LLMO: 4 Ways to Optimize for LLMs

Rightfully, the topic of the hour, the million dollar question "how to appear and get cited in LLMs like ChatGPT".

There's a lot of speculation for how the future of search will look like and whether Google will remain the go-to platform for search. There's a lot of competition (ex: Tik Tok & Amazon), new platforms (ex: ChatGPT & Perplexity) and the Monopoly lawsuit too.

Is Google Losing Market Share?

Yes? According to a study cited by Wall Street Journal. The article started by saying "Google’s grip on the nearly $300 billion search advertising business is loosening."

No? As Marketers and SEOs we need to be critical of everything we here, and someone already did that work for us, yes Rand Fishkin! And the data shows that "Google is basically as strong as it’s ever been".

Here are some stats about Google and AI

• Google holds ~approx. 88% of search engine market share in US and ~approx. 90% globally (2024 data).
• Are people who search Google are switching to AI search engines? 99% of AI users also use Google.
• On average people use Google 200X a month compared to 13.5X for Chatgpt and 16.5X for perplexity!
• Ironically, the top referring website to Google in Nov 2024 (according to SimilarWeb) was OpenAI. So it's really hard to escape Google!

• Just to get the full picture, here's the visits Google got in Nov 2024 according to SimilarWeb, compared to other established platforms. As you can see Google is massive, and it's hard to take the down, at least for now!

Why Do We Need to Optimize for LLMs?

If everything is fine, and Google is king, why do we need to optimize for LLMs?

• Shifting user behavior: for starters, we are trying to stay ahead of the trend and shifting user behavior. It's better to do things right from the first time, vs wait till things change and try to adjust and play catch up.
• Relevance to specific businesses: depending on your business and target customer, LLMs can be more important for your business than the average business. I don't have a lot of content on my website yet, and I still got a few referrals here and there from ChatGPT and Perplexity:

How to Optimize for LLMs?

If you want to optimize for LLMs, and future proof your SEO strategy or shall I say LLM-O strategy here are few things you can do today:

1# Brand mentions is the new keywords

Let's start with your brand. One of the most important things is to make sure you your website has all the information users need about your brand. I can your face looking at me and saying "duh"... well don't "duh" me 😸I've seen People Also Asked in Search about brands answered by third party websites.

Here are the PAAs (People Also Ask questions) that appear when you search for 'SEMRush.' As you can see, questions about the SEMRush brand are answered on third party websites like LinkedIn. Do you really want a random person on LinkedIn, to control the story of your brand? Also, if someone uses LLMs to find information about SEMRush, those sources might be cited and linked instead of the SEMRush website. Review your brand's PAAs and ensure your website provides clear answers to all questions about your brand.

The second thing that's super important to get cited in LLMs, is the mentions of your brand in training data! Here's what we know about the primary sources of the training data for Chatgpt [source]:

1. Common Crawl: This dataset, representing a large portion of the known internet, had the highest weight at 60% in training. It contains nearly a billion words and was carefully filtered and deduplicated to ensure quality.
2. WebText2: This dataset, consisting of Reddit posts from 2005 to 2020, had a weight of 22%.
3. Books1 and Books2: These datasets from online book companies each had a weight of 8%.
4. Wikipedia: Articles from the English Wikipedia had a weight of 3%.

That means Digital PR just got more important than ever. Reddit is now more important not only because of it's increased visibility in SERPs but also because it weighs 22% in the training data (more than one fifth!). And does your brand have a Wikipedia page? definitely worth investing into creating one.

2# Technical is very important

LLMs are not mature enough and sophisticated as Google, after all google has been doing search for so long now! This means that LLMs and AI crawlers require more technical accommodations than Google would.

• JavaScript: A recent study revealed that none of the major AI crawlers currently render JavaScript. This includes OpenAI's crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot), Anthropic's ClaudeBot, Meta's Meta-ExternalAgent, ByteDance's Bytespider, and Perplexity's PerplexityBot. This means that we need to make sure our content does not require JS rendering and can be accessed in raw html.
• JSON data (structured data): the same study showed that content included in the initial HTML response, like JSON data may still be indexed since AI models can interpret non-HTML content. AI models, unlike regular web crawlers, are smart enough to read and understand this non-HTML content.
• 404s and redirects: AI crawlers are inefficient in URL selection and many of their fetches are wasted on 404 pages. Efficient URL management is more critical than ever. The high 404 error rates caused by AI crawlers underscore the need to maintain proper redirects, keep sitemaps updated, and ensure consistent URL patterns throughout your site.
• Just because Google can do it, does not mean all other AI crawler can. Approaching your SEO technical audit with this mindset means looking deeper, fixing all challenges that may cause potential crawling issues.

3# Content types

If you've been following me for a while you know I've been pushing SEOs to leverage video content since it's popular among users and LLMs do cite answers from inside videos.

But, did you know that different types of content have different importance to different LLMs 😺

• Claude focuses heavily on images (35.17% of total fetches), which means optimizing your images' elements like the file name, image title, image alt tag are also going to be important. Not to mention that having good relevant images is also now important.
• On the other hand, Chatgpt prioritizes fetching text (57.7%). So keep in mind that different LLMs prioritize different types of content.

4# Time for Bing webmaster

Now more than ever, it's important to start monitoring your bing webmasters, since URLs ranking on Bing are more likely to get cited in Chatgpt.

The same study we cited above has also shown that "Pages with higher organic traffic receive more frequent crawler visits" so everything we are doing is still important. Do not get distracted by new tactics and trends on the expense of doing good SEO for your website!

Conclusion,

While Google dominates for now, optimizing for LLMs is about staying ahead of the curve. We're kinda learning how to do LLMO on the job! Fun but also challenging. The best advice I have is "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish".