I’ve been seeing more and more traffic coming to my product from apps like ChatGPT and I wanted to write a small article to share what I’ve noticed, but also to be able to come back in a few years and see how this topic evolved.
This is still not to the level of Google and what SEO is sending me, but the volumes are significant and the growth is impressive. From where I stand, this seems like a channel I have to take seriously and it starts to feel like a new kind of SEO.
I think everyone with a product or brand will spend energy understanding how they are “indexed” by LLMs. We’ll then get to the next step of SEO which I’m already seeing called Large Language Model Optimisation or LLMO. I’m guessing this is just the beginning domain will evolve a lot and I’m wondering how it will end up. Given the nature of LLMs I’m guessing branding will be more important than keywords and links. I’m also wondering if good SEO will lead to good LLMO and so on… but the truth is that I don’t know!
For now I’m running tests and my main surprise is how different the various models are in their recommendations. Some models really like my app, and some don’t even know it exists. Some models also change their minds fairly regularly, which makes understanding their mechanisms more complicated.
For the record, here’s where my app currently stands:
If you haven’t done it yet, try it on your brand and see what you get. You can even ask it why they suggested a product and not another, maybe giving you insights on how to improve your “ranking”.
Since you scrolled this far, you might be interested in some other things I wrote: