LLM Visibility: What does this mean? Why should businesses be optimising for this?

Author: Ryan Walsh

Date: 16/06/2025

Table of contents:

What are LLM’s?

• Why your business should also be using GEO to optimise for ChatGPT
• Is your company already being displayed in the LLMs?
• How do the large language models (LLMs) use content marketing and cite it?
• How to improve your company’s authority so that you get visits through the LLMs?
• Why SEO is not dead and why your business needs to focus on GEO and SEO

 

Introduction

We get it, you’re crying into your cereal as you think SEO is dead.

You believe that AI is taking over, and now there’s no point in optimising your website any longer.

However, this is the wrong approach.
All it requires is an adjustment to your thinking and marketing strategy so that you can start making your website more visible in the LLMs as well.

 

Widely respected SEO news websites, such as SemRush, have stated that LLM traffic, or visitors from large language models, will overtake traditional Google search by 2027.

Therefore, we digital marketing strategists must adapt or get left behind.

 

Why you shouldn’t cry into your cereal that SEO is over

When we think about search engine optimisation, and when something new emerges, such as LLMs, we often think we have to start from scratch.

That everything must be redone entirely; however, this is not the case.
Suppose your business has been a busy bee, and you have implemented quality SEO, working diligently on improving your business’s Google E-EAT for some time.

In that case, you should know that you have already done much of the hard work.

You can build on this.

That’s because the optimisation techniques for implementing quality organic SEO are similar to how the large language models use text to display an answer to a query.

Quite put, LLMs such as ChatGPT are becoming one of the biggest and largest content marketing discovery platforms out there.

Therefore, whether you sell chair lifts for older people or energy drinks via mail delivery, you want your content marketing to be read by as many interested shoppers as possible.

This is why marketing managers must not only think about SEO but also consider GEO.

This is why, when you optimise your website for organic search engine optimisation, it is often very similar to how you optimise for the LLMs (GEO). You must put your heart and soul into creating amazing, high-quality content marketing that shoppers find useful.

Many businesses are stating that a significant number of citations and mentions of their companies are actually from pages and blog posts that are sometimes ranked right behind page 2 of Google on the LLMs.

Therefore, a lot of content marketing writers have their heads in their hands, wondering what on earth is happening.
Currently, there appears to be a discrepancy between how Google ranks content and how Chat GPT determines the most effective answer, when citing content marketing. But who’s to say that as the LLMs become better, they become cleverer, that the two different sets become more in line?

However, another perspective is that LLMs are very good at extracting answers from content marketing. Therefore, even if the answer comes from page 3 on Google, if the LLMs deem it a better or more exact answer, the LLMs will cite that.

How LLMs work

Sock it to me, how do the LLMs discover and cite a business’s content marketing

Traditional SEO

For decades, SEO, specifically organic SEO, was all about writing the best content marketing —that’s achieving the best Google E-EAT score and building and sourcing the best backlinks that you possibly can.

Then it was just a matter of sitting and waiting and blinking at your various SEO tools until you reached that position that you wanted to get to on Google’s SERP’s.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

On Indeed, that’s the recruitment website, for decades you see job advertisements for hiring link builders for copy writers etc.
however, now there is something new, that GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, its latest, and it’s a new discipline that marketing companies are using to get their clients more visibility, plus more clicks in the AI powered search results.

 

Chat history

What a lot of businesses are finding is that marketing companies, such as LLM, work by offering results that are very much based on your business’s chat history.

Let us give you a crystal-clear example:

You are a Porsche car enthusiast, and you run a lot of searches around Porsche car clubs and places to meet other 911 owners on ChatGPT.

Then one day, you start to search on ChatGPT for advice on how to remove a chip on the bonnet, and you don’t mention the brand of car.

However, ChatGPT is very clever; it knows that you run around 10 searches regarding Porsche 911 ownership every month. So, it doesn’t just find you results based on how to fix a stone chip; it directs you to pages that are specifically all about Porsche car care and how to fix that ding in the paintwork.

The point we are trying to make here is simple: the results are personalised in ChatGPT and other large language models, as the platforms get to know you.

What are the main differences between SEO and LLMS?

What does LLM “query fan out” mean?

LLMs are brilliant at allowing a shopper to ask additional questions, which follow up on the first question. This will enable you to expand on your original question and ask more questions to refine it. It’s a bit like having a real-life sales assistant right in front of you, similar to how the LLMs now work.

Just as you would ask multiple questions about a product to a sales assistant within a shop, you can use the LLM query fan-out to do the same. Therefore, helping the searcher to refine their original question. This enables the searcher to find the exact product they are looking for.

Relevancy

What many marketing companies are stating is that LLMs are very good at extracting the most relevant paragraphs and citing them within the LLMs, such as on ChatGPT.

It’s not, therefore, always the top-ranking pages, such as the pages on page one of Google, that get cited; sometimes it’s just that a very relevant answer has been found, and therefore, the LLMs often show this as that may offer an exact answer to the question.

 

Good news for businesses

A problem with SEO, traditionally, is that global brands often dominate the first page of Google because they have established strong backlinks. Although Google rankings, for example, businesses on page one, usually correlate with which citations the LLMs use, this is not always the case. As an LLM can sometimes cite a page on page 7 of Google, the reason this sometimes happens is because the LLMs deem that answer more relevant and more specific to that question, so the answer comes sometimes from a page or blog post that is well behind page 1 of Google.

How can our company better optimise our business’s content marketing for more visibility?
In-depth

It’s the same for search engine optimisation, in that Google eliminated a lot of pages that were “content thin” from its index. It now prefers pages which have higher Google E-EAT score.

To obtain a high Google E-EAT score, normally, the content marketing will need to have a high word count.

The reason being that Google de-indexed a lot of content-thin pages is simple: often, these pages lacked offering any helpful advice and were not providing an in-depth answer to the shopper.

Therefore, if your business wants to rank higher in Google’s organic results as well as appear more often as an answer in the LLM’s, the content marketing must be in-depth. It must therefore have a good, high word count and look to answer the question in a very comprehensive way.

 

Think about Googlebot and AI bots.

When you think about it, Googlebot and AI bots that read (crawl and index) the content marketing don’t act too dissimilar to how the human brain works. If it is a mass of text without page titles and pictures to explain the different sections of the article are about, then it can be difficult to skip to the part you really want to read.

What can happen is that the shopper gives up, the bounce rate increases, because many people today are impatient. A shopper often doesnt want to read 4,000 words of text; they may wish to read the introduction and perhaps skip to the part that they want to find the answer to.

Therefore, the point that we are trying to make is simple. By using on-page SEO methods, such as good use of:

– Page titles
– H1-H6 titles
– Breaking the text up with diagrams

What you can do is help the shopper skip to the part that they want to read more about.

But not only that, you are making it much simpler for Googlebot and AI programmes to skip to the part that they want to read.

 

Thought leader / original insights

Think about it like this.

If your writing content marketing that’s similar to millions of pieces of content marketing that’s already out there, why would Google or Chat GPT want to cite your work?

However, if your business offers a unique perspective and has experts working for you who write top-quality content marketing, then your business could start producing content marketing that is simply superior to that of your direct competitors.

For example:

• The content marketing could be more helpful
• It could include contributions by top experts
• It could consist of statistics and facts from the market research your business has carried out
• It could simply be higher quality, in terms of offering better advice

This could result in lower bounce rates, more links, higher rankings in Google’s organic results, as well as being mentioned more frequently in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT.

 

Why choose Walsh & Partners

Walsh & Partners is an SEO agency owned and run by Ryan Walsh. For the last 10 years we have kept on top of the latest changes made to SEO.

GEO is now one of the latest changes to digital marketing and our marketing agency is committed to help your business generate more sales.