14 May 2025 |

LLMO is here to stay. Here’s what you can do about it.

By Tracey Wallace

Some weeks, you’re focused on strategy, reporting out on performance, and see the bigger picture coming together. Others, you’re deep in the details, wondering how something got so off track –– and how you could have paid more attention to it. 

Content marketing is a deep mix of creative, strategic, high-level thinking, and detailed, mundane but extremely important execution. And both are critical muscles to exercise. 

Even with AI, which in theory can automate much of the mundane, the details still matter so much that they sometimes need extra manual review. Things like: Redirects, slugs, meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text, image names, publish dates, authors and their photos and their bios, interlinks, content library maintenance, content length and style guides and headlines and H2s, tables of content, citations…you can get lost in it all. 

And the details matter more now than ever, because SEO is splintering. Soon (i.e. now) we’ll need to optimize for far more than just Google. LLMO is on the rise. There are even headlines like “SEO is dead. Long live LLMO.” 

In a decade, there will be another article titled, “SEO never died.” (JK, Ahrefs already published one) And it will detail how beginning in 2025, SEO didn’t die, it simply expanded far beyond Google to include LLMO––i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Llama, and more.  

This means that more content folks and their SEO counterparts will need to learn how these LLMs collect data and present answers. 

  • Which websites do they weight the heaviest? 
  • How does that change based on the content category? 
  • What areas of opportunity exist to influence the model?

It’s the wild west in LLMO right now, and there are tools being built across existing SEO tools and new ones alike. 

If you haven’t already, go pull up the main AI tools and ask questions about your brand and about your category. How are you showing up? 

One thing you can do right now is to understand how SEO keywords shift into AI prompts. Use AI to do this. Simply drop in several of your URLs, ask it to identify the primary keyword, translate that into an AI prompt, and define why an AI tool would recommend this content. Ask it to turn this into a table. Then, use that prompt to see what AI returns. 

If your brand isn’t there, and you want to be, you’ve got work to do. Both at the strategy and execution level. Good luck.