What is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO is the practice of structuring content so large language models, the systems behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, can find it, understand it, and cite it in their answers. It goes by several names, including generative engine optimization and
answer engine optimization, but the underlying work is the same: clear structure, real expertise, and sources an AI can trust enough to quote.
That is the whole definition, and it is deliberately unglamorous. Most of what makes a page citable is what has always made a page good. The part that is genuinely new is the scoreboard. You are no longer only asking whether you hold a position on a results page. You are asking whether your brand gets named inside an answer that a buyer reads instead of the results page.
This guide is the plain-English version of how that works, what actually moves it, and what you can safely ignore. We wrote it because the advice circulating on this topic has gotten noisy, and a fair amount of it is invented.
LLM SEO vs traditional SEO vs GEO vs AEO: what is the difference?
Mostly the label, and you should treat anyone who tells you otherwise with some caution.
- SEO is the whole discipline: making your site findable, understandable, and worth ranking.
- LLM SEO and LLM optimization describe the slice of that work aimed at being quoted by language models.
- GEO, generative engine optimization, is the same slice with a different acronym.
- AEO, answer engine optimization, is the same again, framed around answers rather than generation.
Google addresses two of these terms by name in its own documentation. Its guidance states that AEO and GEO are both terms used to describe work focused on visibility in AI search experiences, and that from Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and is therefore still SEO (
Google Search Central, “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search,” updated 2026-07-10). The same page points readers to Google’s guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice before buying AEO or GEO services.
We use the term GEO on our own service page because it is what buyers search for, and we would rather meet you where you are looking than win an argument about vocabulary. But the practical takeaway is worth being blunt about: these are not four separate disciplines you need to buy four times. If you want the commercial version of this, including how we run it and what the monthly report looks like, that is on our
generative engine optimization page.
How do large language models decide what to cite?
Here the honest answer comes in two parts, because the public record is uneven. For Google’s AI features we have official documentation. For the rest, we have much less, and we are not going to fill the gap with confident guesses.
What Google has documented. Google’s generative AI features in Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and they use two techniques Google names directly (
Google Search Central, updated 2026-07-10):
- Retrieval-augmented generation, also called grounding. Rather than answering from the model’s memory, the system uses the core Search ranking systems to retrieve relevant, up-to-date pages from the Search index, reviews the specific information on those pages, and generates a response from it, showing clickable links to the pages that support the answer.
- Query fan-out. The model generates a set of concurrent, related queries alongside the one you typed and fetches additional results to address it properly. Google’s own example: ask “how to fix a lawn that’s full of weeds” and the fan-out queries might include “best herbicides for lawns” and “how to prevent weeds in lawn.”
There is a hard prerequisite underneath both. Google states that to be eligible to appear in its generative AI features, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, meeting the Search technical requirements, and that a site must also be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console (
Google Search Central). It adds the caveat that meeting every requirement still does not guarantee crawling, indexing, or serving.
Read that chain backwards and you have the single most useful sentence in this guide. Retrieval comes before citation. If your page cannot be crawled, indexed, and shown with a snippet, there is nothing for the model to retrieve, and no amount of clever writing changes that.
What is not publicly documented. The assistants that are not Google search the open web too, and while the broad mechanics are similar, the specific retrieval and source-selection behavior of each one is not published in the same detail. We are not going to invent mechanics for them. What we do instead is measure the output, which is the next section, and what we tell clients is that the Google documentation is the best available proxy for the shape of the problem, not a specification for every engine.
The LLM SEO fundamentals
Five things do most of the work. None of them will surprise anyone who has done real SEO, which is rather the point.
1. Be retrievable. Crawlable, indexed, eligible for a snippet, reasonably fast. This is the prerequisite from the section above, and it is where most failures actually live. It is also the least interesting thing to sell, which is probably why so little AI-search advice starts here.
2. Answer the question near the top. Put the direct answer in the first few lines, in plain language, before the context and the caveats. A model that has to reconstruct your answer from four scattered paragraphs will often reconstruct it wrong, and so will a human on a phone.
3. Say something only you could say. This is the bar Google actually describes, and it is worth quoting closely: content that provides a unique point of view, such as a first-hand review based on personal experience, stands out, whereas a summary of existing content simply restates what is already available elsewhere. Google contrasts commodity content, its example being “7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers,” with non-commodity content that brings genuine expert or lived experience (
Google Search Central). If a model could have written your page without your company existing, it has no reason to cite your company.
4. Source your claims. Attribution is how a machine, and a reader, decides whether a statement is safe to repeat. Name the source and link it. This page does it roughly a dozen times, which is not an accident.
5. Keep it current. Grounded retrieval favors up-to-date pages, and this field in particular changes fast enough that a two-year-old guide is often actively wrong. Date your updates and actually make them.
And a short list of what you can skip. Google publishes a mythbusting section, and it is genuinely useful because most of these are being sold right now (
Google Search Central):
- llms.txt and other special AI files. Google Search does not use them. Keeping one neither helps nor harms your Google visibility.
- Chunking your content into tiny pieces. Not required. Google says its systems can handle multiple topics on a page, and that there is no ideal page length.
- Rewriting your content specifically for AI systems. Not required. The systems understand synonyms and general meaning, so you do not need to capture every phrasing variation.
- Chasing inauthentic mentions. Called out directly as less helpful than it appears.
- Overfocusing on structured data. Not required for generative AI features, and there is no special schema to add, though Google still recommends using it as part of your broader SEO for rich-result eligibility.
We follow that last one ourselves, for the reason Google gives rather than the reason most vendors give.
Entity clarity and topical authority
There is a layer underneath the page-level work that gets skipped a lot, and it is worth its own section because it explains why two sites with equally good articles do not get cited equally often.
The first half is entity clarity, which is a technical way of saying that a machine should be able to work out who you are without guessing. If your business name, address, and phone number are written three different ways across your site, your Google Business Profile, and the directories that list you, you have handed every system that reads you a small ambiguity to resolve, and some of them will resolve it wrong. The fixes are unglamorous and mostly one-time. Keep your name, address, and phone consistent everywhere they appear. Write an About page that states plainly what the company does, who runs it, and where it operates, rather than a page of adjectives. Mark up the organization with structured data so the basic facts are stated in a form a parser cannot misread. Google is clear that structured data is not required for its generative AI features and that there is no special AI schema, so treat this as ordinary SEO hygiene that happens to help here too, not as a magic ingredient (
Google Search Central).
Then there is corroboration, which is the part you cannot do entirely on your own site. A directory listing, a press mention, a podcast appearance, a conference bio: each one is another independent place where the same facts about you appear. Worth saying clearly, because this is where the advice in this category goes wrong most often: the goal is being genuinely mentioned in places that were going to write about your field anyway, not manufacturing mentions at volume. Google names that specific shortcut in its mythbusting section and says seeking inauthentic mentions is less helpful than it looks.
The second half is topical authority, and the short version is that a single strong page is a weaker asset than a cluster of related ones. If you want to be the source on a subject, cover the subject rather than one question inside it. In practice that means a substantial hub page on the topic, a set of supporting articles that each handle one real question in depth, and internal links running both ways so a reader or a crawler arriving at any one of them can find the rest. This is the same structure that has worked in organic search for years, which is the recurring theme of this guide. It is also, incidentally, the structure of the page you are reading, which sits alongside our
generative engine optimization page and our
SEO fundamentals page rather than standing on its own.
How to get cited by ChatGPT
ChatGPT is usually the first engine clients ask about by name, so it is worth separating what OpenAI actually documents from what the industry has inferred.
Start with what OpenAI publishes. OpenAI runs several crawlers and treats them as independent settings, which matters more than it sounds.
OAI-SearchBot is the one for search: OpenAI states that it is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features, and that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt to help ensure your site appears in search results, and notes it can take roughly 24 hours from a robots.txt change for its systems to adjust (
OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI Crawlers”).
GPTBot is the separate crawler used for content that may train OpenAI’s foundation models, and it can be disallowed on its own. That distinction is the practical takeaway. A site that blocked GPTBot at some point in the last couple of years, which plenty did on principle, has not necessarily blocked itself out of ChatGPT search, and a site that wants one without the other can have it. Check your robots.txt and know which of the two you have actually set.
Then the part that is reported rather than documented. It is widely stated across the SEO press that ChatGPT’s search results are built on Bing’s index, and the practical advice that follows from it is to verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and make sure Bing has your pages (
Search Engine Land). We will be straight with you about the status of that claim: it is not stated in OpenAI’s own current crawler documentation, which describes OpenAI’s crawlers and does not name Bing. We mention it because verifying in Bing Webmaster Tools costs an afternoon, tells you things worth knowing regardless, and carries no downside if the underlying arrangement changes. We are not going to present it as a vendor-confirmed mechanism, because it is not one.
The rest is the same work as everywhere else. Get mentioned on pages that are already trusted in your field, since an assistant assembling an answer is drawing on sources it has reason to believe rather than on whoever tried hardest. Answer real questions in your own words, in the phrasing a person would actually use, close to the top of the page where the answer is easy to lift. And keep the page retrievable in the first place, because the prerequisite from earlier applies here too. Nothing gets cited that could not be fetched.
How to track your LLM SEO performance
If you cannot measure it, you are guessing, and this is the area where the marketing around LLM SEO gets furthest ahead of what anyone can actually prove.
Start with the first-party number. Google Search Console has a Generative AI performance report showing how your content is performing in generative AI features on Google Search and in Discover (
Google Search Central). It comes straight from Google, it is free, and it is the closest thing to ground truth that exists for that surface. If you do nothing else, turn it on and look at it monthly.
Then sample the answers themselves. For the brands we manage, we use Ahrefs Brand Radar to pull the actual AI answers for the questions their buyers ask, and we record which answers name the client and which name a competitor. That is the method behind the citation reporting on our GEO page, and we name the tool on purpose so you can evaluate the method rather than trust the number.
Two caveats we would rather you hear from us than discover later. First, AI answers are not stable the way rankings are. Ask the same question twice and you can get different sources, so the only defensible way to read this data is as a sampled trend over months, not as a single snapshot quoted like a ranking. Second, Google explicitly warns site owners to be wary of third-party tools that promise ranking success or claim to use internal Google metrics, noting that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems (
Google Search Central). That warning applies to the tool we use as much as to any other. Brand Radar samples what the engines say. It does not see inside them, and neither do we.
We have deliberately not published a comparison of LLM tracking tools here. Most of the “best LLM SEO tool” content in this space is affiliate-driven, and we would rather explain the method we use and let you decide.
LLM SEO checklist
Everything above, in the order we would actually do it. None of it requires a new budget line, and most of it is work a competent SEO is already doing.
- Confirm the page can be crawled, indexed, and shown with a snippet. This is the prerequisite for Google’s AI features and the thing most worth checking first.
- Check your robots.txt and know what you have set. OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot are separate settings, and blocking one does not have to mean blocking the other.
- Verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Cheap, useful on its own merits, and it covers you if the reported Bing dependency behind ChatGPT search holds.
- Turn on the Generative AI performance report in Google Search Console and look at it monthly.
- Put the direct answer near the top of each page, in the phrasing a person would actually use.
- Bring something to the page that only you could bring: first-hand experience, your own process, the thing you learned doing the work. A page that restates what is already available gives no one a reason to cite it over the original.
- Name and link your sources. Attribution is how a reader and a machine both decide whether a statement is safe to repeat.
- Keep your name, address, and phone consistent across your site, your Google Business Profile, and any directory that lists you, and make your About page state the plain facts about who you are.
- Earn genuine mentions on pages that are already trusted in your field. Real coverage, not volume.
- Build the cluster, not the one page. A hub plus supporting articles, interlinked in both directions.
- Add FAQ schema where you have real FAQs, using the visible copy word for word. Structured data is not required for AI features, but it is still worth having for the rest of your SEO.
- Revisit and update the page on a schedule. In a field moving this fast, a stale guide is not neutral, it is wrong.
FAQs
Is SEO dead now with AI?
No, and the people saying so usually have something to sell. Google’s own documentation states that SEO best practices continue to be relevant because its generative AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet before it can show up in those features at all. In other words, the AI answer is built on top of the search index, so the work that gets you into the index is the work that makes a citation possible. What has genuinely changed is the measurement. Clicks from a results page no longer tell the whole story, because a share of your visibility now happens inside an answer the reader never clicks out of, and you need a way to see that.
What is the LLM equivalent of SEO?
It is still SEO, with a narrower target and a different report. You will see it called LLM SEO, LLM optimization, generative engine optimization, or answer engine optimization depending on who is writing, and those terms describe the same underlying work: make the page retrievable, answer the question directly, bring something only you could bring, and source what you claim. If a proposal presents these as separate disciplines with separate line items, that is worth a question or two before you sign it.
What is AI SEO called now?
There is no settled name, which is a decent clue about how young the category is. GEO and AEO are the two acronyms that have stuck hardest, and Google names both of them in its documentation while pointing out that from its perspective this is all still SEO. We use GEO on our service page because it is the term buyers search for. The label matters far less than whether the person using it can tell you how they will measure the result, so that is the question we would ask any agency, including this one.
Want to see how this applies to your business?
Want a deeper look at how Pillar Point Digital approaches GEO and AEO for a business like yours? Our
generative engine optimization page covers the process, the reporting, and what a month actually looks like.
If you would rather start with your own site, book 30 minutes with a founder. We will look at your pages and at the AI answers in your market beforehand, so you leave the call knowing where you currently stand in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews. You keep the findings either way.
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