Search Traffic in an Age of LLMs · Money Media Moguls

Search Traffic in an Age of LLMs

A lot of the focus at Chiang Mai SEO was on what gets called AI SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or LLM SEO.

I'll try to communicate a few ideas without getting too much into the weeds.

If you're trying to get traffic for your blogs or articles on your websites, maybe you need to change you're approach.

Google is answering most long-tail queries with AI Overviews. Therefore, the only way to get any volume of visits in search engines is to be cited as a source. To get visits from ChatGPT or Perplexity, you need to be cited as a source.

To be cited as a source, you need to be considered an authority.

To be considered an authority:

Start with the basics of SEO. You need to make sure your content is indexed:

Perform a site search in Google. Type in the search box: "site:yourdomain.com" . Do you get a list of all the pages on your website?
Find out if you're indexed on Common Crawl - this the index other LLMs are using other than Google's Gemini. Go to https://index.commoncrawl.org/ . Where it says "URL Pattern", type "yourdomain.com/*". That asterisk will pull in all pages. You can paste the output into ChatGPT and ask for a list of URLs. If you're not in Common Crawl, you are not in the LLMs!

Be a *topical* authority

In your niche, are you covering the subject matter fully? (Page per keyword)
In your pages, are you responding and covering the keyword idea completely? Technical break: there was a lot of talk last week about "Query Fan-Out". When an LLM processes a page, it doesn’t only ask one question, but rather generates a network of related sub-queries based on the main topic. In one study found that most pages will only answer about 30% of those queries. That's an opportunity for content creators.

Links still matter, but so do mentions

Google still uses its link graph to evaluate pages.
More (better) links will 1) get your pages ranking higher in Google, and 2) increase how often and how deeply your content is indexed. LLMs tend not to go very deep.
ChatGPT makes NO evaluation of links, but uses mentions to assess authority.
Get links and mentions on pages that are relevant to your topic.

Build Your Brand

Be consistent in naming yourself/ your brand across multiple platforms
Get your brand mentioned in places the LLMs like (think big media, academia, Reddit and Quora. Could you get a Wikipedia page?)

One interesting idea: Cindy Krum, who has been predicting technology changes in search for two decades, sees the next big thing as short-form video. It's already being indexed to some extent (YT transcripts), and you can see it appear in the search results. So, imagine one article focused on a keyword. An LLM will perform a query fan-out. For each of those queries, we can provide a short-form video answer and associate it with our article and our brand.

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