SEO and AI citations is a huge opportunity to get eyeballs on your website right now but there's also a lot of misconceptions flying around which is dangerous.
Disclaimer: I am not an SEO expert and I'm just figuring things out as I go. These are my thoughts on how I understand things, which are very often wrong.
First of all it's important to address what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) actually is and how it relates to LLM optimisation (or GEO? I still don't know what the correct terminology is here — they're all horrible).
SEO is basically creating content which ranks highly on the search engines so people click on it, which drives visits to a website which hopefully leads to conversions or inbound leads. People mainly focus on Google but other engines like Bing drive huge traffic which shouldn't be ignored (go submit your site to IndexNow if you haven't already!).
AI search optimisation is basically the same premise but you're trying to get cited by the LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc) rather than Google. There's an interesting overlap with Google because they have the traditional search infrastructure but also Google AI overviews and Gemini.
Ok, so can you just create an awesome piece of content and rank number 1 on the traditional search engines? Absolutely not… traditional search rankings are ruthlessly competitive and the top results are dominated by high domain authority sites (lots of backlinks).
Often, a very high authority site will outrank others even though the actual content isn't good. This is arguably a fundamental limitation of the traditional search engines.
What about on the AI platforms/LLMs?
It's clear that ChatGPT, Claude and the LLMs do not follow the same rules as the traditional search engines (do some research on listicles and you'll know what I mean) but domain authority is still very important.
Ok so how do you actually start ranking on the search engines and getting picked up by the AI search engines?
One word: keyword research. Stop trying to rank for super difficult keywords that are dominated by the giants with 90+ DR, it is never going to happen.
For example, stop trying to compete on 'software development agency' and start competing on 'how to build software platform in australia for reasonable price'…
Do keyword research and find long-tail queries that you can actually compete on, and then create high quality content around this topic.
Reach out to sites who have strong domain rankings and ask for links to your content to start building up your own site's authority, and the search engines/LLMs will start picking you up.