LLM SEO is the practice of optimising your brand's presence in large language models - ensuring that when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity about your category, your brand appears by name, is associated with the right attributes, and is cited as a credible source. It is distinct from traditional SEO (ranking in blue links) and from GEO (earning citations in AI Overviews), though all three are related.

The practical importance: more than 40% of B2B buyers and professional service clients report using LLMs to research vendors before initiating contact, according to a 2025 Demand Gen Report study. If your brand is invisible in those responses - or worse, misrepresented - you are losing consideration at the earliest stage of the buying process. At Through The Glass Creatives, Mherie Vic and Ravve Jay have built LLM audit and optimisation workflows into client growth strategies for exactly this reason.

How LLMs form brand associations

LLMs are trained on large corpora of web text, filtered and weighted by factors that vary by model. What they learn about a brand depends on what exists in high-quality, authoritative web text about that brand: press coverage, case studies, named mentions in industry publications, forum discussions, review aggregators, and the brand's own published content. The models cannot be directly updated the way a webpage can - but they can be influenced over time by expanding the corpus of attributable, authoritative content that exists about the brand on the web.

The core signals LLM SEO targets

LLMs remember what the most credible parts of the web said about you. LLM SEO is the discipline of making sure those sources say the right things.

What you can directly influence vs. what you cannot

You cannot directly edit what an LLM says about your brand between training runs. What you can influence is the corpus of public, attributable content that will be included in future training and in live retrieval. That means digital PR, thought leadership, case studies, expert commentary, and structured data are the primary levers - not your website copy alone. For a related discipline at the retrieval layer, read perplexity seo strategy and generative engine optimization.

The LLM SEO audit workflow

The starting point for any LLM SEO engagement is a structured brand audit across the major models: query ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity with category-level queries ("who are the leading SEO agencies for [niche]?") and brand-direct queries ("what is [Brand Name]?"). Document what each model says, what attributes it ascribes, and what it gets wrong or omits. That audit becomes the baseline for a prioritised content and PR plan targeting the specific gaps.