Sentinel InsightsWhat is LLM SEO?How brands get named in AI answers.

LLM SEO is the work of getting your brand named, described accurately and cited when people ask large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity about your market. Where classic SEO aims for a ranking on a results page, LLM SEO aims for a mention inside the answer itself, ideally with a link to a source that says good things about you.

The name is new, but most of the work isn’t. Language models build answers from what the web already says about you: your own site, the publications that cover your field, review platforms, forums and reference pages. So LLM SEO is part technical housekeeping and part reputation building, and the second part usually matters more.

What is LLM SEO, in plain terms?

Think of an AI assistant as a very fast researcher with no loyalty to anyone. When a buyer asks it to recommend a payroll provider or explain the difference between two products, it pulls from sources it can find and trusts, then writes a summary. LLM SEO is everything you do to make sure that summary includes you, gets your facts right and points to sources you’d be happy for a buyer to read.

You’ll see the same idea under other labels. Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the most common. AEO, a label built around answer engines, and AI search visibility describe overlapping work. We cover the naming question in our guide to what generative engine optimization is and where PR fits. For practical purposes, treat them as one discipline.

How LLM SEO differs from traditional SEO

Classic search engine optimization and LLM SEO share foundations. A crawlable site, clear page structure and a strong reputation help both. The differences show up in what you’re competing for and how you measure it.

The last row is the one most teams miss. If an assistant describes your product using a three-year-old review, no amount of on-page tuning fixes that. Someone has to earn newer, better coverage.

There’s a practical overlap too. Several assistants run a live web search before they answer, then summarise the pages they find. If your pages rank well for a question, they’re more likely to be read and cited. Good classic SEO gives LLM SEO a head start, so don’t abandon one for the other.

Why third-party coverage carries most of the weight

Muck Rack’s Generative Pulse research, published in May 2026, analysed more than 25 million links cited by AI assistants across 17 industries. It found that earned media accounted for 84% of citations across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, while paid and advertorial content made up 0.3%.

That finding shapes the whole discipline. An AI assistant leans on sources it sees as independent: news articles, trade press, analyst notes, expert roundups, reviews and community discussion. Your own website still matters, because it’s often where a model checks basic facts like pricing, locations and product names. But your claims about yourself carry less weight than a journalist’s description of you.

An AI assistant repeats what credible sources say about you. LLM SEO starts with giving those sources something accurate to say.

The core LLM SEO tactics

Most of what works falls into four groups. You don’t need all of them on day one, but you need to know which gap is costing you most.

1. Make your facts easy to find and hard to misread

• One clear description of what you do, repeated consistently on your homepage, about page, social profiles and directory listings.
• Plain answers to buyer questions on your own pages: what it costs, who it’s for, how it compares and what it doesn’t do.
• Structured data for your organisation, products and FAQs, so machines can read key facts without guessing.
• Crawl access for the AI crawlers you’re comfortable with, set in robots.txt and checked against your firewall rules.

2. Earn coverage in sources assistants trust

This is the heavy lifting. Expert commentary in trade publications, data stories that journalists pick up, podcast appearances with transcripts, and inclusion in independent comparisons all give models fresh, credible material. It’s the same work a Digital PR campaign does, judged by a new measure.

3. Clean up outdated or wrong information

Old pricing on a review site, a discontinued product in a Wikipedia-style listing or a negative thread from years ago can all surface in AI answers. Find them, correct what you control, ask publishers to update what you don’t, and publish newer material that gives models a better source.

4. Keep a steady presence over time

A single article rarely changes how an assistant describes you. A pattern of mentions across credible sources over months is what shifts the answer. That’s why LLM SEO behaves more like an ongoing programme than a one-off project.

What about llms.txt?

You may have heard that adding an llms.txt file to your site is the quick fix for LLM SEO. The format was proposed by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI in September 2024 as a way to give language models a clean summary of a site’s content. According to a review by Analyze, neither OpenAI nor Google has stated support for the file.

Adding one costs little, and it won’t hurt. Just don’t expect it to move results on its own. The sources that shape AI answers are mostly off your site, so the file is a tidy extra rather than a strategy.

How to measure LLM SEO

Rankings don’t translate neatly to AI answers, so you need a different scorecard. A simple version looks like this:

• Question set. List the 30 to 50 questions your buyers actually ask before they buy, in their words.
• Answer checks. Run those questions through the main assistants each month and record whether you’re named, how you’re described and who else appears.
• Source map. Note which publications and pages each assistant cites. These are your PR targets.
• Accuracy log. Track wrong or outdated statements about your brand and whether they disappear after you act.
• Business signals. Watch branded search, direct traffic and sales conversations where prospects mention an AI assistant.

Answers vary from one run to the next, so look at trends across many questions rather than reacting to a single response. Keep the same question set from month to month so the comparison stays fair, and add new questions only when your buyers start asking them.

Where to start

If you’re new to LLM SEO, start with an honest baseline. Find out what the main assistants say about you today, which sources they lean on and where competitors appear instead of you. That tells you whether your first job is fixing your own site, correcting old information or earning new coverage.

Sentinel’s AI search visibility service starts with exactly that baseline, then builds the PR and content plan around the sources assistants trust. You can see how we plan paid, placed and earned media together, and our published rates are on the pricing page. We won’t promise AI mentions, because no one can, but we’ll show you every answer and every source each month.