The strategic question nobody’s asking about LLM visibility
Look, I’m not an SEO, AEO, GEO, LLM, or any other kind of acronym expert. But clearly, the alphabet soup is factoring into how we all market our businesses.
Things are changing fast. In a “post-AI world” (that still sounds weird to me), the pressure to keep up feels relentless, especially as we’re constantly bombarded with new AI tools.
The question I keep coming back to is this:
👉🏻 If you weren’t focused on showing up in Google results before, why does it suddenly feel like you have to show up in LLM search results now?
Yes, that’s a gross oversimplification of how AI is changing the game, but it’s a starting point.
A tale of two businesses
To set the stage, let’s consider two extremes. Most businesses live somewhere between them, but these frames help.
Brand A offers a service that businesses search for when something has already gone wrong and they don’t have a trusted provider.
Think: “employment lawyer wrongful termination small business,” “HR compliance attorney Chicago,” or “crisis PR firm for small business.”
They’re strangers to the firm. Discovery is the whole game. If AI recommends them, that’s a business in crisis handed to them at exactly the right moment.
–> In this case, visibility = opportunity.
Brand B sells a service built entirely on trust, relationship, and reputation.
Think: a high-ticket consultant or a niche fractional CFO. Their best clients came from a referral, a conversation at a conference, or years of watching them on LinkedIn.
Nobody Googled their way into a $50k engagement. Showing up in LLM results doesn’t move the needle because that’s not how their buyers buy.
–> Visibility for this brand ≠ the same opportunity.
The strategic question for Brand B isn’t “how do I show up in AI?” It’s “when the people who could refer me land on my website or LinkedIn, do they immediately get what I do and why it matters?”
Does that mean it would hurt to show up as an option in Claude or Perplexity? Absolutely not. But is it what they should be optimizing for? Also absolutely not.
The tactics you choose should match how your business actually grows. Or how you want it to.
Before you decide, run your business through this filter
While this is one scenario, it’d be way too neat if all our businesses fit into one of those two boxes. So before you decide where LLM visibility falls in your strategy, there’s a bigger list of questions worth asking.
Your business model
- How many clients do you actually need per year?
- What’s your average deal size?
- How is your offer structured and priced?
- Are you a personal brand or a company brand?
- How saturated is your niche?
Your buyers
- Where are your clients actually searching?
- How long is your sales cycle?
- Who makes the buying decision and how do they make it?
- Are your buyers even using AI search tools yet?
Your growth engine
- What’s been working so far?
- Do you have capacity for new inbound leads?
- What’s your conversion rate on current leads?
- Do you have enough consistent, findable content out there for an LLM to even know you exist?
Your goals
- Are you trying to grow, scale, or stabilize?
- What’s your timeline?
Clearly, we can’t answer all of these here. But there are three I want to explore more in-depth.
What’s actually worth your attention right now?
💪🏻 What channel is actually doing the heavy lifting for your best clients?
This is more precise than “how do they find you.” Because “find you” is vague. Clients can come from search, referrals, speaking, former colleagues, LinkedIn DMs, industry newsletters, vendor directories, social media, partner recommendations, or even a podcast they heard you on.
But it’s rarely all of them equally. Usually one or two channels are doing the real work.
If search is that channel…
LLMs are worth pursuing. But check who else is showing up and whether you can realistically compete on the angles that matter to your buyers.
If referrals, partnerships, or your network are doing the heavy lifting…
LLMs become a confirmation tool rather than a discovery channel. Someone already knows you; they’re just checking you out. The trust is built through proximity, reputation, and relationships. Search visibility is secondary.
If you’re in a niche where vendors, partners, or platforms recommend you…
–like a fractional CFO in an ecosystem of venture firms, or a messaging consultant who gets recommended by startup accelerators, then LLM visibility is useful if and only if those recommenders are starting to use AI tools to shortlist.
The question isn’t “are people using AI?” It’s “are the people who already send you clients using AI to make decisions?”
🧭 Do you already have a position distinct enough for an LLM to summarize accurately?
LLMs don’t just pull names. They pull from patterns in language, repetition across platforms, and signals that a business is consistent about what it does and who it serves.
AI overviews are most likely to surface for informational and research-oriented queries, and least likely for navigational or transactional ones. Which means if your buyer already knows what they want and is ready to buy, AI probably isn’t stepping in to help them find you anyway. (20North)
And even if they are searching that way, generic positioning won’t get you picked up. If your messaging sounds like everyone else in your space, you won’t be summarized; you’ll be invisible.
This isn’t a tactic you can just turn on. It’s a strategic condition. If you don’t already have a differentiated position and a coherent presence out there, LLM visibility is a long-term infrastructure project, not a current priority.
Knowing that changes how you allocate your time and energy right now. Because it means you’re not behind on AI. You’re behind on clarity.
💰 How many clients do you actually need, and can your current channels reliably deliver that?
High-ticket, low-volume businesses don’t need mass discovery. If you need five clients at $50k each, showing up to thousands of unqualified people isn’t the play; it’s a distraction.
But the need for volume isn’t always about price point. An industrial roofing company might have a high average contract and still need a steady stream of new clients to hit their numbers.
The question isn’t what you charge; it’s whether your current channels can reliably deliver what you need.
If they can, LLMs probably aren’t your bottleneck. If they can’t, it’s worth exploring, but only if your buyers are actually using AI to make decisions in your niche.
The part nobody talks about: the foundation was always the play
Whether LLM visibility is your play or not, the foundation is the same.
The signals LLMs reward—and that E-E-A-T, Google’s long-standing quality framework, has always measured—aren’t new. Consistency, specificity, authority, trustworthiness. Marketers have been told to build these things for years. The channel may have changed, and will again. The fundamentals didn’t, and won’t. (Chief Marketer)
This is exactly why I talk about strategy over tactics. Not because tactics don’t matter. They do, but because without the foundation, no tactic compounds into anything.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record… that foundation is positioning and messaging.
🦜
Positioning is how you set yourself apart in the market: the actual thing that makes you different and why people should care.
Messaging is the translation of that positioning into something clear, understandable, and easy to remember.
When you get that right, marketing becomes much simpler. You can clearly and concisely explain what you do. You have the strategy to update your website, refine your LinkedIn, and confidently go after PR opportunities. You no longer have to think about what to say because you know what your audience needs to hear.
That clarity is what makes you recognizable to the person who could refer you, summarizable (is that a word?) by an AI pulling from everything you’ve put out there, and credible to anyone who lands on your corner of the internet.
It’s why I do this work. And it’s why I’ll keep saying it: solid messaging isn’t just good marketing practice. It’s the infrastructure everything else runs on.
You don’t have to chase everything
The businesses that compound are the ones that know what they’re standing on.
There’s so much happening in your business right now. So many things are pulling for your time, energy, and budget. The hardest part isn’t doing the work; it’s knowing which work is actually worth doing.
The question was never really “should I optimize for LLMs?” It was always “do I have something worth optimizing?”
That clarity doesn’t come from chasing the next tactic. It comes from doing the foundational work first.
After reading this, where does LLM visibility land on your priority list? Hit reply and tell me. I always respond.
Until next time,
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