LLM SEO: What Actually Works in AI Search
LLM SEO means making your site easy for ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite. It rests on the same work as SEO. I check every tactic against the documentation, so you know what's worth paying for and how to test any claim yourself.
- Every tactic checked against Google's own documentation
- A 5-minute method to test any AI visibility claim yourself
- A free AI search audit with its scope published
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AEO, GEO and LLM SEO are SEO under new names, and Google's own guide says so. I offer a free measurement with a published scope, and any work it finds sits inside ordinary SEO.
What is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO is the work of making a website easy for AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite. Google's own guidance says it's still SEO: a page needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no extra technical requirements, no llms.txt file and no special schema. What changed is presentation, measurement and phrasing. Loudachris publishes the scope of a free AI search audit and folds any resulting work into Website SEO from $1,500+GST a month, with no separate AI fee.
Jump to: the tactic table · the 5-minute method · the free audit
By Chris Lourenco, Director, Loudachris Digital Marketing · Last updated 15 October 2026
The Teardown
Every tactic being sold, and what the documentation says.
These are the 10 items that turn up most often in AI search proposals. Each row links to the primary source, so you can read the wording yourself before you sign anything. The table names tactics only, never the firms selling them.
| Sold as | What the documentation says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ✕llms.txt file | Google Search ignores these files, so creating one neither helps nor harms your Google visibility | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕AI-specific schema vocabulary | No special schema.org structured data is needed to appear in AI features | Google: AI features and your website |
| ✕Content chunking "for AI" | No requirement to break content into tiny pieces | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕Writing specifically for AI | Not needed. Write for your human audience | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕Chasing "mentions" across the web | Inauthentic mentions aren't as helpful as they might seem | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕AEO or GEO as a separate discipline | Optimising for generative AI search is still SEO | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕Tools claiming Google's internal AI data | No third-party tool has access to Google's ranking or AI systems | Google: optimising for generative AI |
| ✕Speakable schema as an AI lever | Limited availability, news publishers only | Google: Speakable |
| ✕HowTo rich results | Retired from Google Search | Google Search Central blog |
| ✕Guaranteed AI citations | Indexing and serving aren't guaranteed | Google: AI features and your website |
Sources checked 15 October 2026. If any of them change, this table changes with them and the date at the top of the page moves.
There's a fair reading of some of these. Google itself says it's fine to keep an llms.txt file for other services, and clear section headings are good writing on their own merits. My concern is how they're priced, as a new discipline on a monthly retainer with an implied outcome. Charge only for what the documentation supports and the invoice looks very different.
Google's own answer
How to appear in Google's AI Overviews.
Google's guide to AI features and your website gives the rule in 1 line. To be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. In Google's words, “There are no additional technical requirements.”
The same guide lists the SEO fundamentals that keep working for AI features. Each of them is ordinary, checkable work:
- Crawling allowed in robots.txt, and by your CDN or hosting
- Internal links that make your content easy to find
- A good page experience on every device
- Important content available as text
- Images and video that support the text
- Structured data that matches the visible page
- An up-to-date Business Profile and Merchant Center listing
Google's guide to optimising for generative AI features adds how the selection works. Its AI features retrieve pages from the Search index using its core ranking systems, and may run a “query fan-out” of related searches across subtopics. A page that answers the main question and the questions around it gives those systems more to draw on. The same guide warns that creating separate pages for every variation of a question, mainly to influence rankings or AI answers, breaks its scaled content abuse policy.
Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in Search Console's Performance report, so you can measure them with the account you already own.
What genuinely changed.
Something real did happen. Here are the 3 shifts that hold up to scrutiny.
How answers are displayed
A generated summary now sits above the list of links. For a question with a factual answer, the reader can finish without clicking. For a question that ends in someone being hired, the click still happens, because a summary can't quote a price for your job or answer the phone. That split, informational versus commercial, decides how much any of this matters to you.
How you measure
A visit that started inside an assistant often arrives without a referrer you can segment cleanly, and a generated summary has no fixed position to report. The picture is blurrier, and measurement discipline sharpens it: track enquiries and calls per query family, and label the estimates as estimates.
How queries are phrased
People type fragments into a search box and whole sentences into an assistant. A 2-word query now carries a suburb, a constraint and a budget. Pages that state plainly what you do, where you do it, what it involves and roughly what it costs answer more of that sentence.
The Unchanged Part
What stayed the same: the work itself.
Presentation moved. Measurement moved. Phrasing moved. The task list stayed put. Everything below was the job before any of this arrived and it's still the job now, which is why I sell 1 retainer for it. Put plainly: this is SEO.
Being crawlable and indexed
Pages have to be fetched, rendered and indexed before anything can quote them. Clean canonicals, unblocked resources and pages inside the index are still the first job on any proposal.
Genuinely useful, specific content
A page that states what the service includes, which areas it covers, what it involves and roughly what it costs gives a summary something concrete to draw on. Google calls this non-commodity content.
Accurate, consistent business data
A single version of your name, address, phone number, hours and service list across your site and your Google Business Profile. Consistency makes your business easy to describe accurately.
Real reviews from real customers
Volume, recency, and the actual words customers use. Reviews are the raw material any summary about a local business reaches for.
Standard schema.org markup
Honest markup describing the organisation, the services and the pages, matching what the page shows. It's been part of competent technical SEO for years and is still worth doing.
Clear internal links
Links between your own pages make your content easy to find, and Google lists them among the SEO fundamentals that keep working for AI features.
Should you block AI crawlers?
Blocking is a choice about 2 different jobs. Search crawlers fetch your pages so an assistant can show and link them. Training crawlers collect content to train AI models. Each one can be allowed or refused separately in robots.txt.
- Google.Googlebot's robots.txt rules control Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode included. Google-Extended is the control for AI training and grounding in some of Google's other systems. Source
- ChatGPT. OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, and GPTBot collects content for training. OpenAI says a site can allow the first and refuse the second. Source
- Perplexity.PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's search results, and Perplexity says it isn't used to train AI foundation models. Source
If you want to be found and cited, keep the search crawlers allowed, and check your CDN and hosting settings too, because Google lists them alongside robots.txt. Whether to allow training crawlers is a decision about your content, and it's yours to make. Checking which crawlers can reach your pages is part of the technical work in my Website SEO.
Verify It Yourself
The 5-minute method: check any claim on this page yourself.
Take nobody's word for this, mine included. This takes 5 minutes, needs no software, and produces a number you own.
Write the question the way a customer would say it
Their sentence, with the suburb, the constraint and the urgency in it, because that's how people type to an assistant. Start with a single question.
Open a brand new session, signed out if the tool allows it
Chat history and account personalisation both change what comes back. A fresh session gives you a clean reading.
Ask it, and write down what you get
Record 2 things only: which businesses are named, and which URLs are cited. The named list and the source list are the parts that matter.
Repeat the identical prompt at least 3 times, fresh session each time
Same wording, new session. Then, if you have 60 seconds spare, run it once on a second assistant. You now have a small sample instead of an anecdote.
Count, then conclude
Your result is a fraction: named in 2 of 4 runs, cited in 1 of 4. That fraction is the honest output. Re-run it before you spend money on the strength of it.
Now point the same method at a sales pitch
When a provider shows you a screenshot of an AI answer naming a business, ask 3 questions. How many times was the prompt run? Were the sessions fresh? And can you re-run the identical prompt right now, together? A claim that holds up to all 3 is worth listening to.
The Variance Principle
The same prompt, 3 times, can give 3 different answers.
Generated answers are produced fresh each time, and the result varies with how the question was phrased, what else was in the session, which model version is serving you, and what got retrieved at that moment.
So a single check measures 1 moment, whichever way it falls. A provider who says you're missing from AI answers, or shows you an answer naming your business, needs repeated runs to back it. The unit of evidence is a frequency across those runs.
A single run is 1 data point
Treat it the way you'd treat asking 1 person on a street corner for the best cafe in town: interesting, and a reason to ask more people before you budget against it.
Frequency is the honest metric
Named in 3 of 10 runs is a statement you can defend, act on, and re-measure next quarter. Insist on that shape and most of the noise in this market clears.
Comparisons need identical conditions
Before and after only means something when the prompt, the session state and the assistant are held constant, with the same number of runs on both sides.
Where the numbers on this page come from
Every claim here is sourced to documentation or testable with the method above. I haven't published a study, so the page carries no percentages, growth curves or client outcomes from AI visibility work. If I publish numbers here, they'll come with the prompt, the run count, the dates and the assistant used.
What I offer: a diagnostic with a published scope.
The useful product here is measurement: a read on whether there's anything worth fixing, run the way the method above describes, with the scope published before you ask for it. My audit runs 12 agreed prompts 3 times each across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and it's free. Whatever it turns up is ordinary SEO work.
Free
The AI search audit
Repeated prompts, recorded frequencies, and a plain read on whether any of this is costing you enquiries. The full audit scope is published, so you know what arrives.
From $1,500+GST/month
If there is work to do
Our published SEO pricing, month to month, no lock-in. Website SEO is $1,500, $2,500 or $4,000+GST a month, whether or not AI comes up.
$0
AI surcharge
A single line item, because the work is shared. If a quote carries a separate AI line, ask which deliverable it buys that standard SEO doesn't already include.
Request the audit and I'll agree the prompts with you first, then send the written report and the raw response log. Prefer to talk it through? Call me.
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The rest of this silo argues the same case from different angles: the AI search visibility hub, the case against answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation as separate products, what to ask an AI search agency, and how any of it applies here in Adelaide.
Read This Before You Spend Anything
Who can leave this until later.
The best first step in AI search is often a simpler piece of SEO. If any of these 5 is still on your list, start there, because it'll move revenue further and cost you less.
Get your key pages indexed
If Search Console shows key service pages outside the index, start there. Indexing comes before every sentence on this page.
Complete your Google Business Profile
Full categories, service areas, the right phone number and a steady flow of reviews. For a local business it's the highest-yield work available, and it's the same data any summary about you draws on.
Build search as a channel first
If most enquiries come from referrals and repeat customers, grow the search channel before worrying about how it's presented.
Convert the traffic you already have
Turning more of today's visitors into calls is cheaper, faster and fully within your control.
Write down your top 10 commercial queries
The method above starts with the question a customer would ask. With the list in hand, you can run it and decide whether there's anything to fix.
All 5 done? Run the method, get your fraction, and bring it to the free audit. I'll run it independently and tell you whether the 2 sets of numbers agree.
Who wrote this
Chris Lourenco, Director, Loudachris Digital Marketing
Loudachris is based at 21-22 Greenhill Road, Wayville SA 5034, and I work with Australian service businesses on SEO, Google Ads and the websites that support them. I wrote this page because I kept being asked to quote for AEO and GEO packages, and that work already sits inside the SEO retainer. Everything here is sourced or testable, and anything I couldn't source has been left out.
Found a source that has since changed, or a point you'd argue? Send it through the contact page and I'll update the page and its date.
Straight answers about LLM SEO and AI search.
Is LLM SEO a real discipline, or is it just SEO?
What's the difference between LLM SEO and GEO?
Does SEO still matter for AI search?
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Is there a schema type that AI systems reward?
Should I chunk my content or rewrite it for AI?
Can anyone guarantee my business gets cited in ChatGPT or an AI Overview?
How do I check whether my business appears in AI answers?
What does your AI search audit cost?
The rest of the argument
Same position, applied to the specific question you arrived with.
AI Search Optimisation
The overview for this whole silo: what AI search visibility is, and why it sits inside SEO.
The Free AI Search Audit
The published scope of the diagnostic, including how many runs it takes and exactly what comes back to you.
Website SEO
The retainer all of this already lives inside. From $1,500+GST a month, month to month.
Check your own AI search visibility, free.
Run the 5-minute method yourself, then have me run the audit independently and compare. The audit is free, the scope is published, and you get a straight answer either way.
Call 0403 454 199
Start at the AI search visibility hub or read the SEO pricing guide.