Did you know?
- As of April 2025, ChatGPT has 1 billion users. Forbes
- Chat GPT and other LLM’s have 400 million weekly active users, as of February, 2025. Reuters
- ChatGPT had a conversion rate of 16% compared to Google Organic’s 1.8% Seer
- Traffic from traditional search has dropped 15-25% for many brands averi
Large language models, also known as LLMs, are very large deep learning models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data. They utilize a set of neural networks that consist of an encoder and a decoder with self-attention capabilities. The encoder and decoder extract meanings from a sequence of text and understand the relationships between words and phrases in it. (AWS Amazon)
The rise of LLMs is fundamentally changing digital marketing, providing new avenues for brands to build relationships, drive conversions, and optimize communication.
In response to this evolution, we have to rethink SEO strategies and optimize content not just for Google, but for other LLM-powered platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini.
ChatGPT, for example, draws information from training data and has a live web element that indexes real-time sites, allowing it to provide relevant and geographically tailored information. As a result, the shift to leverage LLMs to return your content in order to enhance your brand’s online presence has become essential.
Whether you’re fine-tuning SEO, rolling out targeted email campaigns, or creating ad creatives that really resonate, these tools are working in the background to make strategies smarter and results stronger.
How do we as marketers embrace this change?
How to adapt your strategy to be more LLM friendly?
How to structure your content and leverage techniques so that your brand is visible and relevant within this new technology:
#1 Write for humans first:
Optimizing content for LLMs like ChatGPT is largely consistent with good SEO practices, with the primary focus remaining on creating high-quality, useful, and informative content for human audiences.
LLMs look for precise answers to specific questions. They extract snippets that most directly address the user's intent.
Utilizing keywords that focus on context and intent instead of frequency, leads back to the idea of the human experience in SEO. LLMs don't just look for keywords—they understand context, semantics, and the relationships between concepts.
Rather than fixating on individual keyword metrics, LLMs enable marketers to approach SEO the way search engines do - by grasping language in context and anticipating user needs.
Craft content that resonates more deeply with what your audience is truly looking for.
#2 Ensure Comprehensive Topical Coverage
To maximize your website’s visibility to LLMs and ensure comprehensive topical coverage, create a well-structured, semantically rich, and authoritative online presence. This means going beyond keyword optimization to build true topical authority by deeply covering every facet of a subject and its related concepts.
#3 Structured content
Use headings, lists, tables and various media formats
#4 Information Architecture of your site
Have a clear site hierarchy i.e. great internal linking structure
#5 Technical SEO fundamentals
Ensure crawlability and indexability - accessible to search engine bots. Optimize for page speed.
#6 Technical optimization
Implement Schema markup*
#7 Build credibility with E-E-A-T:
This is based on how trustworthy and expert your content appears to the AI. LLMs prioritize sources with demonstrated expertise and credibility.
- Content quality: Adhering to E-E-A-T principles helps in producing content that is accurate and reliable, which is essential for user trust and satisfaction.
- Alignment with Search Engine Guidelines: Search engines like Google use E-E-A-T to assess content quality. LLMs that align with these principles are more likely to produce content that ranks well and meets quality standards.
- Misinformation mitigation: By focusing on credible and authoritative sources, LLMs can reduce the risk of disseminating false or misleading information.
*What is Schema markup?
- It’s a special type of code added to your website - structured data markup.
- Enables search engines and LLMs like Chat GPT to better understand the content of your page.
It’s a way to label important parts of your page and it explicitly tells LLMs what your content is about. There are also different types of schema.
Recommended schema types to implement:
- Organization: Your company’s core details such as website URL, social profiles, physical address, phone number, etc
- Article/BlogPosting: Lists the content’s heading, brief description, URL, who it was written by
- Person: This is for specific person pages like author pages stating their experience, expertise, social profiles, etc.
- Product: Key products details such as price, description, image
- Recipe: See the previous section
- LocalBusiness: Address, phone number, social profiles, website
Example:
Take a recipe for example, by adding schema markup you can tell ChatGPT the following details:
- Recipe name
- Preparation time
- Ingredients
- Instructions
- Calories per serving
The shift to AI driven search and the reliance on LLMs isn’t coming - it is here. Between September 2024 and February 2025, referral traffic from generative AI rose by 123%. At the same time, Google's search market share dropped below 90% in October 2024 for the first time since March 2015, highlighting the growing influence of AI-powered search platforms.
By embracing these technologies, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and deliver more personalized and engaging experiences to their customers.
ChatGPT’s integration of search functionality via Bing, coupled with its upcoming product search capability are sure to further accelerate traffic growth.
This positions ChatGPT as an increasingly valuable central hub and tool for information discovery, product research and purchasing decisions.
In this evolving landscape, brands that adapt swiftly will seize prime opportunities, while those not adapting to become more LLM friendly, risk a decrease in online visibility.
Make sure your expertise and specialty are in the right place, at the right time and in the correct format so that you are the answer they are looking for.
