LLM SEO
LLM SEO: being the source a model quotes, not just a page it ranked.
People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the questions they used to type into a search box, and the answer names a handful of sources. LLM SEO, also sold as AI search optimisation, is the work that makes you one of them. Most of it is technical SEO you should already have. A small part is genuinely new, and this page is about telling the two apart rather than charging a premium for the acronym.
Straight answer
Most LLM SEO is technical SEO with a newer name. A little of it is genuinely new.
We would rather tell you that than sell a fourth discipline. The work that moves whether a model cites you is mostly work that was already worth doing, plus a small, cheap set of things that are actually new.
Sold as new, actually just SEO
- A site a crawler can read without fighting it
- Structured data that validates
- Named authors with real, legible expertise
- Clear headings and a logical page structure
- Accurate, current facts on the page
- Fast, stable pages
Genuinely different for LLMs
- Answers stated in self-contained passages a model can lift whole
- Entity consistency across the sources models already trust
- Being described correctly, not merely being present
- Measurement by prompt sampling rather than rank tracking
- Third-party pages about you outweighing your own
- No submission, no console, no appeal process
The claim we will not make
Nobody can guarantee a citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity or an AI Overview. Outputs are non-deterministic, they change between model versions, and the same prompt can return different sources on consecutive runs. There is no submission process and no support channel. What can be raised is the probability that you are found, extracted and described correctly. Anyone promising more than that is describing something they do not control.
LLM SEO, AI SEO, GEO and AEO
Four names, one body of work. Which page you need barely matters.
LLM SEO is the narrowest of the terms: being cited inside the answer a large language model generates, in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot. It is also written as AI search optimisation, or AI search optimization in US spelling.
AI SEO is the broader service, covering AI Overviews inside Google's results as much as the standalone assistants. If you want the wider version of this work, that is the AI SEO page.
GEO, generative engine optimisation, and AEO, answer engine optimisation, are two labels for the same objective aimed at generative systems. They are used interchangeably by nearly everyone selling them, and are covered on the GEO and AEO page.
The reason the distinction barely matters is that all four rest on the same foundation. A site that cannot be crawled cleanly, whose facts are stale, whose authors are anonymous and whose structured data is broken will fail at all of them at once. That is why we would rather fix the foundation than sell you a separate retainer per acronym.
Scope
What LLM SEO covers here.
Weighted towards the parts that are genuinely different for a model, since the rest is technical SEO and is priced as such.
Extractable answers
Pages restructured so the answer sits in a self-contained passage a model can lift without the surrounding paragraph. Most commercial copy buries the answer under a build-up nothing can quote.
Entity clarity
One unambiguous description of who you are, what you do and where, consistent across your site, your profiles and the third-party sources that describe you, so a model does not confuse you with someone else.
The sources models lean on
Assistants disproportionately cite a small set of reference sites, directories and communities. Being described accurately there frequently matters more than anything on your own domain.
Structured data that connects
A graph where organisation, people, services and articles reference each other, rather than isolated blocks a parser cannot relate. The same work is technical SEO.
Prompt sampling
A defined set of real customer questions run repeatedly across the major assistants, recording presence, description and co-citation. Coarse, and reported as coarse.
Correcting the record
Being described wrongly is more common than being absent and does more damage. Finding where the wrong description originates, often on a third-party page, and fixing it at source.
Evidence
We shipped the machine-readable parts, and you can fetch them now.
A great deal of LLM SEO is sold by people who have never implemented any of it. Everything below is live on this domain and verifiable in your browser in about ten seconds.
llms.txt
A machine-readable index of every page on this site with a description of each, generated from the same catalogue that builds the sitemaps so it cannot drift out of date. Fetch it.
llms-full.txt
The long-form version, carrying substantive content per page rather than a line each, for systems that want the body rather than the map. Fetch it.
A validated schema graph
Every page carries JSON-LD that parses and validates, checked on each build rather than assumed. Entities are connected rather than emitted as isolated blocks.
Said plainly, because it matters here
There is no public evidence that any major AI provider reads llms.txt, and Google has said outright that it does not. We publish it because it costs almost nothing and might one day be useful, not because it is the mechanism by which anyone gets cited. If an agency is selling llms.txt as the core of an LLM SEO package, that tells you how closely they have followed this.
Cost
What it costs.
The same £95 blended hourly rate as everything else. There is no premium for the letters LLM.
Visibility baseline
From £650
A defined prompt set run across the major assistants, recording where you appear, how you are described and who is cited alongside you, with the inaccuracies traced to source.
Extraction and entity work
Scoped
Pages restructured so the answers are liftable, the entity graph connected, and the descriptions made consistent across the sources that carry weight.
Retained, 8 hours a month
£760/month
Sampling repeated on a cycle so you have a trend rather than a snapshot, with the underlying technical and content work running alongside it.
If your site has unresolved indexation or structured data problems, that work comes first and we will say so, because it serves both classic search and the models.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
What is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO is the work that decides whether a large language model, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot, uses your site as a source when it answers a question. You will also see it called AI search optimisation, and in American English AI search optimization. Same work, different label.
The honest definition is narrow. It is not a replacement for search engine optimisation. It is the subset of technical and content work that makes a claim on your page easy for a model to extract and attribute to you, plus a genuinely different measurement problem, because there is no ranking to check when the answer is generated fresh each time.
How is LLM SEO different from AI SEO and GEO?
They overlap almost completely, and the proliferation of acronyms is a marketing habit rather than a real taxonomy. The practical split we use on this site: AI SEO is the broad service covering both AI Overviews inside Google and the standalone assistants; generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the same idea under the label the industry settled on, used interchangeably with answer engine optimisation; and LLM SEO is the narrowest framing, being cited specifically inside a language model's generated answer.
If you are trying to decide which page you need, it does not matter much. The underlying work is one body of work. Pick the term your team already uses and we will not bill you differently for the letters.
Can you guarantee my site gets cited by ChatGPT?
No, and nobody honest will. Model outputs are non-deterministic, they change between versions, and the same prompt can return different sources on two consecutive runs. There is no submission form, no ranking to climb, and no support channel to appeal to.
What can be raised is the probability that you are found, extracted correctly and described accurately. An agency offering a guarantee is describing something it does not control.
How do you measure whether LLM SEO worked?
By sampling rather than tracking. A defined set of prompts a real customer would ask, run repeatedly across the major assistants, recording whether you appear, how you are described and what is cited alongside you. Repeated over time it produces a trend, which is the honest ceiling of what this measurement can be.
It is coarser than rank tracking and should be presented that way. What it catches reliably is being described wrongly, which is more common than being absent and considerably more damaging. There is a full method for running this yourself published on the site.
Should we do LLM SEO instead of normal SEO?
No. For almost every business the traffic and the revenue are still overwhelmingly in classic search, and a site a crawler cannot read cleanly will not be cited by a model either, because the same infrastructure underlies both.
Treat it as a second surface that the same foundational work already serves, with a modest amount of extra effort on extraction, entity clarity and measurement. If someone proposes replacing your SEO budget with an LLM SEO retainer, that is a reason to be suspicious of them.
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