Guess what: SEO isn’t dead. But it does need to change.
Organic clicks are dropping across industries. Search engines pull AI-generated (or better: summarized) information from websites to provide answers directly in the SERPs, and customers turn increasingly to Large Language Models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT to research tools and strategies.
How do you stay visible in this changing landscape?
We’re constantly testing and monitoring the changes in Search to see which tactics deliver results. This guide lists SEO strategies that still work and LLM SEO best practices to implement. But first, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about.
LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO: the Terminology Explained
“Name it to tame it” – the idea is well-known in psychology and might explain the range of abbreviations marketers have come up with to grapple with the implementation of AI in search engines and the accelerated evolution of Large Language Models like ChatGPT.
To avoid any confusion, here’s what each of them stands for.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comprises the strategies and techniques aimed at increasing a website’s visibility and organic traffic by making sure the pages of that website are found at the top of search engine results. In other words, SEO is aimed at ranking websites on traditional search engines.
LLM SEO (Large Language Model SEO), LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are basically the same thing. They focus on optimizing content to increase its chances of being included in the answers given by LLM-driven tools (like ChatGPT) and search engine features (like Google’s AI Overview). As such, their scope is broader than the scope of SEO.
In short, SEO focuses on ranking websites high in traditional search engines, whereas LLM SEO, LLMO, and GEO aim to get brands mentioned in AI-generated answers on search engines and elsewhere.
In this sense, you could say brand and authority are even more important in this new era of getting found on the web than they were when you could get away with ‘just” ranking on Google.
The Importance of SEO for LLM in a Changed Search Landscape
In October 2024, Google’s search market share dropped below 90% for the first time since 2015, and 2025 saw a decrease in click-throughs in traditional Search following the rollout of AI Overview. At the same time, B2B SaaS has seen an increase in referral traffic from LLMs as well as conversions coming from that traffic. Other industries are reporting similar trends.
At Flow, we’re also seeing a decrease in organic clicks across client accounts, while impressions are up.
The landscape has changed, but the importance of generating visibility hasn’t.
To win new customers, you still need to show up where they go to look for the solution you provide. The only difference now is that you don’t just need to rank on Google anymore; you also need to appear in AI overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other AI-driven answering tools.
Yes, organic search results are losing prominence on Page 1, but this is nothing new. We already had paid ads, People also ask, and featured snippets competing with our ranking efforts. Smart marketers tried to win a spot in those – and it’s no different now for AI Overviews.
To increase brand visibility and discoverability, your content needs to be findable and easy to process by LLMs. That’s the role of LLM SEO.
LLM SEO vs Traditional SEO: Is There Truly a Difference?
A lot of the uncertainty around optimizing for LLMs comes from them producing answers in such a different way compared to traditional search engines:
- They reply in paragraphs instead of with a list of links.
- They can instantly adapt their replies through “conversation” with the user.
- They focus on giving the user a usable answer instead of giving them the resources (links) to find an answer.
But if you look at the list of LLM SEO best practices we put together in the next section, you’ll notice that a lot of these have long been best practices for traditional SEO as well:
- Ensuring your website is indexable.
- Creating well-structured content that is easy to read by both humans and search bots (and now also LLMs).
- Winning features on relevant and authoritative websites to boost our own authority.
- Getting included in listicles to generate more brand awareness.
While LLMs seem completely different from search engines like Google and Bing, they’re really just the next step (but a big step) in the evolution of Search, better equipped to provide users with information in a conversational and contextually relevant way.
To capture the small percentage of your addressable market that is currently actively looking to buy, you need to be wherever they go to inform their decision-making process. That means appearing in traditional Search, LLM tools, and AI-powered Search. It’s not a matter of moving from SEO to LLM SEO, but of doing both.
Our holistic approach combining SEO and LLM SEO with paid ads and features on relevant sites made our client Emboarder impossible to miss for anyone looking for employee onboarding software.
We can help you get the same results.
8 LLM SEO Best Practices
Ready to grow your visibility across LLM search engines and tools?
Implement the best practices below to generate awareness, capture demand, and stay top of mind regardless of where your audience goes looking for answers.
1. Build widespread, consistent brand presence
If there is one practice you take away from this article, let it be this one: you need to build an omnipresent brand. Having an optimized website is no longer enough.
There are two parts two this:
1. Optimizing content you control
Create a consistent brand presence across the channels that you own (your website) and those that you don’t but that you do control the content of (your social media channels, your Capterra listing page, your Crunchbase profile, …).
Look at how LLMs formulate answers around the solution you have to offer and use that language in your copy. Your content will also more likely be referenced if you use the exact same language to describe something across your channels. That includes:
- a product’s description.
- your company’s history.
- the first line of your CEO’s profile.
Not sure where to start? Use our Branded Search Checklist to review your website and socials, the web properties on which content is easiest to adjust if needed.
2. Being present on relevant properties across the web
This means generating mentions and citations through digital PR and media appearances, monitoring forums like Reddit to answer questions related to your product, and getting included in review articles, “best x” listicles, and expert roundups.
When doing traditional SEO, you need mentions to include backlinks to your site. While getting backlinks is still great, LLMs only need to see you mentioned in content to reference you in their answers.
2. Optimize entities across channels
Entities are singular people, places, things, events, and organizations that are clearly defined by their names, types, attributes, relationships to other entities, and other specific characteristics. They are stored in Google’s Knowledge Graph, one of the many sources across the web that Google’s AI Overview draws information from.
You optimize for entities in the same way that you create a consistent and widespread brand: by using the same phrasings and other brand elements in the following places:
- your website.
- your social channels.
- third-party review sites and directories like Crunchbase, where you control the description of your company.
- digital PR efforts and media appearances.
- contributions to forums and other types of online communities.
3. Create well-structured content
Just like for traditional search engines, content needs to be clearly structured for LLMs to process and interpret it correctly. One of the most important aspects in this regard is using the correct heading hierarchy.
You also want to keep your paragraphs short, use bullet points to aid semantic interpretation, and include tables where they allow for clearer representation of the information.
4. Implement schema markup – but be careful!
In an ideal world, each of the pages of your site would have perfect structured data markup telling the search engines and LLMs what they’re about. Your FAQ page would have FAQ schema, your product pages product schema, but you can also markup bits of content in a more granular way.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get it right, and badly executed schema can negatively impact your website’s appearance in LLMs. (Source 1, Source 2)
If you’re sure you can implement the schema correctly, do it.
But if you’re not, it’s better to just leave it than to implement something that might do your site more harm than good.
5. Craft clear, fact-checkable snippets
While there is no hard data on this, LLMs seem to favor clear facts presented in a concise way. Even better if you can include an authoritative source. An example could be:
“According to Flow Agency’s June 2024 study on the likelihood of an AI Overview appearing for a specific keyword, top-of-the-funnel keyword searches are most likely to generate an AI Overview.”
Do make sure the facts you share are correct, or it might backfire on your reputation, and that you link to the fact’s original source.
6. Opt for conversational content
In traditional Google Search, someone might enter the search query “best team management software,” but if that same person opens ChatGPT, they’re more likely to ask – either by speaking or by typing – something like: “What team management software should I use for my remote company with 50 employees?”
Write your content as if you were speaking to someone, keeping in mind not just what your target audience might ask an LLM, but also how it would phrase that question. Optimize for natural language queries and use related terms alongside synonyms to showcase topical relevance.
A Q&A section at the bottom of blog posts is a good way to answer questions your target customers might be asking LLMs.
7. Publish original content
If LLMs more easily process content written in natural language and output answers in conversational language, then, perhaps, the best way to create content for LLMs is… to create content with an LLM?
Not exactly. AI-driven content creation tools can only summarize and regurgitate information that’s already out there. If everyone starts to feed them AI-generated content, LLMs won’t be able to output updated information, nor will they be able to offer different perspectives. That would bring down the user experience, and the goal of LLM-driven search engines and tools is to provide the best possible user experience so users keep coming back.
So how do you stand out and get in? By publishing authoritative, opinionated, and original content. Interview experts, quote the CEO, and perform original research.
The latter is particularly interesting as it
- provides LLMs with new and easy-to-understand data.
- tends to gather a lot of citations (and backlinks).
- establishes you as a thought leader in your field.
LLMs also seem to favor unique and original data when providing answers, especially when the information is presented in a clear and reputable way. Use bullet points and tables, mention your methodology, and add a date to your research results.
8. Follow modern SEO best practices
Your visibility first and foremost depends on whether crawlers can index your content. That is true just as much for LLM crawlers as it has long been for traditional search crawlers. The good news is that technical SEO best practices work just as well for LLM indexability as they do for traditional Search indexability.
- Ensure your Robots.txt or firewall settings (for example, through Cloudflare) aren’t blocking any search engine or AI crawlers.
- Check that nothing that needs to be indexed is hidden behind a paywall or a login.
- Avoid duplicate content.
- Fix 404s and broken redirects.
- Clean up redirect chains.
- Utilize intelligent internal linking to let search engines and LLMs know what your site is about and where your authority lies.
What about schema?
While implementing schema is still important for technical SEO, its effectiveness for appearing in AI-driven results hasn’t been proven yet. As both Senior Consultant of Organic Growth at img Julio C. Guevara and expert SEO Mark Williams-Cook explain, LLMs “tokenize” content when they ingest it, essentially breaking up the structured data you added.
In an ideal world, each of the pages of your site would have perfect structured data markup telling Google what they’re about. Your FAQ page would have FAQ schema, your product pages product schema, and so on.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get it right, and badly executed schema can negatively impact your website’s appearance in Search. If you’re sure you can implement schema correctly, do it.
But if you’re not, it’s better to just leave it than to implement something that might do your site more harm than good.
On top of taking care of the technical aspect, you want to combine the following SEO tactics with your LLM SEO strategy to increase your chances of getting found by your target customers:
- Build qualitative links to your site to increase domain authority.
- Creating topic clusters in which one main topic/post is supported by subtopics/posts to establish topical relevance.
Lastly, it’s good to remember that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot all depend on search engines for grounding their information.
- ChatGPT and Copilot use Bing.
- Gemini and Perplexity use Google.
Ranking well in those search engines increases your chances of being mentioned in the LLM tools they inform.
Tracking LLM Performance
At the time of writing, there are no specific analytics tools for ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Claude, etc. But you can distill how much traffic some LLMs are sending you by setting up reports in GA4 in Looker Studio. You’ll have to use a filter for Page Referrer and add this regex:
| ^https:\/\/(www\.meta\.ai|www\.perplexity\.ai|chat\.openai\.com|claude\.ai|chat\.mistral\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|bard\.google\.com|chatgpt\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|edgeservices\.bing\.com)(\/.*)?$ |
Because the above is a bit tedious to set up and unpleasant to read, we created our own LLM dashboard that’s free for you to use. On top of tracking referral traffic from LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity, it also shows which pages this traffic lands on, and conversions from LLMs.
Well-known SEO tools such as Ahrefs now mention how many AI citations a web page has, but here at Flow, we found that the lesser-known tools ZipTie and Peec currently offer better data.
Tracking mentions and citations alongside LLM-driven traffic and – of course – conversions is now more important than tracking click-throughs.
And if you’re wondering how you can do better, ask LLMs like ChatGPT questions about your brand and your offer. If its answer doesn’t include you, analyze what is in there so you can rephrase and/or expand on your content for a higher chance of being included later.
Quick Wins and Long-Term Growth
If you’ve been in the game long enough, you might remember the times in which keyword stuffing, adding hidden text to a page, and spamming comment sections were successful “black hat” SEO techniques.
As Google updated its algorithm, a lot of these techniques have become useless at best, harmful at worst.
Humans often want to find quick wins over putting in the work that will lead to long-term results, and it’s no different with LLM SEO. LLMs currently have a few weaknesses that marketers can exploit by:
- mentions in “best x” listicles, including pay to play ones
- getting brands mentioned in, or publishing their own LinkedIn articles.
- contributing a ton to brand-related Reddit channels.
At Flow, we look at the ROI a tactic can deliver and how risky it is. Our LLM SEO strategies often combine quick-win tactics that are working today with a long-term approach focused on brand and authority building.
Effective LLM SEO: a Holistic Approach
SEO can no longer be the website and Google-focused discipline it has been for so long. The rise of AI-assisted search forces marketers to adopt a more holistic approach, combining technical optimization with content strategy and digital PR to build an omnipresent brand profile.
At Flow, we integrate SEO and LLM SEO best practices into your overall marketing strategy to deliver sustainable results.
