he was responsible for sales and the delivery of client projects and helped numerous companies establish SEO as their leading growth channel. Today he leads the development and marketing of the marketplace and shares his experience in expert articles (including on OMR), on LinkedIn and on the company's YouTube channel.