LLM SEO is an informal umbrella term for making a business or its content more likely to be understood, retrieved and named by large language models, used loosely to cover the same ground as GEO, AEO and AI visibility, without committing to any one of them.
- It is a colloquialism, not a defined discipline. No paper coined it and no standard governs it, which is exactly why definitions vary by vendor.
- It covers roughly the same work as GEO and AEO. Where it differs is emphasis: LLM SEO points at the model, GEO at the generated answer, AEO at the extracted one.
- “Optimising the model” is not a thing you can buy. You cannot edit training data or steer weights. What you can do is change what the model finds and what other sources say.
- Use it as a search term, not as a spec. If someone sells you LLM SEO, the useful question is which of the six layers they actually work on.
A name that arrived from the audience, not the field
GEO has a paper behind it. AEO has a decade of featured-snippet practice. LLM SEO has neither, it emerged from people searching for the thing they had just watched happen: an assistant answered a question and named somebody, and they wanted to know what that discipline was called.
So the term is honest about its own origin. It says “the SEO-shaped work, but for the language models,” and leaves the specifics to whoever is answering. That vagueness is useful for a search box and unhelpful in a proposal.
It also carries a quiet misconception worth naming: that there is something to optimise inside the model. There is not. You cannot reach the training data, you cannot adjust weights, and prompt tricks aimed at models are the modern equivalent of white text on a white background, ineffective at best.
What the work is once you strip the label off
Be present in what the model can reach. Live browsing pulls from the open web; the underlying model absorbed a snapshot of it. Both reward the same thing, being described consistently in many places rather than brilliantly in one.
Be describable in a sentence. Models compress. If your business cannot be summarised accurately in one line, the line that gets used will be someone else’s summary of you, or a competitor’s.
Be corroborated. A single self-published claim carries little weight against several independent sources agreeing. This is why reviews, directories and local press do more for LLM visibility than another homepage rewrite.
Be readable by the crawlers. Each major assistant has its own user agent, and blocking them, deliberately or via a default in your CDN, removes you from that surface entirely.
Be measurable. Sample the answers, on a schedule, and keep the screenshots. Everything above is a hypothesis until you do.
Where this term ends and the next one begins
How you would know LLM SEO is working
The measurement problem is the reason to be careful with this term. There is no ranking to check, no impressions report, and no console. Anyone offering you a dashboard of “LLM rankings” is inventing a coordinate system that does not exist.
What is real is sampling. Ask the questions your buyers ask, on the platforms they use, more than once, and count how often you are named. X out of 12 is the unit we publish: twelve real buying questions, three platforms, three runs each in clean sessions, counted at two of three. Dated, screenshotted, re-run monthly.
The full protocol is public, including what it refuses to claim, so you can run it yourself or hold someone else’s number against it. We publish our own results on the tracking page, in both directions.
This page defines a term. It does not sell anything. How the work is actually run and reported is on the AI Visibility service page.
Want the short version? The Visibility Glossary keeps one-paragraph definitions; this page keeps the practice.
Fair questions about LLM SEO
Is LLM SEO different from GEO, or the same thing with a different name?
Substantially the same work, different emphasis and different provenance. GEO was coined in a 2023 research paper and points at the generated answer; LLM SEO is a colloquial term that points at the model. In practice, agencies use them interchangeably. The distinction that matters is not the label but whether the provider works on identity and eligibility too, or only on page copy.
Can you get my business into a model's training data?
No, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. Training corpora are assembled by the model providers on their own schedule from broad web crawls; there is no submission process and no supplier who has one. What you can influence is how widely and consistently you are described across the web, which is what those crawls see.
Do llms.txt files help?
It is a proposed convention rather than a supported standard, and no major assistant has committed to reading it as a ranking or retrieval input. Publishing one is cheap and harmless, we publish one, but treating it as a lever is a mistake, and any provider leading with it is telling you what they do not have.
Why do different assistants give completely different answers about my business?
Because they are drawing on different sources with different freshness and different weightings, and because generated answers vary between runs by design. Consistent answers across platforms is itself a signal that your entity is solid; wildly divergent ones usually mean the underlying facts about you disagree somewhere.
Should I hire an 'LLM SEO' specialist?
Hire on the answers, not the label. Ask what they measure and how, what they will not promise, and which of the six layers, eligibility, crawler access, extractability, entity stability, citation surfaces, measurement, they actually touch. A specialist who only rewrites pages is doing a fifth of the job.
Find out what the assistants say about you now
The free Visibility Check runs 12 real buying questions for your trade and market across three assistants, your X/12, the screenshots, and the first fix worth making. No sales call.
Get my free Visibility Check