GEO, LLMO, AEO… It’s All Just SEO

LLMs operate differently. They derive their understanding of a brand’s authority from words on the page, from the prevalence of particular words, the co-occurrence of different terms and topics, and the context in which those words are used. Unlinked content will further an LLM’s understanding of your brand in a way that won’t help a search engine.

As Gianluca Fiorelli writes in his excellent article:

“Brand mentions now matter not because they increase ‘authority’ directly but because they strengthen the position of the brand as an entity within the broader semantic network.

When a brand is mentioned across multiple (trusted) sources:

The entity embedding for the brand becomes stronger.

The brand becomes more tightly connected to related entities.

The cosine similarity between the brand and related concepts increases.

The LLM ‘learn’ that this brand is relevant and authoritative within that topic space.”

Many companies already value off-site mentions, albeit with the caveat that those mentions should be linked (and dofollow). Now, I can imagine brands relaxing their definition of a “good” off-site mention, and being happier with unlinked mentions in platforms that pass little traditional search benefit.

As Eli Schwartz puts it,

“In this paradigm, links don’t need to be hyperlinked (LLMs read content) or restricted to traditional websites. Mentions in credible publications or discussions sparked on professional networks (hello, knowledge bases and forums) all enhance visibility within this framework.”

site reputation abuse).

These tactics offer enough SEO benefit that many people still deem them worthwhile, but they will offer even less benefit for LLM visibility. Without any relevant context surrounding these links or articles, they will do nothing to further an LLM’s understanding of the brand or boost the likelihood of it appearing in outputs.

Andrej Karpathy points out, there may be a growing benefit to writing documents that are structured first and foremost for LLMs, and left relatively inaccessible to people:

“It’s 2025 and most content is still written for humans instead of LLMs. 99.9% of attention is about to be LLM attention, not human attention.

E.g. 99% of libraries still have docs that basically render to some pretty .html static pages assuming a human will click through them. In 2025 the docs should be a single your_project.md text file that is intended to go into the context window of an LLM.

Repeat for everything.”

This is an inversion of the SEO adage that we should write for humans, not robots: there may be a benefit to focusing our energy on making information accessible to robots, and relying on the LLMs to render the information into more accessible forms for users.

In this way, there are specific information structures that can help LLMs correctly understand the information we provide.

For example, Snowflake refers to the idea of “global document context”. (H/T to Victor Pan from HubSpot for sharing this article.)

LLMs work by breaking text into “chunks”; by adding extra information about the document throughout the text (like company name and filing date for financial text), it’s easier for the LLM to understand and correctly interpret each isolated chunk, “boosting QA accuracy from around 50%-60% to the 72%-75% range.”

Understanding how LLMs process text offers small ways for brands to improve the likelihood that LLMs will interpret their content correctly.

Adam Noonan on X shared with me: “Public GitHub content is guaranteed to be trained on but has no impact on SEO.”

Coding is arguably the most successful use case for LLMs, and developers must make up a sizeable portion of total LLM users.

For some companies, especially those selling to developers, there may be a benefit to “optimizing” the content these developers are most likely to interact with—knowledgebases, public repos, and code samples—by including extra context about your brand or products.

Elie Berreby explains:

“Most AI crawlers do not render JavaScript. There’s no renderer. Popular AI crawlers like those used by OpenAI and Anthropic do not even execute JavaScript. That means they won’t see content that is rendered client-side through JavaScript.”

This is more of a footnote than a major difference, for the simple reason that I don’t think this will remain true for very long. This problem was solved by many non-AI web crawlers, and will be solved by AI web crawlers in short order.

But for now, if you rely heavily on JavaScript rendering, a good portion of your website’s content may be invisible to LLMs.

Final thoughts

But here’s the thing: managing indexing and crawling, structuring content in machine-legible ways, building off-page mentions… these all feel like the classic remit of SEO.

And these unique differences don’t seem to have manifested in radical differences between most brands’ search visibility and LLM visibility: generally speaking, brands that do well in one also do well in the other.

Even if GEO does eventually evolve to require new tactics, SEOs—people who spend their careers reconciling the needs of machines and real people—are the people best-placed to adopt them.

So for now, GEO, LLMO, AEO… it’s all just SEO.

Further reading