LLM SEO

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.

See how placements work.

Related: AI visibility · AEO · brand mention