What Are LLMs & How to Optimize Your Website for Them

LLM, large Language Models, are advanced AI platforms that are trained on large amounts of written text to analyze and generate human-like responses. They can perform multiple tasks, answering complex queries, summarizing text, translating, and even generating whole new content. LLMs are a part of modern AI that power Generative Search and Conversational Search.

Generative Search generates a natural language response based on a human query, such as the answers provided by AI Overviews. Similarly, Conversational search is a part of Generative search that maintains a proper interaction between the user and the LLM tool, such as ChatGPT, Claude AI, Perplexity AI, Grok, DeepSeek, and more.

According to a report, the global market of large language models surpassed $5,617.4 million in 2024, with expectations to cross $35,434.5 million by the end of  2030. With growing popularity, LLMs are becoming a primary source of information that not only provides answers but also influences decision-making, making LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization a crucial to enhance your brand visibility.

In today’s guide, we will learn what LLM optimization is and how you can use it to power your existing SEO foundation.

What is LLM Optimization

Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO) is the process of improving your brand’s visibility across LLM-generated responses, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI overviews, Google’s AI mode, and more. The aim is to get LLMs familiar with your brand, so it includes your content in its answers via mentions or citations.

Major LLM optimization tactics include:

• Getting a positive mention of your brand on well-known websites. It makes the LLM understand the brand more and perceive it more favorably.
• Creating original, useful, and LLM-friendly content (that is, content considered by LLMs for citation in their responses).

For example, we asked ChatGPT, “What are the best tools for AI SEO?”

Note: Answering what is an LLM, you can give names such as LLM SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO).

Why is LLM Optimization Crucial For Your Brand

As people rely more on AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity AI, and more for search discovery, LLM optimization analyzes how users discover and interact with these platforms. Unlike traditional SEO, which is all about keywords and backlinks, LLMO focuses on improving your visibility across AI-generated answers. In fact, according to a study by SEMrush, the average visitor from an AI search is 4x more valuable than an organic search visitor.

This means the stakes are higher and the opportunities greater for brands that adapt early. LLMO can help you increase brand awareness, protect and improve your reputation, and drive more revenue. The key to LLMO lies in optimizing for how large language models understand and process data. This includes:

• Semantic Clarity: Making the content easy for AI to understand.
• Structured Information: Formats such as FAQ pages, tables, and lists should be easily parsed by an LLM.
• Context Optimization: Explicitly linking concepts and entities that form relationships.
• Conversational Patterns: Natural language Q&A formats that align properly with LLM content generation.

Read Also: How an LLM SEO Agency Can Transform SEO Approach

6 Ways To Optimize For LLM (LLMO)

To properly understand what LLM optimization is, it requires both technical and creative skills. Although we don’t know how exactly LLMs mention or cite your brand, here are some of the essential ways you can optimize your content for better LLM visibility.

1. Create Authentic Content With Real-Time Statistics

Firstly, it is important to understand that LLMs prioritize content that includes data, stats, or references from reputable sources. These fall into two broader categories:

• Self-contained LLMs: Trained on static and gargantuan amounts of data.
• RAG-based LLMs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation style models fetching updated, real-time data from the web.

Original stats and credible research findings are 30-40% more likely to get a place in LLM-generated answers.

LLMs are supposed to give evidence-based answers. If your contents involve original statistics, research findings, or unique data points, they are deemed authoritative by AI systems, which will therefore cite your brand.

How to implement this:

• A good number of original industry-related research: surveys, data analysis, case studies.
• Clear, concise statements of findings that can be directly quoted.
• Highlighting statistics in bold text, bullet points, and callout sections.
• Mention those statistics along with your brand name.
• Refreshing the data yearly for relevance.

2. Earn Mentions on Websites That LLMs Cite

Research and find out pages that LLMs often reference. Try to get your brand name mentioned on these pages or websites. LLMs retrieve content from reliable and frequently cited websites. If your brand has been named in those sites, then the chances of getting placed in AI-generated content are greatly increased.

For example, we asked ChatGPT to provide “Top Picks for 2025 Video Editing.”

Here, the RTINGS blog mentions a laptop brand in a buying guide. ChatGPT may cite that blog in its recommendations. In this case, the brand’s mention indirectly becomes a part of the AI’s answer.

How to Find the Right Sites

• Query AI search tools about your topic (Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, etc.).

• Find out from which sources AI tools consistently draw.

• Create a list from those domains and types of content that keep coming up.

• Join the list of contributors, be it through guest posts, comments, partnership, or content contributions.

3. Make Your Content Accessible to LLMs

In order to ingest and cite your content, it has to be accessible and able to be of the contents ingested by LLMs.

Here is how to make your content more technically accessible to LLMs:

• Make server-side rendering a priority. The LLM will generally be learning from the raw HTML of the webpage, which means it won’t learn from content that is rendered by JavaScript. Therefore, you should minimize any reliance on JavaScript rendering.
• Make sure your content is publicly accessible. LLMs can only train on publicly accessible content, not content that is behind paywalls, login walls, or contractual restrictions pertaining to AI.
• Follow technical SEO best practices. LLMs may also pull information from searchable content databases, so make sure you are using technical SEO best practices.

4. Create an Entity Strategy

Understanding entities is probably the most technical part of LLMO. To optimize for LLMs, you need to be able to understand how these systems ‘see’ your brand as an entity. When we talk about AI systems entities, it is not only your brand name but your business’ full digital identity (with all the attributes, relationships and topical connections).

LLM’s essentially build relationships between entities across an enormous knowledge graph, therefore, your visibility is driven directly by how clearly defined your entity is, and what it is connected to.

This is also the foundation of how AI-first systems interpret authority. As discussed in our podcast Authority Signals in AI-First SEO, maintaining clear entity definitions and consistent authority signals helps these systems recognize credible brands more effectively.

Why it works: AI systems cluster similar concepts together; by entity optimization you’re able to show what your brand is, what it is doing and what topics it has authoritativeness on.

How to implement this approach:

• Utilize tools such as Google’s Natural Language API and Inlinks’ Entity Analyzer to audit how your content is perceived currently.
• Ask AI systems directly what topics they consider your brand to be an authority on.
• Create content that strengthens the relationship between your brand and target topics.
• Use schema markup to define your brand and its attributes clearly.
• Create a Wikipedia page if you meet the notability standards.

5. Enhance Passage-Level Relevance for AI Discovery

Optimizing content at the passage level may contribute value because LLMs frequently conduct passage-level retrieval (i.e., search for the best segments of text rather than the best documents).

Here are some recommendations for optimizing content at the passage level:

• Be concrete: Utilize clear and definite wording throughout your document, and for maximum benefit, mention relevant entities. Doing this gives LLMs and users more information to extract from your content.
• Restrict external dependencies:  Ensure that all important passages and sentences can stand alone and make sense. Avoid dependencies in predecessors or external documents.
• Stay on Main Topic: Center each passage around a specific topic or subtopic. Avoid asides, which can confuse LLMs and distract users.

Document depth may also become less relevant due to passage-level retrieval. Since the LLM can pull in relevant content from multiple documents residing on your site.

This suggests that it may be advantageous to create separate documents suited to highly specific use cases (i.e., documentation tailored to very specific uses of your product) rather than comprehensive documents incorporating multiple use cases.

6. Leverage Strategic Backlinking for LLMO

How to do LLMO well means recognizing the ongoing importance of backlinks, only with an AI-related twist. When it comes to LLMO, the quality and context of backlinks is more important than sheer quantity. Authoritative links from sources mentioning your brand in the context of subjects or themes with which you want to be associated are especially valuable.

Contextual backlinks largely support the topic-brand associations, which are key for LLMO.

How to put it into action:

• Concentrate on quality instead of quantity (references from high-quality, reputable, and relevant sites).
• Seek out editorial links that reference your brand in context.
• Regularly show off some branded anchor text and a lot more of the relevant topical text.
• Target links to references from websites that are likely to be in the LLM’s training datasets.
• Build relationships and get to know thought leaders in your subject area.

Will LLMs Impact Traditional Ways Of Search?

Well! Since LLMs are emerging as a new way to discover content, a question arises: “Will LLMs replace traditional search engines”? The answer is NO! LLMs are not here to replace traditional SEO; rather, they will provide added support to how websites or content appear in AI-generated answers. From Crawling, Indexing, and Backlinks to Keyword, Content, and UX, SEO forms the basis of LLM optimization. However, the main difference lies in their search behavior. While SEO traditionally focuses on search experiences, LLMO works on improving and targeting large language models for an advanced search experience.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Large Language Model optimization (LLMO) represents a new era of search discovery where the main focus is to target an AI platform such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more. As Google keeps changing its policies, businesses must focus on developing their SEO strategies to get positioned in LLM-generated answers. From creating authentic content to using strategic backlinking, getting a place in LLM responses requires a deep understanding of what an LLM is and how to use it for better online visibility.

Want your brand mentioned in LLM-generated answers? Choose ResultFirst, the expert AI SEO agency that knows how to optimize your content for various LLMs. With years of experience working with large language models, we ensure your brand/website is cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity AI, Google AI Overviews, DeepSeek, and more. Get in touch with ResultFirst and dominate AI Search with unmatched visibility.

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