LLMO: Getting Found by AI Assistants (Not Just Google)

SEO isn’t going away. People still Google things. But a growing chunk of answers now come from assistants that summarise the web for you — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, the lot. If your site only makes sense to a human scrolling a pretty page, those systems may never mention you.

That’s where LLMO comes in. Think of it as the cousin of SEO: making sure language models can find, understand, and correctly cite what you do. Not spam. Not keyword stuffing. Just clear, structured facts about your business.

SEO vs LLMO — same idea, different reader

SEO mostly cares about search engines ranking pages. LLMO cares whether an AI can answer “who builds custom cloud software in Auckland?” without inventing a rival that doesn’t exist.

In practice that means: plain descriptions of services, consistent names and contact details, pages that say what you actually offer (not just vibes), and machine-readable hints — schema, an llms.txt, FAQ answers that don’t waffle. GEO sits nearby too: showing up when someone asks about local providers, not just generic global ones.

What we put on brochure sites now

When we build a Web Presence site, we treat discoverability as part of the job — not a bolt-on after launch. Mobile-friendly layout, sensible headings, and yes: SEO, LLMO, and GEO basics out of the box. You’re not paying extra for a buzzword pack; you’re getting a site that can be found by people and by the tools they use.

Does that guarantee you’re the top answer in every chat? No. Anyone promising that is selling magic beans. What it does is stop you being invisible when an assistant goes looking for NZ software firms that actually exist.

Keep the writing human

Ironically, the worst LLMO content is the stuff that sounds like it was written by a model — walls of “leverage” and “seamless ecosystems.” Assistants and people both skip that. Straight sentences about what you do, who you help, and how to get in touch still win.

We’ve been fiddling with this on our own site for a while. Happy to walk through what “good enough” looks like for a smaller NZ business — without turning your homepage into a data dump.