Here’s a question all of us are trying to figure out: What will AI mean for our businesses—specifically, the way we market our businesses?
Over the last couple of years, most of the AI focus has been on content creation—whether copy or images, we can now create more, faster! But that seems like a very shortsighted goal—who wants to read more mediocre marketing content? Certainly not your future clients.
But right here, right now, the biggest opportunity for your firm to take advantage of AI is optimizing for answers in large language models (LLMs)—LLMO (large language model optimization). This is the next evolution of thought leadership visibility.
LLMs are gaining fast on search engines as the places we look to answer our questions—there have been over a billion queries of LLMs in the last 12 months.
Thought Leadership and Media Relations for LLMO
The reason your firm should jump on this ASAP is that it won’t be easy, which means a lot of your competitors will shy away from doing the work. Everyone is looking for Ozempic for their marketing—we want to inject some medicine and have everything be solved. But—ask your doctor, or maybe your mother—the easy route is rarely the best route. LLMO is a huge opportunity, but it’s not going to happen in seconds. There is work to get your company and your thinking in the right spots to appeal to the LLMs.
You need to position your firm as the source for LLM answers. Some of this can happen on your website, but LLMs pull most of their information from established, credible websites—in other words, media outlets. This means LLMO leans heavily on media relations; placing your thought leadership content in the media is the surest, fastest way to ranking in LLMs. This is not about begging for backlinks (which most media sites don’t provide anyway). Links don’t matter; good, useful information is what matters.
The next two to three years is the opportunity. This is like diving into SEO in 2003. There is absolutely a first mover advantage with such a seismic shift.
What Makes LLMO Different from SEO
Important note: Despite what SEO pros are saying, LLMO is not SEO. Those of you who have followed Scribewise for any length of time know that we are “SEO cynical”—we have long maintained that placing a major focus on SEO is a waste of your budget, especially in professional services. I mean, of course you should mind technical SEO, but this is like saying you should put on decent sneakers before going for a run—no shoes or bad shoes can get you hurt, but the shoes you wear isn’t a major factor in whether or not you succeed.
If your content is clear, structured and helpful, AI will find it.
How To Influence LLM Answers
To appear in answers from your favorite LLM, your content needs to be accurate, context-rich and authoritative enough to cite or summarize.
We recommend writing helpful thought leadership content that can be placed in trade publications and then shared on your website and by your folks on LinkedIn. Build relationships with editors and journalists, and pitch your smart folks on the problems you solve. Getting a mix of bylines and quotes in relevant stories will help your firm and your people get cited in LLM answers. This is not a quick “fix” (in marketing, there are no quick fixes, despite what many executives think). But it is an effective strategy for reaching your audience as traditional web traffic becomes increasingly irrelevant. Bonus: You’re also reaching your audience by connecting with them through the trade pubs and newsletters they already read.
You’re probably already using ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity to find answers to your questions. So are your future clients, and it will rapidly become the place to go for answers to all of our business questions. Your firm needs to be there.