LLM SEO (or LLMO, or GEO - the names haven't settled) is the work of getting your brand found, trusted and cited by large language models instead of just ranked by Google. This is the plain-English version for people who already know SEO: how LLMs actually choose what to say, which of your existing skills transfer directly, the handful of genuinely new moves, and the tactics you can safely ignore.
Muhammet İLBAŞ 12 min readIf you've spent years doing SEO, the last two years have felt like the ground shifting: a growing share of your buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity instead of typing into a search box - and your rank tracker can't see any of it. The discipline that's emerged to deal with this goes by several names: LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO, AEO. The names haven't settled; the work has.
This is the plain-English guide for people who already know search: what LLM SEO actually is, how the models choose what to say, which of your existing skills transfer straight across, the handful of genuinely new moves, and the tactics you can safely ignore.
LLM SEO is the work of getting your brand found, trusted and repeated by large language models. The unit of victory changes: SEO wins a position on a results page; LLM SEO wins a mention inside a generated answer. There is no page two of a ChatGPT answer - the model names two or three options and everyone else doesn't exist for that buyer. Same web, same content, harsher scoreboard.
On the naming soup: LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are, for practical purposes, the same discipline wearing different badges. Vendors emphasize different corners; the mechanics underneath don't change. We'll say "LLM SEO" here and mean all of it.
SEO optimizes a page to rank. LLM SEO optimizes a fact about your brand to be retrieved, trusted and repeated.
You can't optimize a black box, so start with the two pathways every engine blends:
Each engine weighs the mix differently - Perplexity is nearly all retrieval, ChatGPT blends both per question, Gemini rides Google's index, Claude leans on memory, Grok listens to X - which is why the same question gets different brands named on different engines, and why measuring one engine tells you almost nothing about the rest.
More than the doom posts suggest. Three pillars carry over almost intact:
A model quoting your page lifts a sentence, not a scroll depth. One claim per section, stated completely in the first sentence or two, self-contained enough to survive being quoted alone. Your pricing page is the highest-stakes example - engines get asked about cost constantly and most pricing pages are unquotable. Test yours:
Open your pricing page in another tab and be honest:
To a crawler, your pricing is a rumor. The good news: this is pure mechanics, fixable this week.
The unit of work shifts from "this URL" to "this fact about us, everywhere the engine can see it." A model states what independent sources agree on - so the same positioning, category and pricing story needs to appear on your site, your review profiles, the comparison articles and the community threads. One page claiming it is marketing; five sources agreeing is a fact.
Every engine leans on a shortlist of third-party pages when it answers your category - roundups, review platforms, Reddit threads, Wikipedia. Those domains are your new SERP. Find which sources the engines cite for your niche and earn presence there deliberately, the way you used to chase backlinks - except now the link matters less than the sentence next to it.
None of this shows up in Search Console. The LLM SEO scoreboard is: of the questions buyers ask, how often are you named, how prominently, in what tone, against whom, citing which sources - per engine, trended over time. That's a new instrument; these are the KPIs worth tracking, and an AI visibility tracker is the tool category that automates it.
The practical loop, compressed: baseline where you stand across engines on real buyer questions; fix the technical gates; ship quotable pages for the questions you should own; earn corroboration on the sources the engines already cite; re-measure and let the trend, not a single answer, tell you what moved. That's a quarter of work for most teams - we laid out the week-by-week version in the 90-day GEO plan.
Type your brand name or domain - we'll line up the questions buyers ask about it.
LLM SEO isn't a repudiation of your SEO career; it's the next compounding layer on top of it. The crawl-index-rank machinery you know still gates everything. What's new is the finish line - a model deciding, sentence by sentence, whether you're the brand worth naming - and the discipline of making that decision easy: be retrievable, be quotable, be corroborated, and measure the answers themselves. Start with the measurement; everything else follows from knowing where you actually stand.
LLM SEO is the practice of optimizing your brand's presence so large language models - ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok - find it, trust it and repeat it in their answers. Traditional SEO wins a position in a list of links; LLM SEO wins a mention inside a generated answer. The two overlap heavily (LLMs read the pages that already rank) but the scoreboard is different: 'were you named, and how were you described,' not 'what position did you hold.'
Functionally, no. LLM SEO, LLMO (large language model optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are competing names for the same young discipline, emphasized slightly differently by whoever's selling the term. The mechanics underneath - be retrievable, be quotable, be corroborated, measure per engine - are identical. Pick one name internally and don't overthink it.
Not literally - there's no results page and no position one. What exists instead is a probability: how often the model names you when buyers ask about your category, how early in the answer, and in what tone. That's measurable (run the same real buyer questions on a schedule and count), and it moves in response to the same kind of deliberate work that used to move rankings. 'Rank' is a useful metaphor as long as you remember it's a share of answers, not a slot.
Yes - it's the substrate. Retrieval-augmented engines search an index and read what ranks; Gemini literally rides Google's. If your pages aren't indexed, crawlable and reasonably ranked, you fail LLM SEO before it starts. What changes is that ranking stops being sufficient: the page must also be quotable, and the fact must also be corroborated by sources beyond your own site.
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