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LLMO = LLM Optimization, which basically means doing SEO for AI chatbots like ChatGPT to optimize the amount of visibility your company gets in LLMs.
If you follow the advice from the top LLMO how-to guides out there, like this one from Ahrefs, you get a lot of tips that mainly work for bigger brands.
This made me think it’s probably a game that is hard for small companies to currently play.
LLM’s like ChatGPT currently (early 2025 as of writing) do not have enough data about all the small companies out there.
Testing if small brands appear in LLMs
To put that hypothesis to the test I asked several top LLM’s if it knows 10 smaller Danish brands by simply prompting “Do you know the Danish company OnRobot?” (example with OnRobot).
And here are the results:
| Do you know? | mistral-small | mistral-large | gpt-4o-mini | gpt-4o | gemini-1.5-flash | gemini-2.0-flash | claude-3-5-sonnet | claude-3-5-haiku |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Morningscore | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Morningtrain | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Morningbound | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Twentyfour | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Vestas | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Sandgrav Solutions | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Fenerum | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Roccamore | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Flatpay | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Onrobot | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
This was tested via API’s, so I was sure they wouldn’t use search data (the API only relies on the model data out of the box, and does not connect to “the internet”).
Gemini 2.0 is the winner
Gemini-2.0-Flash and GPT-4o knew the same amount of brands, but Gemini had the most detailed answers overall, almost always getting the details right.
Maybe Google could leverage their huge local database from Google Business? I don’t know. ChatGPT did fairly well too.
What determines if a brand is found by an LLM?
There are many studies out there about that. My own experience is that these metrics matter:
- Amount of digital PR
- Backlinks from other websites and what is written in the anchor text (this is an anchor text)
- Age of company (most LLM’s have data cutoff dates in 2023)
- Brand mentions on user generated sites like Reddit and Quora
- Wikipedia page
Most B2B companies have little PR and therefore don’t get easily discovered by LLM’s. I don’t think very small local PR is worth much currently, it needs to be at least a national media.
And smaller companies often don’t have a Wikipedia page or a lot of mentions on sites like Reddit.
So this means it’s currently hard to rank for most smaller companies who don’t have a big brand.
But of course there are ways to break through 😎
SEO and link building is probably your best bet, with a focus on digital PR and User Generated Content sites like Reddit, where you should become active in discussions around your industry and mention your brand name whenever suitable.
