You've spent years figuring out what Google wants. Keywords, backlinks, page speed, mobile-friendliness. You know the checklist.
Now there's a new checklist. And it's different enough to catch you off guard.
LLM ranking isn't really ranking
First, let's clear something up. Google gives you positions 1 through 10. LLMs don't work that way.
When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, it either mentions you or it doesn't. It might mention you first, or third, or not at all. But there's no position 7 where you're visible but not great. You're in the answer or you're invisible.
The "ranking factors" for LLMs are really the signals that influence whether you make it into the answer at all.
What LLMs actually look at
Does it know what you are?
AI needs to understand you as a distinct entity. A company, a product, a service. If your website says one thing, your LinkedIn profile says another, and industry directories have outdated descriptions, AI gets confused. And confused AI doesn't confidently recommend anything.
Your own description matters as much. Compare two consulting firms. Firm A: "We empower businesses to achieve transformative growth through innovative strategies." Firm B: "We help B2B SaaS companies build outbound sales processes that generate 20+ qualified meetings per month." When someone asks AI for help with outbound for their SaaS, Firm B is an easy match. Firm A can't be matched to anything.
Consistency across the web is huge. When 10 different sources describe you the same way, AI builds a clear picture and feels confident mentioning you.
Does it trust you as an authority?
AI gravitates toward sources that seem authoritative. Comprehensive content that goes deep on topics. Coverage by respected industry publications. Being cited by experts.
Thin content doesn't build authority. A 300-word page that barely scratches the surface won't compete with a comprehensive guide that actually answers questions.
Do others vouch for you?
What others say about you weighs more than what you say about yourself. Reviews on G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, mentions in comparison articles and roundups you didn't write, podcast appearances, niche press coverage: AI can check those sources, while a testimonial on your homepage could say anything. A mention without a link counts too, which makes this broader than classic backlinks.
If nobody talks about your brand except you, AI notices.
Is your content fresh?
For AI tools that search in real-time (and most do now), recently updated content has an advantage. If your best content hasn't been touched since 2022, newer sources might get cited instead.
Can AI easily extract information?
Clear headings, FAQ sections, comparison tables, structured data. These make it easy for AI to understand and cite specific information. Messy walls of text with buried insights are harder to work with.
Do you directly answer the questions people ask?
If someone asks "what's the best X for Y?", content that directly addresses that exact question format is more likely to be cited. AI looks for content that matches what the user actually wants to know.
What's different from Google SEO
Some Google factors don't matter much for LLMs. Page speed? Doesn't affect whether AI recommends you. Mobile-friendliness? Irrelevant. Meta tags and title optimization? Less important than the actual substance.
Other things matter more for LLMs. Semantic clarity and clear explanations beat keyword optimization. Entity recognition beats keyword density. Being cited by authoritative sources matters more than raw backlink counts.
Does a top Google rank still help?
Yes, but it's no longer enough. Engines that search the web (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and the others) start from Google or Bing results to decide which pages to read. If you're nowhere in those results, you're rarely read at all. Being read and being cited are two different steps, though, and three things explain why a page ranked 2 can lose to a page ranked 8.
Engines judge passages, not pages. They cut your content into chunks and keep the ones that answer cleanly. A well-ranked page can produce zero citable passage if its answers are buried in long paragraphs.
Engines search several sub-queries, not your keyword. One user question turns into several searches on different angles (price, alternatives, use case, reviews). A page built for a single head keyword covers only part of them.
Engines weigh the whole domain. An excellent isolated article can be ignored if the rest of the site is thin on the topic. Topical authority is judged at the site level.
The Princeton research that coined the term GEO measured visibility gains of up to 40% in generated answers from content changes alone (adding statistics, quotations and sources), with no change in search ranking.
What you can stop worrying about
Keyword density is meaningless here. LLMs understand meaning, not ratios of word frequency.
Meta descriptions and title tags don't directly influence LLM recommendations. They're for search engine result pages, not AI-generated answers.
Internal linking structures don't matter the way they do for Googlebot. LLMs don't crawl your site and follow links.
Page speed won't affect whether AI recommends you. Fast or slow, it doesn't factor in.
What you should focus on
The safest strategy is focusing on fundamentals that have staying power regardless of how AI evolves.
Be genuinely authoritative in your space. Comprehensive content, real expertise, depth that competitors can't easily replicate.
Communicate clearly. Write so that a smart person who doesn't know your industry could understand exactly what you do and why it matters.
Keep information consistent everywhere. Website, social profiles, directories, press mentions. Same story, same positioning.
Make it easy to extract specific information from your content. Structure helps.
Tracking what works
You can't see LLM ranking factors directly, but you can see results. Four indicators do the job.
Citation rate: out of your relevant prompts, how many name your brand? Below 10%, your AI visibility is marginal. Between 20 and 40%, you have a solid presence. Above 50%, you're a reference in your niche.
AI Share of Voice: your share of all brand mentions on those prompts. It's the GEO equivalent of organic market share.
Position in the answer: being named first with a reason is worth far more than a passing mention at the end of a list.
Coverage per engine: visible on ChatGPT but absent on Perplexity and Gemini is a gap. Engines don't favor the same sources, so each one needs checking.
Give it three to four months before judging. Structure and freshness move fastest; authority and third-party mentions take longer.
Tools like Mentionable track this across AI platforms. Over time, you can correlate changes in your content and online presence with changes in your AI visibility.
Tracking alone leaves the hardest part to you: writing the page that closes a gap. Mentionable's page generation reads the pages the engines cite instead of yours on a given prompt and drafts yours in the same format, with the JSON-LD and the facts only you can supply flagged. That turns a ranking-factor checklist into a page you can publish.
