Digital Lab

All anyone can talk about is LLMs this, AI that… but with all the flashy buzzwords, there is very little information available to help you practically and tactfully grow your business.

This email is exactly the opposite.

We’ve helped hundreds of websites grow and stay relevant in search, social, and now AI.

The good news is, it’s not as complicated as everyone makes it out to be.

Some of the core strategies have worked to stand out on other platforms for the last decade also work on LLMs.

• Make enjoyable content
• Be concise (don’t wordstuff)
• Optimize for good technical performance
• More buzz about you online is always a good thing

But let’s get specific.

The Basics of AIO

The world has yet to agree on one singular term for AI / LLM related marketing optimizations.

ie. “How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?”

But the acronym we’ve seen the greatest legitimacy from & mainstream adoption from major tech platforms in the industry is AIO or AI Optimization.

Just know while reading this, the rules and recommendations are the same no matter what you call it:

• LLMO
• GEO
• AIO
• SXO
• AEO
• AI SEO
• LEO

It’s a bit ridiculous, but wanted to get that out of the way.

AIO has had a massive surge in interest, and the related search terms are rising.

Google has always been the defacto “home base” of the internet.

Making it one of (if not THE) most important places for businesses to be present and optimized.

However ChatGPT and other LLMs have started to take a bite out of Google’s search monopoly.

If you ran the numbers just 5 years ago you would have found that 92% of all digital searches where done through Google.

The remaining 8% was a mix of small platforms with only a percent or so each.

However today Google has dropped to 80% of digital searches with ChatGPT capturing 9% all on it’s own.

Does this still mean Google is at the top? Yes, by a landslide.

But, what it also means is that Google is wavering.

For the first time in two decades, a company is actively stealing market share from them.

This has never happened before.

So we can’t understate the opportunity here.

If this path continues Google will eventually become a shadow of it’s former self.

LLMs are bringing out a new era of digital search and there will never be a better opportunity to get discovered than today.

AIO vs SEO

What most people misunderstand about AIO is that the way you optimize for AI systems is practically identical to the way you optimize for Google.

The actions that would improve your discoverability in Google ALSO improve your discoverability in AI.

Things like:

1. Keyword & Topic Research
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Content Strategy & Planning
4. Content Creation (Articles, Guides, Pages)
5. On-Page Optimization (Headings, Structure)
6. Structured Data / Schema Markup
7. Internal Linking Strategy
8. Authority Building (Citations, Mentions, Links)
9. Analytics & Performance Reporting

These are all 100% overlapping and would improve your performance in both platforms at the same time.

Any good SEO team will be working on AIO and SEO in tandem.

The area with unique aspects is technical optimization.

The introduction of schema additions & llms.txt adds a tiny amount of extra work to just guarantee that AI models are tracking you and discovering your content as fast as possible.

A couple of quick wins that will help you with both LLM discovery and Google discovery:

1. Optimize for E-E-A-T (experience/expertise/authority/trust) Use quotes, stats, and first party information to create inherently unique information. This makes it more likely that you are referenced compared to another competitor who repeats the same thing as all other sites.
2. Clear page structure Use short paragraphs, clear H1/H2/H3 structures, lists, structured tables, etc. To improve content discovery.
3. Performance & UX (Core Web Vitals/page experience) Optimize for page load time, smoothness, and mobile-friendly experiences.
4. Technical accessibility + crawlability Clear sitemaps, canonical tags, correct status codes, and allowing bots/crawlers to navigate the site is 100% essential for platform discovery.

If this all feels a tad overwhelming, we’ve created an auditor work sheet you can run through to quickly find out if your pages are well optimized for AIO.

Our SEO/AIO team can also run this report for your entire website to get a full picture in a fraction of the time.

Free AI Optimization Checklist Audit

The immediate first step you can take as a business owner is to self-analyze.

• What’s working?
• What’s missing?
• What’s broken?
• What do I not know?

Questions like this will often uncover 100 things you could be doing immediately to improve your performance in LLMs and Google alike.

We run our clients through detailed audits that include weekly refreshes and lots of tools like Website Auditor, Screaming Frog, Semrush, and more.

But, if you want to get started immediately and don’t have any of the fancy tools…

This one checklist could uncover exactly what you need to get started.