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SEO

GEO optimisation 101: How to boost your visibility on LLMs

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The way we search has changed. Every day, 16.4 billion searches are made on Google, and 2.5 million prompts are made on ChatGPT.

Whilst 93.39% of total search traffic in the UK is driven from Google, it’s no longer the only source of information. In fact, 82% of consumers turn to social media for product discovery and research; and the number of prompts made on ChatGPT has increased by 150% over the last 12 months.

So, whilst LLM traffic is still relatively small, it’s growing – which means now is the time to understand how to get your brand more visible across them, and start tracking your performance.

What is AI search?

AI search uses artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing, to first interpret a search query, before collating information from sources all across the web, and providing the user with a context-driven, conversational response.

Some examples of AI search platforms include Google’s AI Mode and Gemini, as well as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Visibility within AI search is important for these four following reasons:

  • To increase your brand authority and trust
  • To grow your share of voice
  • To meet users on the platform they’re actually searching on
  • To future-proof your brand, as the way we search evolves

How do you optimise your site for LLMs?

There’s no silver bullet – at the end of the day, it’s all about best-practice SEO. But these are some core areas to consider, as ultimately, visibility within LLMs is about being visible everywhere.

Technical housekeeping

Technical will continue to remain the foundation of any SEO strategy. Crawl your site to identify any errors, which you can then work on fixing with your developers as a high priority. Doing a mini tech audit every three months will help you to keep on top of any potential issues, so you can fix them.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth around whether schema markup will help with visibility in LLMs or not – but the truth is, it’s important from a traditional SEO perspective, so regardless; implementing it correctly will surface you within Google, which will help with overall brand visibility.

And there are so many types to consider – for example, if you add in review schema, you could start to see your reviews appear within your search listings, which can help to increase clicks to site because you’ve built trust. Similarly, if you add in organisation schema, then you may be featured within the knowledge panel for relevant search queries.

That being said, tech SEO is the foundation, and isn’t going to get you surfaced in LLMs alone, so you need to pair it with additional best practice SEO strategies.

Content

Content – specifically informational – is key. Get those core commercial pages right, and then start building out supporting content via content clusters.

Review your internal linking structure, so both Google and LLMs understand the relationship of pages on your website; and users know where to click through to for the next stage of their journey.

Do your keyword research as you would normally, but once you’ve done that, take a step back to think about what additional prompts people might be searching for – questions that won’t have search volume within Google (yet). Answer the Public is a great way to get some inspiration, or you can check out People Also Ask once you’ve searched for that query on Google. Alternatively, you could do a manual search within the LLMs themselves, to see what content the pages they surface are covering.

Other things you need to consider when creating content for LLMs – and all of which are best practice anyway – are:

  • Optimising content for your core keywords (without over-optimising).
  • Breaking up content with subheadings, and answering questions directly below.
  • Keeping information up-to-date and relevant. You should be carving time aside for content audits every six months, so you can refresh data. We’d also recommend that where you have “dates published” on blogs, you update those timestamps every time you refresh data.
  • Adding in rich media where relevant – think things like graphs, images and videos.

Build brand awareness

So, now you have your best practice SEO covered; but if you want to be visible within LLMs, you need to take the next step – and that’s brand visibility.

Digital PR

Referring domains from high quality backlinks are hugely important from an SEO perspective, but when it comes to LLMs, brand mentions can be just as valuable. Building those brand mentions from reputable sites via a digital PR strategy will highlight to LLMs that you’re an authoritative and credible source, which can help to build your visibility when people are searching for questions.

Social media

Video content is being indexed within Google search, and people are searching in-platform for social content. But video content is also being surfaced within LLM searches too – so having that content there, can help for certain queries where AI feels it’s more valuable to surface video rather than written content.

But it’s not only that. Brand awareness is about being visible across multiple channels; so having content on social media that people are engaging with is another way of showcasing to LLMs that you’re a trustworthy brand. Just make sure branding is consistent across channels and on-site; and that where possible, you’re creating a cohesive content roadmap that formats are all following.

Reporting on LLM success

Of course, you’ll want to make sure you’re reporting back on the success of your hard work; and there are two things you’ll need to do here.

Firstly, you’ll want to look at the initial scope of the opportunity, and your visibility vs competitors. There are lots of tools out there that can help with that – have a read of our guide on the best LLM trackers to find the right one for you. Many of these can show you which prompts you’re visible in, as well as prompts your competitors are being featured in that you’re not, to show the quick win opportunities, and what content you need to create.

You’ll also then want to look at performance metrics – you can do this by setting up LLM tracking in GA4. From there, you’ll be able to see sessions that come through to your site from LLM traffic, the landing pages users click through to, and the conversions from it.

Ultimately, GEO optimisation is best practice SEO, with a reinforced purpose of brand. It’s not enough to have a technically sound site – you need content; and then PR and social to amplify that content and highlight to LLMs and Google that you’re an authority in your industry.

If you’d like help with pulling together a GEO strategy, or are looking for some recommendations on building your features within AI overviews, then get in touch with us today. Alternatively, have a read of our report on the future of search, to understand how you need to evolve your organic strategy.