Skip to content
Aquinel
Free Consultation Call, No Obligation

LLM SEO: What It Means and What You Can Actually Influence

LLM SEO means getting AI tools to name your business. Learn what you can change, what you can't, and how it differs from SEO.

LLM SEO is the work of getting large language models like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to name your business. A model answers from two places: what it learned in training, and what it fetches live. You can barely change the first. You can influence the second. So the work is retrieval work, plus getting written about on sites models read.

Lourdes Paul Agilan, founder of Aquinel

Founder, Aquinel · Published · 9 min read

Note on verification: We did not read Reddit or X for this post. We read vendor documents, two studies from the last four months, and one academic paper. Both recent studies are small or come from the author's own company. We say so where we use them.

What does LLM SEO mean?

LLM SEO is the work of getting a large language model (LLM) to name your business. An LLM is the engine inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Buyers ask these tools for advice. You want your name in the answer.

The words have a second meaning. Data Science Dojo's post "LLM-powered SEO" (first published 13 August 2024) means using AI to do SEO tasks. This post does not cover that.

WebFX's guide of 11 June 2025 defines LLM SEO as optimizing a brand's online presence to appear in LLM responses. Its advice is mostly normal SEO plus brand mentions. It skips one split: where the model gets its facts.

Where does an LLM get its answers?

An LLM answers from two places. The first is memory. The model read a very large body of text before launch. The second is the live web. The tool searches, reads pages and writes an answer from them.

Memory has a date on it. OpenAI's model page for GPT-5.5 lists a knowledge cutoff of 1 December 2025. The same page lists a snapshot dated 23 April 2026. Anything you publish later is not in that model's memory.

Search fills the gap. Anthropic's documentation says Claude searches for information "current, changing, or outside its training data." Claude answers stable knowledge directly. OpenAI's help page says ChatGPT "may search the web automatically." Each answer can mix both sources.

How often ChatGPT searches is not settled. Three studies give three different rates. Our guide to how ChatGPT searches now compares them.

How much can you change what a model remembers?

Very little. Training happens before launch. You cannot send a model a correction.

Size matters too. Kandpal and four co-authors posted a paper to arXiv in November 2022 (revised July 2023). They counted the training documents on the topic of each quiz question. Model accuracy tracked that count. Rare facts were the weakest. Closing the gap by size alone would need models "many orders of magnitude" bigger, they estimated. Retrieval reduced the reliance on training documents.

That paper tested older models and no brands. By the paper's logic, a small company's name is a rare fact. That is our inference, not a finding.

Each company runs separate bots. The bot names tell you what the visit is for.

CompanyBot tied to trainingBots tied to search or user requests
OpenAIGPTBotOAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User
AnthropicClaudeBotClaude-SearchBot, Claude-User
PerplexityNone. PerplexityBot "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models."PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User
GoogleGoogle-Extended limits training and grounding in some systemsGooglebot, with normal search rules

Sources: OpenAI crawler documentation; Anthropic Privacy Center (updated 7 April 2026); Perplexity bot documentation; Google Search Central (updated 10 December 2025).

OpenAI says the two settings are independent. You can allow OAI-SearchBot and block GPTBot. Blocking GPTBot keeps your content out of training. It does not remove you from ChatGPT search. Our AI crawler checklist shows how to check yours.

We found no published test of allowing a training crawler. We found none of blocking one. Neither move has proof behind it. Treat the choice as policy, not a growth lever.

What can you change? The live part

The live part is open to you. A search tool reads pages. You control your pages.

Google's Search Central page (updated 10 December 2025) says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode." A page needs indexing. It also needs snippet eligibility. Google warns that serving is not guaranteed.

OpenAI says much the same. A site must let OAI-SearchBot crawl it. OpenAI's help page adds that placement is not guaranteed. So there is no "ranking" in ChatGPT.

Google also describes "query fan-out." It runs several related searches for one question. Your page can match any of them. So cover the sub-questions, not only the headline question.

This is the part most guides already teach. We covered the steps in how to optimize your website for AI search. We covered the citation side in how to get cited by ChatGPT. We won't repeat them here.

Do memory or search decide who gets named?

Two recent studies point in different directions. Read both.

Study one: search changes the answer. Jeff Oxford of Visibility Labs tested 1,000 product prompts. He ran each prompt 10 times with ChatGPT search on. He ran it 10 more times with search off. That made 20,000 responses. Search Engine Land reported it on 17 June 2026. About 80.2% of recommended products changed when search was on. Only 19.8% appeared in both modes. Products named in every no-search response showed up with search on only 15.8% of the time. The study is observational. It comes from the author's own company.

Study two: memory shapes the shortlist. Suganthan Mohanadasan published his study on 10 August 2026 (updated 17 August). He read the search queries ChatGPT wrote for itself. All data came from one ChatGPT Plus account in Dubai. He captured it on 24 and 25 July 2026. In 21 of 27 conversations, the first query held a brand the user never typed. Brands named in ChatGPT's own query reached the final answer 68.9% of the time (119 brands). Brands fetched but never named reached it 2.1% of the time (515 brands). He calls every percentage "directional." He also sells SEO tools, and he says so.

Visibility Labs (June 2026)Mohanadasan (August 2026)
Sample1,000 prompts, 20,000 responses27 first-query tests, 57 conversations
Main findingSearch flips most product picksBrands in ChatGPT's own query win far more often
WeaknessObservational, no collection dates, author's own companyOne account, software-heavy, author calls it directional

Do they conflict? Partly. The first says search overturns memory. The second says memory picks the names ChatGPT looks up. Both can be true. Memory may pick the first names. Search may then add and drop others.

Neither study is settled. We found no independent replication of either. We would not trust a clean split between the two yet.

What can you do about memory?

You cannot edit it. You can change what the web says about you. The web feeds both parts. Future training runs read it. Live search reads it today.

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and published results on 26 May 2025. Branded web mentions showed a 0.664 correlation with mentions in Google's AI Overviews. Backlinks showed 0.218. Ahrefs says correlation does not prove cause. It also says most factors showed weak or moderate links. The study covers Google AI Overviews only. It does not cover ChatGPT.

Mohanadasan reaches a similar view from his own data. Your brand may never show up in ChatGPT's queries. Page tweaks will not fix that, he says. He recommends getting reviewed, compared and covered in roundups. That is his opinion, based on a small sample.

So the work has two jobs:

  1. Retrieval work. Keep pages crawlable, plain and matched to buyer questions.
  2. Mention work. Get described accurately on review sites, directories, news and partner pages.

Our guide to building topical authority for AI covers the second job.

LLM SEO vs SEO: what is different?

Most of it overlaps. Google says so. Page work is shared. Measurement is not.

SEOLLM SEO
The goalA click from a results pageA name inside a written answer
PositionA rank you can holdNone. Answers change per run.
What you controlYour pages and linksYour pages, plus what others say about you
How you checkRank trackersMany runs of the same question, reported as a ratio
Memory matters?NoYes, in part, and you can barely change it

For the full comparison, read SEO vs GEO vs AEO.

LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO, AEO: which name should you use?

They name mostly the same work. Pick one.

Fractl published a survey on 12 November 2025. It asked 342 newsletter readers from Third Door Media which term they use. GEO got 42%. AISEO got 16%. SEO and AEO got 14% each. AIO got 11%. LLMO got 8%. Fractl is an agency, and the sample is one newsletter's readers. "LLM SEO" was not on the list.

Aquinel is our company. Our services page says GEO, AEO and SEO. We don't treat these names as different jobs. Our post what is generative engine optimization covers where each one came from.

People still type "LLM SEO" into Google. So this page uses it.

What should you do this week?

  1. Pick one buyer question. Ask it in ChatGPT five times. Write down the brands you see each time. Those names are your rivals.
  2. Open your robots.txt file. Check that OAI-SearchBot is allowed.
  3. Find three sites that describe your category. Check whether they list you.
  4. Fix what they say about you. Ask for corrections or new listings.
  5. Run the same check next month.

Do not expect a rank. A good result is a higher share of runs that name you. Aquinel's services page shows how we run these checks.

Questions

What is LLM SEO?

LLM SEO is the work of getting large language models to name your business in their answers. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. Some articles use the same words for using AI to do SEO tasks. That is a different topic.

How do you optimize content for LLMs?

Let the search crawlers in, keep key facts as plain text, and answer one buyer question per page near the top. Then get other sites to describe you. Google's Search Central page, updated 10 December 2025, says no special optimizations are needed.

Is LLM SEO the same as GEO or AEO?

In practice, yes. LLM SEO, LLMO, GEO, AEO and AI SEO are different names for mostly the same work. Fractl's November 2025 survey of 342 search practitioners found GEO was the most common name at 42%. LLMO came in at 8%.

Can I put my business into an LLM's training data?

Not on demand. Training happens before a model launches. OpenAI's GPT-5.5 page lists a knowledge cutoff of 1 December 2025. You can allow training crawlers or write content other sites quote. We found no published test showing either one raises mentions.

Is LLM SEO different from SEO?

Mostly no. Good pages, crawl access and trusted mentions still matter. What differs is measurement. AI answers change from run to run, so you test the same question many times and report a ratio. There is no fixed ranking in ChatGPT.

Sources

If you would like us to walk you through how this would work for your firm, the call is free.

Lourdes Paul Agilan, founder of Aquinel

About the author

Lourdes Paul Agilan

Founder of Aquinel. Works with MSPs and IT services firms from Chennai, India, on getting recommended by ChatGPT and found on Google.

LinkedIn

Keep reading

See how this would work for your firm.

Free Consultation Call, No Obligation