AI SEO Brand Visibility Guide 2025

"Has anyone actually seen results from focusing on LLM SEO?"

I just binge-watched every bit of YouTube wisdom to make your brand rank in AI search engines. The outcome...? I wrote this 6-page document.

It's got:

• Technical breakdowns
• Actionable advice
• Real examples
• No marketing BS, just fundamentals

Yes. Brands are dominating the AEO/GEO visibility game.

✅ Here's how you can too.

The SEO You Knew? It's Dead. Long Live AI Search.

For decades, the search game was simple: User ↔ Website. You pushed content, Google ranked it, and users clicked. A beautiful, symbiotic system, right? A strong bond. 🤝

Well, that bond? It's broken. Severed.

Over the last six months, search fundamentally flipped. AI burst onto the scene. Not just as a chatbot, but as a disruptive force.

ChatGPT's market share? Up a staggering 400%. Google? Down 2.15% - the first dip in a decade.

This isn't just a shift. It's a seismic event. Search is undergoing a fundamental change. The way people get information? It's absolutely shifting.

The AI Middleman: Your Brand's New Gatekeeper.

Welcome to the new world. Now, an AI model sits squarely in the middle: User ↔ AI LLM ↔ Website. This "answer engine" - ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot - isn't just delivering results.

It's arbitrating truth. It's summarising your content. It's deciding if your brand, product, or service even merits being in the conversation.

This AI model? It now owns the relationship. It handles the direct interaction. That final mile of information delivery? It's all AI. This is critical.

The Data Doesn't Lie: Traditional SEO Metrics Flop in AI.

41 million AI search results analysed. The findings? Provocative.

• Traffic ≠ AI Citations. ❌
• 95% of AI citation behaviour cannot be explained by traffic.
• High-traffic sites? Often never cited. Low-traffic sites? Can dictate industry narratives. It's insane.
• Backlinks ≠ AI Citations. 😱
• 97.2% of AI citations cannot be explained by backlinks.
• It's worse: there's an inverse relationship 😅
• Sites with 1-9 backlinks: Average 2,160 AI citations.
• Sites with 10+ backlinks: Average 681 AI citations.

Your typical SEO strategies? They don't apply here. They just don't.

The Technical Underbelly: How AI Search Really Works.

Thinking AI search is just another SEO channel? Think again. AI Search literally cannot be the same as traditional search. The architectures are fundamentally different. We're comparing apples to oranges, not just slightly different apples.

ChatGPT: The Bing Connection, And Beyond.

ChatGPT's browsing is fascinating. It uses Bing for the heavy lifting. Your long-form query? ChatGPT normalizes it. It turns your three-paragraph prompt into 5-7 keywords. 👉 You've lost control of the search at this stage. It's now ChatGPT's interpretation.

Then, that simplified query hits the Bing API. Bing returns just three things: URL, Title, and Meta description. That's all Bing sees.

But here's the kicker: Bing isn't the final decision-maker. WebGPT Agent is! (This is not SearchGPT). The agent has to choose which web results to crawl. It parses the page HTML & picks out the most useful content & links. Finally, it decides what relevant information to include in the answer as a citation.

So, optimising for ChatGPT means optimising for WebGPT. Not ChatGPT itself. Not even purely Bing. It's a distinct optimisation target.

Perplexity: Semantic, Vector-Based, and Proprietary.

Perplexity? It's on a different planet. It's semantic. It's vector-based.

• No traditional indexing.
• No traditional search engine.

Perplexity encodes your query. It finds the single best-matched piece of content from its massive, proprietary, cached directory of the web. It doesn't do live searches. This is a crucial distinction.

Google AI Overviews & Microsoft Copilot: Different Biases.

Each AI search engine plays by its own rules. Their underlying biases dictate what content gets amplified.

• Google AI Overviews: Looks fairly domain-agnostic. It presents a relatively fair distribution of cited sources. This looks like the 'fairest' of the bunch.
  • Top sites cited by Google AI Overviews include: YouTube.com, LinkedIn.com, Gartner.com, Reddit.com, Quora.com and Wikipedia.org.
• Microsoft Copilot: This one has a massive bias. It heavily gravitates towards corporate and business content. Forbes and Gartner? They're getting cited massively.
  • Top sites cited by Copilot include: Forbes.com (2.1M shared), Gartner.com (1.3M shared).

What AI Generative Search Engines Do Love.

• ChatGPT Loves Wikipedia. Across 177 million AI citations, Wikipedia is the most popular domain. By a factor of six compared to any other source.
• Perplexity is UGC-focused. It loves User-Generated Content from platforms like Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Yelp. It wants to know what real people are discussing.

Mastering AI SEO: A New Playbook.

Don't despair. AI search is controllable. The playbook looks different, but the game is still winnable.

Technical Optimisation is Key. It Just Looks Different.

• 👉 Get Indexed on Bing. If you're not indexed by Bing, you will never show up on ChatGPT. It's foundational. The only thing more foundational is having a website.
• ❌ Don't just optimise for Bing. ChatGPT's results only overlap 26% with Bing. It's not one-to-one. You still need a distinct AI optimisation strategy.
• AI Crawlers Ignore JavaScript. If your site is heavily client-side rendered or relies on JavaScript for content delivery, AI crawlers won't see it. Put the content in HTML.
• llms.txt is Your New Best Friend. This new protocol acts like robots.txt, but for Large Language Models. It's a markdown-formatted map.
  • It takes your messy HTML.
  • It makes it digestible for AI.
  • It tells AI: "Here's my key content. Here's where to find it. Here's why to click."
  • AI search engines already use this as frequently as sitemaps.
• Semantic URL Slugs Win. WebGPT sees your URL slug. It needs to be descriptive.
  • Full of codes and crap? You're losing on one out of three fronts for AI signals.
  • Make your URL slugs descriptive. Tell AI what it's about.
• Spoil Your Content in Your Meta-Description. This is controversial. But it works.
  • Offer value upfront. Tell the AI what the content delivers.
  • Example: content="The best business credit cards include Ink Business Unlimited, Venture X Business and U.S. Bank Business Triple Cash Rewards, among other options."
  • This is a "huge green flag" for AI answer bots. It gets cited. A lot.

Content is Still King. But AI Search is Lazy.

Yes, content is still king. But AI search is lazy. It favours formats that are easy to process.

• Listicles and Comparative Content Dominate.
  • 32.5% of AI citations are listicles/comparative content.
  • Blogs/Opinion? A distant 9.9%.
  • AI wants pre-digested, easy-to-grab insights. Give it to them.
• AI Search Engines Have a Recency Bias.
  • Recently refactored content gets favoured.
  • Update your content. Make it feel fresh, even if it's evergreen.
  • AI picks up and cites content on the scale of days and weeks, not months and quarters. Visibility can skyrocket overnight.
  • Example: A fintech brand boosted citation share by 7.7% in a month by optimising existing content for AI queries.
  • Example: A remote staffing client saw visibility jump from 0.1% to 5.2% in one day by releasing strategic content. Within a week, they were a top 10 brand in the multi-billion-dollar remote staffing industry.

Social Media & UGC Work Situationally.

• Perplexity loves user-generated content: Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp.
• Engage directly where the conversations are happening. Influence the narrative there.
• Example: A cloud computing brand's Google AI Overviews visibility jumped from 23.8% to 73% in a month just by commenting on a few influential Reddit threads. Google AI Overviews literally couldn't stop talking about that brand.

The Prime Opportunity: Build Your Muscle Now.

Most brands are about to lose the majority of their direct connections to customers. Generative search controls the narrative now. This is a harsh truth.

But if you're reading this? You have an enormous opportunity.

• Understand Conversations and Models. Learn what people are searching for in AI.
• 👉 Track Your AI Visibility. Monitor AI citations. Understand which pages matter most. See exactly how your content and competitors shape the AI narrative.

Go out there. Make the most of it.

James Berry
Founder & CEO at LLMrefs
llmrefs.com

Sources:

• Why Your Next 1000 Users Are On AI Search - Arpoov Sharma
• The 2025 AI Search Race - a16z
• We Analyzed 10,00,000 AI Prompts: Here's what we found - Josh Blyskal
• AI SEO in 2025: The New Rules - Nathan Gotch
• How to Dominate AI Search Results in 2025 (ChatGPT, AI Overviews & More) - Matt Kenyon
• What is GEO? (and Why It's The FUTURE OF SEO) - Exposure Ninja