27/08/2026

Author: Ryan Walsh

About the author:

Ryan Walsh is one of the most experienced e-commerce search engine optimisation specialists in the UK. He now mostly works with exclusively national companies that need the complete SEO and GEO area to grow their brands and businesses.

All you hear here these days on LinkedIn and in various blog posts is that “SEO is dead”. Let’s cut straight to the point: it’s not. It’s far from dead, so don’t ditch your search engine optimisation strategy.

Within this article we will explain why traditional SEO and LLM optimisation or “GEO” are more closely aligned than you might think.

Therefore, whether your burning ambition is to be cited more on ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude or you want to rank supreme at the top of Google’s organic results this is the guide for you.

We are an established digital agency; since 2008, we have been crafting search engine optimisation solutions for businesses. So, this guide is for you if you don’t know how to make your business more visible in LLMs and Google’s SERPs.

 

TLDR: LLM Optimisation vs SEO

As we will come onto a bit later on, traditional SEO- that is, ranking on the first page of Google SERP’s- that’s not going anywhere and is still the main way shoppers find goods and services.

Therefore, if you neglect this aspect of your marketing, that is you neglect strengthening your organic ranking factors, well you will often fail when it comes to LLM optimisation.

The two methods of attracting shoppers are therefore very closely aligned as this post will illustrate.

Publishing good content, building strong links, and getting the technical foundations right is still the bedrock of success.

Whether your boss is breathing down your neck to get your business more visible on ChatGPT or organic traffic needs increasing, well we would encourage you to focus on improving those organic ranking factors first.

 

Citation building and LLM’s

So, it’s about identifying the questions your prospective customers are asking, then building a positive user experience (Sting U.X) and content marketing around them.

However, how your content is being found is substantially changing.

Businesses worldwide still want their content marketing to appear on page one of Google. That is, businesses from sole traders through to

PLC or Nasdaq companies still want to appear on the first page of the SERP’s.

However, things have changed: businesses now also want their content to appear as an answer in, say, ChatGPT. LLMs therefore don’t serve up 10 organic links; instead, they synthesise and respond with a very succinct answer. Therefore, here it’s all about getting your business mentioned as a “citation” as well.

 

Here, therefore, is the distinct difference between LLM and SEO

SEO

Search engine optimisation is all about climbing Microsoft and Google’s search results, also known as the “SERP’s”. You achieve this by improving and strengthening traditional ranking factors.
SERP’s stands for “search engine results pages”.

Therefore, SEO is about ranking your content for high-search-volume keywords.

This means after you’ve been a busy-bee in say Ahrefs conducting keyword research, its all about optimising your website for those keywords.
LLM optimisation, in terms of how your businesses content marketing is found is a totally different kettle of fish; that’s about getting your business mentioned as a source or citation in what is often a very concise answer.

 

Quality content that’s really useful and authoritative

Quality content marketing always pays dividends, this is why we would encourage you to read about EEAT.

I have been working on various companies’ search engine optimisation strategies for donkey’s years; therefore, I can say hand on heart one thing is true:

Google rewards quality work, this was reinforced after EEAT guidance.

So many businesses and digital marketing agencies, for that matter, have come and gone in that time because they have “cut corners”.

However, Google’s rules haven’t changed; it still rewards very high-quality work.

 

Therefore, here’s the golden rule, whether optimising for LLM or for SEO:

– Produce quality work (Google EEAT)
– Make sure the work is clearly structured (good on-page SEO and splitting of the text)
– Make the work useful for the customer and not just written for SEO gain
– Make it authoritative by having authors who truly know what they are writing about, therefore are subject experts
– Revisit the work and make sure it’s kept updated

 

Content structure and quality are key.

What’s key now in this new era of LLM optimisation, is content marketing quality and how the work is structured. Good page structure (FAQ style) has always been important, as it helps Googlebot understand and better interpret the work, including what it is about. However, AI systems need to do the same job: write truly useful, well-structured content marketing.

Here’s the benchmark you should hold the content marketing to:

Useful

Don’t write content marketing just for pure SEO gain; the best SEOs in the business know content marketing must be truly useful to the end reader (the customer).

Google weighs metrics such as “bounce rates” and other engagement metrics, like “dwell time”. Both of these metrics can be measured in Google Analytics.

Therefore, don’t just publish content marketing and forget about it. Instead, get obsessed with the U.X signals and ask questions such as:

– What’s the bounce rate like?
– What’s the dwell time like?
– How many inbound links have linked to that work?

 

Do this on a very granular level, by that we mean on each page and blog post.

Expertise

A key part of Google EEAT is “Expertise”, but we can’t overstate this enough; the author really needs to know their stuff. If the work is rushed marketing rubbish, written in a two-hour window, you’re likely to see that page as “crawled and not indexed” within your Google Search Console account.

Google now has millions of answers and pages it can serve as an answer.

So, therefore, if a business has poured a huge amount of time creating market research, researching the topic they are writing about and the author knows about the product or service inside out, well how can you expect that page to rank higher and be served as more LLM citations.

So, the only work that we are seeing rank higher, gain more visitors, is work that’s written in accordance with EEAT.

SEO vs GEO- where can we gain the most shoppers?

These figures are hard to compute, but Google handles over 13.7 billion queries every day. The average shopper makes around 3 to 4 searches per day (SQ Magazine).

Now, when you compare that with how many people use AI search, the numbers are quite different.
ChatGPT has been reported to handle around 2 billion queries per day.

The point we’re making is that “SEO is not dead,” as some agencies would have you believe. In fact, traditional, or organic, search engine optimisation is still the main way most customers find businesses to buy goods and services from.

 

What do we mean by “organic”?

Ever since the days of Google’s PageRank formula, businesses have been fiercely fighting to get their companies ranked on page one of

Google. To do this, SEO experts have been optimising what are called “ranking factors”.
Fast forward to 2026 and businesses are still focused on improving these ranking factors. It’s worth bearing in mind that there are over 200 of these, so the list of factors you can improve is truly massive. However, these ranking factors can broadly be split into these categories:

 

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is anything you can change directly on your website. Whether you have an e-commerce or brochure website, you can alter the content, meta titles, descriptions, alt text, and other key areas, such as adding internal links to pass link juice to key pages.

 

Off-page

Off-page SEO includes ranking factors outside the website.

These ranking factors include backlinks and mentions of your brand name. In semantic search, mentions on important websites can also help improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

Technical SEO

It’s crucial to optimise for LLMs and SEO, and to make sure your technical SEO is set up correctly. This means improving page speed, mobile responsiveness, and ensuring the pages you want indexed can be indexed well.

What does Large Language Model Optimisation involve?

Large Language Model Optimisation does depend on which LLM you are optimising for. There are so many LLMs now, such as DeepSeek, Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, to name just a few.

Our best advice is to focus first on improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation.

This can be a long road; we fully appreciate that. However, this work is needed if you also want to be more visible on LLMs. LLMs use this information to build their own knowledge, then use that text to serve as answers in their own SERPs.

 

AI Tools Rely on Indexed Content

If your content marketing isn’t “indexable,” it needs to be crawlable and indexable by Googlebot.

If it isn’t, LLMs often can’t read it. Ahrefs shared an interesting statistic: 76% of AI Overview answers come directly from answers and text in the first 10 organic search results.

That’s why we said earlier that content marketing needs to be crawlable, indexable, and rank highly in SERPs.

 

Topical Authority

What does “Topical Authority” mean?

Here, we’ll talk about Google EEAT, and Google likes to rank businesses higher once they’ve proven they’re experts on a certain subject. For example, if you are writing some of the best guides and content marketing on Rolex watches, you will build authority in that area.

This means businesses that consistently publish high-quality content and guides that drive strong organic traffic build topical authority.

When you combine that with retaining shoppers’ interest by having most pages with high dwell time, Google starts to see that you know what you are talking about and that you’re keeping shoppers engaged. As a result, new guides you publish start to rank higher because the domain has built topical authority.

Are backlinks still important for LLM optimisation?

LLM optimisation doesn’t rely so heavily on backlinks in the same way that organic SEO does.

For example, as we mentioned earlier, Google’s roots lie in a system called “PageRank,” which heavily depended on backlinks to determine where a business should rank in the SERP’s.

However, although the core algorithm that powers Google’s organic search results still uses backlinks as a main ranking factor, LLMs reportedly rely less on backlinks, when deciding which citations to mention.

 

Why content structure matters more than ever

LLM SEO means that you now need to make it easier than ever for the LLM’s to extract a direct answer from the page.

Good marketing consultants have understood for a long period of time that writing conversationally helps you create clear headings and answers directly beneath them. This allows Googlebot to understand and interpret exactly which main questions the page is answering.

Again, LLM optimisation and GEO overlap significantly.

What we mean by that is, if the content structure is really good- by that we mean clear questions and answers- then this makes it easier for, say, Perplexity or ChatGPT to find very precise answers to questions that it may wish to cite in the LLM’s.

Google’s AI Overviews and LLM responses

AI Systems use multiple sources.

In traditional SEO, also known as organic SEO consultants often focused on backlinks as a sign of how authoritative the content marketing is. Backlinks are still really important; however, AI models now use a range of different sources to determine which business offers the best answer to a query.

For example, AI systems may use review platforms and other sources, such as an author’s LinkedIn profile, to decide whether to use their answer as a citation.

Vague content or “Thin Content Marketing” simply doesn’t work anymore

This is important to note, as many businesses make this common mistake.

That is, businesses write thin content.

This means blog posts, guides, and main pages often don’t offer much useful advice as they don’t have a high enough word count or simply lack detail.

 

High-quality content marketing remains key to driving more visitors.

As this article explains, high-quality content marketing is still the main driver of GEO and also SEO success.

What we mean is that if your brand wants to be more visible in LLMs through citations, or generate more organic traffic from Google’s SERP’s you will need high-quality, well-written content marketing.

 

Genuine value

When our agency first started, agencies up and down the country would write say content marketing purely to hit, say, 500 word count.
Often this was nothing more than “marketing waffle”. Google has subsequently weeded these pages out of its index, through numerous spam updates such as the large Google Panda updates.

Now, businesses compete for visibility based on quality and offering useful advice.

What we mean is that businesses that do the following will improve their visibility.

 

Answering commonly asked questions that your customers frequently ask

Making sure that the experts within that business fill the page and blog posts with as much expertise and knowledge as they can offer.

 

Answering the question

To appear more visible in AI answers, such as through Google’s AI overviews, you have to answer the question in the blog post or page more comprehensively than the competition.

When you answer the question better than anyone else, your business can appear higher in organic rankings and within LLMs because you’re offering a higher-quality answer.

 

Use good page structure.

Use good page structure; by that, I mean strong on-page SEO needs to be used.

Use clear headings and bullet points to summarise your points. Also, make sure the content has logical sections and flow, for example, answer a main question, then answer follow-up questions within the content marketing as well.

 

One does not replace the other.

If there is one key takeaway from this article, it is that traditional or organic SEO is not going anywhere anytime soon.
LLM optimisation actually complements traditional SEO. By that we mean that if your business has a very strong “EEAT Score”, and you’re really working hard to improve your organic search engine optimisation over the long term, then you’ll naturally start to appear in LLMs more often.

 

Therefore, the following is still important:

• Conducting keyword research
• Building quality backlinks
• Improving on-page SEO

 

However, the real competition is offering the best answer to a query

The real competition today, in terms of being more visible as a brand in LLMs, is offering the best possible answer and solution to a question.

Now you might be thinking, well, surely this was always the case when a business was optimising and improving its organic search engine optimisation?

And we would agree and say yes: businesses that have strived to offer the best advice are always more visible, whether that’s via organic SEO or through LLMs.

Therefore, writing very detailed guides such as this- well, they are massively time-consuming; however, it’s a key part of getting a business more visible in the LLMs.

FAQs

Will the LLMs such as ChatGPT eventually replace SEO?

We think, as do many other digital marketing consultants, that the LLMs will always complement traditional SEO.

We therefore think Google will remain the biggest search engine, and many people will use ChatGPT as well.

Therefore, SEO isn’t being replaced; it’s evolving, and marketing companies have to adapt and compete by providing really high-quality content marketing.

Therefore the aim will be to get the business mentioned on the LLM’s, but also ranked on page one of Google as well.

This content has to satisfy the hundreds of different ranking factors that Google’s algorithm uses; that’s if you want to rank on page one.

But the company also needs to understand how the AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, work. They also want to display very precise answers to questions, which is why you need to pay particular attention to creating really good content marketing.

 

I don’t want to be spinning too many plates at once- can I concentrate just on improving my SEO?

Yes, you can, but it’s a bit like saying, I only want to take a certain percentage of the overall amount of sales that are out there to be obtained.

As you can see, that makes no sense, so what the best companies do is they understand what, say, Perplexity wants, what ChatGPT wants, and what Claude wants, and incorporate this into a broader digital marketing strategy which also includes SEO.

For example, instead of publishing a blog post every week, the strategy might be to consolidate efforts into one really good piece published say once a month.

Then work on raising the authority signals, such as backlinks to that piece.

This way, you compete on quality rather than sheer quantity, and you stand a much better chance of appearing in the LLM revolution and in traditional search results, such as on Google.

 

Great- but how do we measure whether our LLM optimisation is truly working?

Citation rate

How often is your business cited when you ask a set of relevant queries?

Since you’re not just optimising for one LLM, you will need to test this across multiple AI platforms.

So check Perplexity and ChatGPT, and while you’re at it, Claude as well.

Then do a process of “reverse engineering”- if your business is not the cited source on these LLM’s, find out, well, why that is so.

AI Referrals: Use Google Analytics 4 to track visitors from AI platforms.

You can also use Google Analytics 4 to track visitors from AI platforms.

As this number increases, it shows AI platforms are citing and recommending your work more widely.

 

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