Some of the most recent, exciting innovations on the Internet have come as a result of AI, particularly based on LLMs, or large language models. SEO is no different, and any New Orleans organization (whether a private entity, publicly traded, or non-profit) considering a big SEO campaign for their business needs to take optimizing for these AI tools into account when planning their work.
You might be saying to yourself, while you sip some coffee at cafe du monde, French Track, or Mojo: “LLMs are so new, how can anyone know how to optimize for them?”
The answer is that we’re testing a lot of different strategies and seeing what’s working – the same thing that agencies like ours have been doing for decades now to get to the top of Google.
There’s a few lessons that have already been learned. For example, the current most popular models out there (including ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft AI’s Bing tool [also called Sydney]) all express different answers if you ask it certain questions. Have each of these tools present their favorite Mardi Gras Krewes, or recommend a Bywater Bar, and they’ll give you a different response. This is no different than SEOs trying to optimize for both Google and Bing. The best indicators that we have at the moment suggest that most LLMs have crawled the same parts of the web, so getting your website listed in authoritative lists, sets of data, and other often-trafficked websites is a great way to appear in LLM results, and at the moment this is the forefront of much of our LLMO strategies.
Beyond that, we’re focused on generating unique, education content by humans, with limited to no assistance from AI. Yes, that’s right: in order to rank high on LLMs, we’re suggested using them in a minimal fashion to create content. The reasoning for this is that no one is going to be betteer at identifying AI generated content than the AI tools themselves, and they’ll be trained to identify content that was created by a different version of themselves, which they’ll find less valuable as training data. Therefore, it’s crucial that humans create the majority of your unique content so that it’s useful in the long-term as training data.
There’s still a lot that our industry has to learn about SEO for LLMs, but Online Optimism will be at the forefront of it for our clients.