Introduction

LLM’s simply stands for “large language models”, these are used by the large AI companies such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Businesses globally are seeing the number of organic visitor numbers gradually to decline largely due to Google’s AI Overviews.

The reason for this is twofold, the rise of zero click searches as well as people using LLM’s rather than say relying on Google’s organic results to find an answer to a query.

 

What exactly are AI mentions?

AI generated responses are generated when you ask an AI programme such as ChatGPT a question.

To help the user feel more confident with the information, often the AI generated response will cite its sources that allowed it to form that answer, also known as a reference.

These references can be linked or unlinked depending on the AI platform that the shopper is using at that time.

 

Can you explain why AI mentions are important?

If organic traffic to a website is decreasing, there was often a good reason for this. For example, it could be that a product is simply less in demand in the marketplace, possibly because of seasonal demand.

However, retailers are often aware of these seasonal buying habits and can explain that. Instead the reason why so many businesses organic traffic is decreasing is people are using AI platforms such as Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google’s AI mode more than ever before.

Therefore retailers and businesses in general want to ensure there “plugging the gap” so to speak as to why they are losing organic traffic.

Often this is because shoppers are now using query fan out, and AI programmes to find websites that they want to buy from. Often this comes after a long conversation with an AI programme so that the shopper can refine the results, obtaining the exact product or service they want.

Because the results from AI programmes are conversational, chatty and friendly they can be very persuasive.

Therefore, because a shopper has asked a series of questions regarding say “the best e-bikes on the market”, then once your business gets mentioned as a source, this provides a brilliant marketing opportunity for you to make a sale.

Your business could secure a shopper who has been through a long conversation with AI programme to then be directed towards your business.

 

The conversation could go something like this:

– Find me the best e-bike below £2500.00
– The style of the bike needs to be a full suspension bike, can you change the results?
– I now need a list of bikes with U.K dealerships so that I can buy spare parts at a later date

As you can see, this is a shopper who knows what they want, they therefore have “strong purchase intent”. They are therefore going to be the shoppers that businesses want to attract, this is why businesses want to be cited as a citation or source of information that AI programmes provide.

 

Content marketing on-page and off-page

Let us return to our example earlier about a shopper who wants to buy an e-bike.

The LLM will most likely favour a page that’s written by an authoritative source that answers that exact question.

For example, The Guardian newspaper may have written an editorial piece citing best 10 e-bikes in the U.K for 2025.

This would go some way to answering the shoppers question about finding a quality e-bike.

Therefore, the Guardian may well be cited as a source.
Alternatively, your business may have published a blog post that has attracted a lot of links and is a really good quality piece of content marketing.

In this case your content marketing may well be given the direct source.

 

Relevant and helpful

Your business is much more likely to be cited as a source or as a citation if the content marketing is helpful.

If the content marketing answers the exact question the shopper has asked, therefore will most likely satisfy the question that the shopper has.

Therefore, do write helpful content marketing, yet also we would recommend writing the work in the style of an FAQ.

The reason being it might say a H3 title tag that answers the shopper’s question further down the page. Therefore if the written work is written using an FAQ style of writing it is much more likely to be cited as a citation as Googlebot and the LLMS can better understand the written work and its meaning.

News article, social media posts or high-quality websites

We always advise businesses that if they want to rank high organically in Google’s organic results in the LLM’s you have to make your brand a celebrity.

You have to think like a celebrity.

You want to get your name out there, listed on the best websites.

This then improves your business’s authoritativeness, plus, it also shows your brand as a thought leader, a respected brand. For example, if your mentioned on a leading pod cast, mentioned in a well-known newspaper, plus also linked to by a relevant, high quality websites, this all improves your businesses authoritativeness.

 

Make sure the work can be read (crawled and indexed)

This advice is true whether you’re optimising for Google’s organic results or AI platforms such as ChatGPT.

The work needs to be read, it needs to be crawled and indexed. Your web designers or appointed SEO agency can check this.

Some of the checks involve making sure none of the pages are blocked by say Googlebot because of robots.txt is blocking the page from getting indexed.

Make sure your XML sitemap is kept up to date.

 

How we can help

If you run a business in Bristol and you need to generate more sales we can help. We can help your company to improve your organic and local SEO. We can produce content marketing that has very high Google E-EAT score, this will increase your companies chances of being cited within the LLM’s and Google AI.