Is there life after SEO?

Posted by Mike O'Brien on September 2, 2025 in Ai in Marketing, Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Decoding LLMO — search optimisation for the age of AI

LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation) is structuring your brand’s information so AI assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity) can find it, trust it, and use it in answers.

Difference in one line:

• SEO competes with pages.
• LLMO competes with facts, entities, and claims.

Why LLMO matters

AI assistants synthesise answers, not just lists. That means:

• You can be cited without a click-through.
• If you’re absent from the model’s knowledge, you may vanish entirely.
• Accuracy and entity consistency decide trust.

Four quick illustrations

• ASOS Style Match: Visual search built on a richly tagged 85k-SKU corpus helps products surface in visual and semantic queries. ASOS plcFashionNetworkRecommend
• Forever 21 data foundation: Unifying profiles (e.g., Amperity) raises the quality of first-party entities and attributes that power personalisation — and clearer facts for assistants to reference. Amperity+1
• Site performance (Nostra): Faster pages improve crawlability and SEO — a prerequisite signal for assistants that blend web quality with model knowledge. nostra.ai
• Duolingo (inference): Clean definitions and tidy entities help education answers frequently cite Duolingo in AI results.

How to optimise for LLMs

• Define the questions you want to own (top 25).
• Structure pages with Q&A blocks and concise answer snippets.
• Use authoritative sources and cite them visibly.
• Keep entity names consistent (brand, products, people).
• Publish on high-authority domains where possible.
• Track AI answer share, citations, and brand-accurate mentions.

ICONIC® lens

• Investigate: Map category questions and intent.
• Customers: Capture natural-language phrasing.
• Opportunities: Choose answer spaces to own.
• Numbers: Track citations, answer share, AI-referred traffic.
• Implementation: Rework content for humans and models.
• Contribution: Watch awareness, trust, and conversion lift.

One-line insight: LLMO decides whether you’re the answer — or an invisible footnote — in AI search.

Fact check callouts

• ASOS visual search rollout and scale (iOS UK; ~85k SKUs). ASOS plcFashionNetwork
• Nostra AI case: Forever 21 crawl speed and load acceleration. nostra.ai
• Amperity selection and multi-brand data foundation featuring Forever 21. Amperity+1

Next in the Series: The ICONIC® AI marketing blueprint — integrating AI end to end.