SEO in the Era of AI: LLM SEO

Chances are, you've mastered traditional SEO. You've loaded your pages with keywords, given your images alt-tags, and optimized your page titles for search. Good to go, right? A couple years ago, yes. With the introduction of Large Learning Models (LLMs) — ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, to name a few — not anymore. Companies are changing their approach to SEO, largely due to the fact that according to a report by WSI, nearly 60% of Google searches now end without clicking into any website.

This means that consumers are no longer visiting websites, they're simply getting their information from Google AI generated responses, map packs and visual answers. This poses a threat to businesses of all sizes — how do you drive traffic to your site if consumers are turning to AI search?

The answer is LLM SEO, or optimizing your website for AI search recommendations. Think about it like this: instead of optimizing for search engine algorithms, you're optimizing for language models.

Traditional SEO versus LLM SEO

Traditional SEO focused on how search engines crawl, index, and rank content. LLM SEO focuses on how AI models understand, reference, and recommend your content in conversational responses.

Here's how the shift looks in practice:

• Traditional SEO: "How do I rank higher on Google's search results page?"
• LLM SEO: "How do I make sure ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot cite or summarize my brand accurately?"

Vercel, a cutting-edge AI tool that allows developers to build better websites faster, does a wonderful job of explaining their shift to LLM SEO on their blog.

In that post, they use this chart to illustrate key differences in traditional and AI SEO.

Although these terms can be very technical, I will explain the key concepts below.

How to Optimize for LLM Search

LLM SEO isn't just about technical tweaks — it's about content clarity, community-based authority, and structure. The most important thing is to write in clear, concise, and easy to digest language. This means that short answers and FAQ-style structure is more valuable than ever.

LLMs are good at picking out exact answers to specific questions, which means that using question-based headers followed by clear answers are most beneficial for LLM SEO. This approach mirrors how people naturally ask/answer questions, and is also how LLMs process language.

Using my client Traders Point Pediatrics, here's an example of effective LLM optimized format:

Keep the answers concise. When writing in this format, it's important to keep the most critical information most accessible (preferably in the first sentence). You can elaborate in a subsequent paragraph, but LLMs favor complete, stand-alone answers that immediately follow the setup question.

Gaming the System

LLMs are still evolving, along with the ways they're trained and refined. At their core, LLMs learn from vast collections of text drawn from across the internet: websites (such as blogs), articles, forums (Reddit), and other publicly available data. Because of this, some people believe they can "game the system" by flooding the web with AI-generated content—blog posts, Reddit comments, social media threads, or other searchable text—to make their ideas more visible to LLMs.

While this idea has some truth, the reality is more nuanced.

Modern AI companies don't simply "feed the raw internet" into their models. The data goes through heavy filtering and quality checks to remove spam and low-quality content. In addition, many models are fine-tuned with curated datasets, human feedback, and trusted sources, which makes it very difficult for random online noise to meaningfully sway what they recommend or generate.

That said, content visibility can still be influenced indirectly. Systems that use retrieval (like search engines, or chatbots connected to the web) depend on what gets indexed and ranked. In those cases, traditional SEO principles—creating authoritative, well-structured, and engaging content—matter just as much, if not more.

Conclusion

Similar to traditional SEO, you can't trick an LLM with low-authority links, but you can train it to find you useful. Focus on clarity, credibility, and consistency. Possible reformatting/addition of LLM-accessible pages on your website may improve the likelihood of your business coming up in AI search. If your content provides real value and is published on reputable, indexable platforms, it stands a far better chance of being surfaced by both search engines and AI systems.