Being Ghosted by LLMs? GEO Isn’t Broken; But Your Website Might Be.

Being Ghosted by LLMs? GEO Isn’t Broken; But your Website Might Be.RoosterPR

The backbone of any GEO strategy is a fully optimised website. In fact, we’d go as far as to say there is little point in investing in a digital PR strategy that encompasses GEO if you don’t get your digital shopfront in order first. We’re talking functionality, structure and, most importantly, scrapability.

Your website should act as an encyclopaedia – the most complete source of truth about your brand and product or service – that LLMs trawl through, helping to make it as easy as possible to choose whether to reference you, your products and/or services.

Rooster’s top tips on optimising your website for maximum GEO visibility:

1. Benchmark Domain AI visibility.

Perhaps it’s because we work in comms, but we love a bit of data to be able to quantify progress. Domain AI visibility – the measure of how frequently and favourably a brand, person, or piece of content is cited and surfaced by AI tools like ChatGPT and search engines with generative capabilities – is a good metric to benchmark in the first instance. You can easily access free tools online to generate a figure to compare against once you start optimising your website. N.B. 70+ is generally considered strong.

2. Treat LLMs like your everyday customer.

They know what they want, so help them find it. Think about the customer journey – How many clicks does it take to find what your company does? Is key product info easily accessible? Is it clear who the product is for? Is pricing transparent? If your customers struggle to find this basic information, so will AI. So, the less layers and clicks the LLM is required to go through to access the information it needs, the better. It’s not rocket science, just the building blocks of any decent website.

3. Get rid of filler.

AI can’t feed back on what it doesn’t understand so, if you’re not already, it’s time to get clear on your messaging. Empty buzzwords and vague marketing fluff that serve no real purpose and only force LLMs and AI search engines to work even harder to understand what the content is and whether it’s useful. Ensure terminology is consistent and copy is clear and informative throughout. AI needs something solid to quote and/or summarise, so it’s worth considering, if a person spent 5 minutes on your website, could they summarise your business? If not, neither can an LLM. In short, your website is the one place on the internet over which you have total control, so make the most of it.

4. Maximise potential for content.

Clearly signposted and regularly updated customer FAQs, blog and/or news pages are your not-so-secret weapon. Content has to be easy to scrape, which may mean retrospectively restructuring content already on your website. Key considerations include:

  • Descriptive GEO (and SEO while you’re at it) friendly headers
  • A short 1–2 sentence summary of the content
  • Descriptive H2s (subheads)
  • Image captions

We didn’t say it was a quick process… The best way to understand how LLMs and AI search engines work is to use them.

Ultimately, the best way to understand how to optimise your website is to spend time understanding how LLMs are (or in many cases, aren’t) – accessing and reviewing information on your website.

Use known website keywords as prompts in AI searches to check out how you compare against competitors and where you might need support. If you spot discrepancies – AI misreading your info and poorly filling in the gaps or citing competitors whilst altogether ignoring you – you know there’s still work to do on your website.

What, like GEO’s hard?!

If you liked this article, be sure to look out for future content in our ongoing PR and AI blog series at Rooster.co.uk.