LLM SEO: How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and AI Search

Last month a business owner here in Barcelona showed me something on his phone that bothered him. He had asked ChatGPT to recommend a supplier in his sector, and the same competitor kept coming up, a company he had never heard of. His own site ranks perfectly well on Google. Yet in the place his customers were quietly starting their search, he simply did not exist.

That gap is what LLM SEO is about. I am Armen, an SEO consultant in Barcelona, and more of the questions I get now are not about ranking on Google at all. They are about why an AI model recommends one business over another, and how to be the one it names. This post is the honest version of how that works, without the hype you get on most guides.

What LLM SEO actually means

LLM SEO is the practice of getting large language models to find, trust and cite your business. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for a recommendation, the model pulls from what it learned in training and, increasingly, from live web results it fetches on the spot. LLM SEO is the work of making sure your business is in both.

It is not a separate discipline that replaces everything you know. Think of it as a layer that sits on top of solid SEO. The content depth, the clean technical setup and the authority that already help you on Google are the same foundations a model leans on. What changes is the finish line. You are no longer only chasing a click. You are trying to be the sentence the model quotes back to the person asking.

Why this matters for your business now

The behaviour has already shifted. A growing share of buyers open an AI assistant before they ever touch a search box, and many never scroll a page of blue links at all. When Google shows its own AI generated answer at the top, studies have measured a real drop in clicks to the sites below it, in some cases more than a third fewer.

Here is the part that stings. If a model does not mention you, your customer often never learns you exist. There is no page two to fight your way onto and no map pack to appear in. You are either in the answer or invisible. For a local business in Barcelona, or one selling into Spain and beyond, that is a channel worth taking seriously while most competitors still ignore it.

The signals language models reward

Models do not think the way a search crawler ranks pages, but patterns have emerged in what they cite. A few matter more than the rest.

The first is clarity of your entity. A model needs to understand what your business is, what it does and where, and connect that to related topics with confidence. Vague, everything for everyone positioning confuses it. A sharp, consistent description of who you serve makes you easy to recommend.

The second is how liftable your content is. Models favour pages where the answer sits in a clean container: a direct reply of roughly 40 to 60 words right under a clear question, a short definition, a labelled step, a tidy table. If your best answer is buried in paragraph nine, the model has to work for it, and it usually reaches for a competitor who made it easy.

Authority is the third, and it looks a lot like classic link building with a twist. Models notice who talks about you across the web, not just who links to you. Being cited on trusted reference sites, mentioned in reputable articles and discussed where real people gather all raise the odds a model trusts you enough to name you.

A practical LLM SEO checklist

Enough theory. Here is what I actually do when a client wants to show up in AI answers.

1. Get properly indexed in Bing. ChatGPT and Copilot rely heavily on Bing for live results, so a site Bing knows and ranks surfaces far more often. Submit your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and fix anything blocking it. This is often the fastest win of the lot.
2. Structure content so a model can lift the answer. Lead each key section with a plain, direct reply to the question a customer would type. Use real headings phrased as those questions. Wrap definitions, processes and comparisons in the format that suits them, whether a numbered list or a simple table.
3. Open the door to AI crawlers. Check that your robots.txt does not block the bots these systems use, keep your XML sitemap current, and consider an llms.txt file that points models to your most important pages. Good structured data helps a model read your business correctly.
4. Build your brand entity, not just backlinks. Earn mentions on reputable sites in your field, keep your details consistent everywhere, and make sure your Google Business Profile and any reference listings say the same clear thing about you. For an SEO audit I always check how a business is described across the web, because that is what a model absorbs.

I keep this list short on purpose. Most businesses that are invisible in AI answers are failing at the first two steps, not the exotic ones.

How to check whether you appear

You do not need a fancy tool to start. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and ask them the questions your customer would ask, in plain language: the best provider for your service in your city, or who to trust for a specific problem you solve. Write down who appears and which pages get cited.

Then vary the wording and ask again. The answer often changes with a small change in phrasing, and that tells you where you are close and where you are nowhere. Do this once a month and you have a simple, honest scorecard for whether your work is landing.

Where classic SEO still fits

None of this means the old work is dead. The opposite is true. A model has to be able to crawl, read and trust your pages, and that is exactly what strong technical SEO and genuine content quality deliver. The businesses winning in AI answers are almost always the ones already doing the fundamentals well.

So the smart move is not to drop your Google strategy and chase the shiny thing. It is to keep your foundations sharp and add the LLM layer on top. That is a lot of what my SEO consulting work looks like right now: getting the basics right, then making the whole thing legible to the machines that increasingly stand between you and your customer.

Bringing it together

I will be straight with you about where this is heading. AI answers are not a passing trend, and the businesses that get named in them are building an advantage that compounds while everyone else waits to see if it is real. You do not have to overhaul anything. You have to be findable, quotable and clearly described.

If you run a business in Barcelona or sell into Spain and Europe, this is a rare moment where the field is still wide open, because most of your competitors have not started. Get your foundations clean, make your answers easy to lift, and put your brand in front of the models. If you want a hand working out where you stand today, tell us about your project and we will take a look.