Why This Matters to Marketing Directors
If you’re budgeting for organic growth right now, you can’t just rely on Google alone.
Your customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google’s AI Overviews for recommendations, comparisons, and buying advice. In many cases, they’re getting a complete answer without ever clicking through to a website.
And increasingly, those answers are cutting brands out of the buyer journey altogether. LLM SEO (Large Language Model SEO) is how brands make sure they aren’t cut out of that conversation.
That raises some awkward questions for any Marketing Director:
- “If AI is answering my customers’ questions, where is my brand in that answer?”
- “Can I even see the traffic it’s driving or stealing?”
- “What do I change in my SEO strategy to keep us relevant?”
This is where LLM SEO comes in.
In this guide, we’ll explain what LLM SEO really is, how AI search engines decide which brands to reference or cite, how this differs from traditional SEO, and what practical steps Marketing Directors should take now to protect future organic growth.
What Is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO (Large Language Model SEO) is the practice of optimising your business, website, content, and brand data so that AI systems use you as a trusted and reliable source when generating answers.
- Traditional SEO optimises for a ranking position in the organic listings.
- LLM SEO optimises to be the answer itself.
When someone asks a question like, “Who is the best PPC agency in Manchester for ecommerce?” Google’s AI Overview, Perplexity, or ChatGPT may answer that question without showing a list of 10 links, and other times may present a short paragraph naming a handful of agencies.
What you want, is to be one of the names to show inside that answer. If your brand isn’t showing as part of that response, it doesn’t matter how well your page ranks organically. You’ve effectively invisible to the new layer of search engines that AI has become.
How LLM SEO Differs from Traditional SEO
Traditional SEO focuses on optimising individual pages to rank for specific keywords in the organic listings of search engines. It also rewards backlinks, on-page optimisation, and strong technical structure and hierarchy. Success with traditional SEO is often measured in rankings, sessions, and conversions, whether that be sales, calls and email and form submissions.
| Traditional SEO | LLM SEO |
|---|---|
| Optimises for pages and keywords | Optimises for entities, relationships, brand signals |
| Aims to rank in Google results | Aims to be cited in AI answers |
| Focuses on backlinks to pages | Focuses on brand authority across channels |
| Measures traffic | Measures visibility in answers + brand mentions in AI |
| Fights for position | Fights to be the source |
LLM SEO however shifts the focus from pages to brands, from keywords to concepts, and from rankings to trust and citations.
AI systems don’t think in terms of “page one” or “position three”. Instead, they evaluate which organisations, or brands, appear more credible, relevant, educational, knowledgeable and better representative of a topic, and then builds answers around those entities.
In other words, where traditional SEO competes for space, LLM SEO competes for authority. Not authority in the sense of website domain authority, but topical and entity authority.
This doesn’t replace classic SEO fundamentals though, they’re still very much valuable, but it helps to build on them in a way that reflects how search behaviour is changing. We still need to work on SEO foundations to improve our discoverability for AI and LLM search.
Why LLM SEO Matters Right Now
AI-powered search frequently results in zero click experiences, where users receive the information they need without visiting a site. Studies show that a significant proportion of AI-driven searches end without a click, particularly for informational and comparative queries. However, for many brands, that creates a hidden risk: silent traffic loss.
If an AI system answers a question using your competitor’s brand as the reference point, you might not necessarily see a drop in rankings, but you will see a gradual decline in influence and eventually demand. As a result of zero clicks, we also naturally see a decline in clicks to the page itself, and this can certainly cause some widespread concern, especially if over the course of a few months an article or blog post you’ve worked on very hard starts to see a gradual decrease in clicks. That doesn’t mean the SEO isn’t or hasn’t worked, and it certainly doesn’t mean the content is terrible.
It just means, if it’s being shown in AI and LLM, then chances are the article answers a direct question and therefore doesn’t need clicking on.
This is particularly important when you consider how younger audiences are behaving. Gen Z and younger Millennials increasingly treat conversational tools and social platforms as their first port of call for questions, research, and recommendations.
TikTok for instance is increasingly being used as if it is a search engine, and as a result even TikTok videos are being cited in the AI Overview. What this implies is Google is no longer the default starting point. The comparison to mobile optimisation in the early 2010s can be used here. Brands that adapted early gained a long-term advantage. Those that waited found themselves playing catch-up for years. The same can be said for AI and LLM SEO.
LLM SEO Starts with Being Machine-Readable
AI and LLMs don’t “read” websites in the way humans do. Instead, they construct graphs, representations of organisation, services, their relationships and authority.
Think ‘entities.
Either your brand fits into their graph, or it doesn’t.
For AI and LLM systems to confidently include your brand in an answer it needs to understand the following:
- What your business does.
- Who your services are for.
- Where you operate.
- Why you’re credible.
- How you differ from competitors.
That understanding comes from entity optimisation, not keyword density.
This includes consistent business descriptions across the web, structured data on your site, clear topical focus in your content, relevant and contextual internal linking, and external validation through citations, mentions, and expert commentary.
This is where many SEO strategies fall short. They optimise pages in isolation but fail to optimise the brand as an entity.
LLM SEO in Practice: A Director-Level Framework
At Return, we approach LLM SEO as another strategic layer within organic growth. The framework below reflects how we help Marketing Directors future-proof visibility while maintaining commercial focus.
- Entity and Brand Structure
We start by ensuring your brand is clearly defined and consistently represented across your website and online. This includes structured data, knowledge graph alignment, Google My Business, and removing any potential ambiguity about what you do and who you serve.
The goal here is that when AI systems find your brand, they understand exactly where you fit.
- Topical Authority and Intent Design
Rather than producing very disconnected and irrelevant blog posts, we build topic authority around buyer intent.
This means identifying the questions your customers are asking and ensuring your content addresses those questions comprehensively, consistently, and with great depth.
- Presence Within AI Search Engines
We actively test how brands appear in AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, identifying where competitors are referenced and where gaps exist. Simple searches can help to identify your presence across these systems.
From there, we then shape content and brand signals to improve the likelihood of citation and inclusion within those AI and LLM search engines.
- LLM Readable Content
Content must now do more than just rank in Google. It must aim to explain and answer.
We structure pages to they aim to answer questions clearly. This includes the use of FAQs, table of contents, bullet points, clear structured headings, and language (including long tail queries) that mirrors how people typically ask questions.
This is all about ensuring the content on your website is reusable by these machines without losing value, without losing depth, and without losing quality.
- Reputation and Trust Signals
AI systems review trust from patterns across the web, including reviews, media mentions, thought leadership articles and guides, and consistent brand presence. This all feeds into how credible your business and organisation are and appears.
This is also why LLM SEO blends perfectly with PR, content, and brand strategy, not just technical SEO. This is also why traditional SEO is still very much important. Without a strong SEO strategy you’re simply not going to appear credible enough to be cited by AI and LLM systems.
How Should Marketing Directors Measure LLM SEO?
Classic SEO metrics still very much matter. But with LLM SEO, whilst the focus on revenue and leads are still important, we should be looking at:
- Whether the brand appears in AI search
- Whether you’re generating traffic from AI searches
- How well the content aligns with queries your users are asking
Just as mobile visibility became a large measurable metric, AI visibility is one too.
What Should Marketing Directors Take Away from This?
LLM SEO isn’t about abandoning your traditional SEO efforts, and it certainly isn’t about trying to optimise for every keyword you can think of.
It is about recognising that search behaviour is changing, and we have to stay on top of that.
AI and LLMs have already shaped how Google’s listing appears, as well as how customers discover and shortlist brands they want to work with or purchase from. And in most cases, this could even happen before a user even head to Google, sees a landing page, or lands in a conversion funnel.
Again, this doesn’t make traditional SEO any less important. If anything, it makes it much more strategic.
The brands and organisations that will win over the next few years will be the ones that treat LLM SEO as an extension of their current marketing and organic strategy rather than a replacement.
They will be the brands that clearly define who they are, consistently represent the best of their brand, and help to answer a user’s question, or solve a user’s problem.
Marketing Directors should look to add increased intent, structure, and topical authority in the work you’re already doing, and to ensure the brand remains as visible as possible across the various organic and AI and LLM systems.
If you want to sense-check your current position and understand what LLM SEO means for your business specifically, we’re happy to talk.
Want to see what we could do for your business? Book a call today on 0161 533 2790 or send us a message.