As AI influences online visibility more and more, how can brands adopt generative engine optimization strategies to ensure they’re consistently surfaced in LLM answers?

The importance of becoming  an authority (or building a brand) is nothing new to SEO. Having been an SEO professional for more than 20 years, I’ve been talking about branding for as long as I can remember. It’s even more important now.

Being a recognized authority in a niche is fundamental because LLMs rely on the training data that’s built on associations. While search engines keep an index of documents that they bring up largely based on keyword matching, LLMs go back to their knowledge of the world to give answers.

This "knowledge" (training data) is built on statistical relationships between the words and entities. Unless your brand is associated with key concepts and problems in your niche, you are invisible.

But what does it take to build a topical authority?

Topical authority: traditional SEO vs SEO for LLMs

For both Google and LLMs, topical authority is defined as depth of expertise, or how consistently a site or an author covers a well-defined topic from different angles.

The difference is that Google has been using all kinds of other signals, like site reputation, backlinks, user-driven records (on-site engagements), brand mentions/searches, and so on.

Once you accumulate those signals to become recognized as an authority, you could branch out and enjoy organic visibility on other topics. For example, you could be a well-known source of news, then add a coupons section to your site and own a new topic in organic search. (This is now referred to as “Site Reputation Abuse.”)

But there’s one fundamental thing that makes AI topical authority different from organic search topical authority: LLMs need a clear understanding of what your brand is doing (and how it can be differentiated).

LLMs don’t have many additional signals (like Page Rank and site authority). LLMs rely on their training data. If an entity becomes associated with different topics, it confuses LMM platforms and makes your brand unfindable.

Even when LLMs perform searches to find more information and give a more satisfying answer, they would direct the search based on what they already know about a topic.

For example, if you ask ChatGPT for advice on “best running shoes,” it would often check Runner’s World and its recommendations because it “knows” this brand. Additionally, it will check manufactures it knows (Nike, Puma, etc.) and find new recommended products there. It’s unlikely to refer to a brand that sells everything, including shoes.

How brand diffusion affects small businesses and personal brands

For organic search visibility, my personal brand could afford to be known as an “SEO expert,” search blogger, guest blogging expert, and community manager. This is confusing for LLMs. They need to know exactly what a brand is doing to surface it in answers.

As a result, I rarely (if ever) was listed in AI answers for SEO expert recommendations, even though LLMs had a ton of information about my personal brand. If I asked ChatGPT directly, “who is Ann Smarty?,” the answer included all my previous positions, things I was known for, and so on. But it could never decide how to categorize me. So it would refer to me as “content marketer,” “community manager,” or “blogger,” even though my primary career has always been an SEO professional.

“The more, the better” doesn’t work well for LLM visibility. Each of your brand mentions and associations should be consistent with how you want to be positioned in the training data.

On the plus side, having a narrow (but stable!) topical relevance can help you win over huge brands, like Amazon, when prompts call for specific needs or problems.

How to build topical authority for LLM visibility

1. Define your topical authority and differentiation

2. Find out what LLMs know about you

3. Start with what you own

4. Focus on authority-building content

5. Build relevant entity associations

01. Define your topical authority and differentiation

This is the first step and the most difficult one because not many brands give it enough thought: What do we want to be known for?

Take this step very seriously because it determines the rest of your marketing strategy.

• Which specific problems is my business solving?

  
  

• Who am I solving it for?

  
  

• What am I doing differently to solve those problems for my audience? (How am I different from my competitors?)

  
  

• What makes me an authority on those well-defined topics? (Years of expertise, specific experience, problems I solved for myself before creating a product, and so on.)

  
  

You cannot be vague here. And you cannot be good at everything. (Don’t make my mistakes!) You need a definitive digital footprint that is easy to understand.

For example, to fix my faulty training data that is skewed outside of SEO on many fronts (social media, community, and the like), I would need to adjust all of my digital footprint to emphasize the following:

• 20+ years of practical, first-hand SEO experience

• Building and executing answer engine optimization strategies since 2014

• Strong focus on long-term, ethical, and actionable SEO strategies

• Working with well-recognized SEO entities for two decades (Jim Boykin, Search Engine Journal, SEOchat, Moz, etc.). Associating yourself with relevant entities is crucial.

02. Find out what LLMs know about you

These days, all well-known LLM platforms default to searching. This means, when answering questions, they actively research online sources that may influence their answers.

In ChatGPT, you can prevent it from searching to find out what it actually knows about you:

• Type a brand-driven prompt, e.g., “Who is NAME” or “What does BRAND NAME do”

• Select the “Don’t search the web” option

  
  

This is how you’re positioned in the training data, which is a fundamental part that forms the answers’ narrative. Most LLMs “know” the answers and use online search to confirm what they already know. Unless your brand is positioned properly in the training data, you have low chances of being surfaced in answers.

You can clearly see what needs to be changed and what needs to be added. In my case, as it was well-expected based on my diverse SEO career, it clearly missed the “SEO topical authority” piece, which is the main reason for not surfacing me for prompts like “top SEO experts.”

In contrast, Aleyda Solis’ topical authority is much more consistent. It’s all about SEO, no diffusion here:

LLMs need to be confident when giving answers. While they can run searches to answer prompts better, the training data is fundamental to what they will search for.

All LLMs use the same sources for training data; that is, what people know (Common Crawl, Google’s index, online discussions, etc.). They can update their training data at different paces, but it’s pretty consistent from platform to platform. 

03. Start with what you own

So far, we’ve established two foundational pieces:

• How you want to be known

• What LLMs (in this case, ChatGPT) know about you

  
  

The following steps bridge the gap between the two.

Traditional SEO has never cared about brand information content. Having a detailed “About" page or “FAQ” would often come up as an SEO recommendation (for trust building, EEAT optimization, etc.), but there has never been a convincing case study or Google’s confirmation that it could directly help with rankings.

For LLMs, it’s one of the most important digital assets because they do prioritize the information a brand gives about itself on its official channels:

• Your website’s “About” and “FAQ” pages

• Your social media bios

• Your claimed business profiles and (for personal brands) your author bios

  
  

For AI visibility optimization and building topical authority, you need to tell LLMs exactly what your expertise is.

• Create a detailed but very clear “About” page describing what your business does, why it does it, and who it's serving. Add testimonials, link to your social media channels, and add Organization or Person schema (depending on who this page is about). LLMs may or may not use schema (depending on how they get to that page), but it doesn’t hurt.

  
  

• Update all your social media profiles to talk directly about your topical authority. You can use different wording because different social media platforms have different word limits for bios, but make sure the message is consistent everywhere. Your bios need to be factual (number of years in the industry, achievements, experience, associated entities, and so on).

  
  

• Add an FAQ page answering possible “fan-out” questions about your business. Gemini is a great tool to find those questions. ChatGPT is another option, too.

When answering questions or writing your About page, avoid fluff or too much creativity. Writing a poem about your career story is cool, but only if you also add factual bullet points for LLMs to pull the information from.

04. Focus on authority-building content (that can’t be easily summarized)

Context is key for LLMs.

In traditional SEO, we had the freedom to talk about anything without much fear of diluting our topical authority. You could write on different topics across different publications, change career paths or focus, but it wouldn’t have a direct impact on your site’s organic search visibility (rankings). This can be evidenced in the way that some high-authority sites experiment with parasite SEO to drive traffic and see little ill effects. 

With LLMs, focus is key. Keep talking about your niche, your core expertise, and new trends to your target audience.

But it’s not so much about creating 101-level content (even if it’s relevant). LLMs don’t need expert sources for that. 

Authority-building content is something that cannot be easily summarized for a “What is X” prompt. It's about the depth of your expertise, and it can be deep everywhere, from your site to your official channels.

• Come up with original research on a regular basis to be at the center of relevant discussions. Think: surveys, polls, and original data with your analysis.

  
  

• Re-share and curate deep, relevant content from your peers and related brands (and tag them). These engagements work in your favor because they strengthen your association with known entities.

  
  

• Share detailed case studies on how you (or your product) helped someone solve their specific problems. Problem-solution context helps LLMs understand the practical implications of your topical authority.

Kevin Indig explores this further in his piece 5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs.

05. Build relevant entity associations

This is a more challenging step, but probably the most important one in terms of moving the needle.

Being mentioned alongside your competitors has been essential for years (if you wanted to be part of Google’s Knowledge Graph). But it wasn’t required for organic search visibility, which relies on keywords and backlinks.

For LLMs, entity associations are everything.

Try prompting ChatGPT or Gemini for a high-intent query, like product or brand recommendations. In most cases, all the cited sources will be listicles.

LLMs cite and mention entities that show up in the same context, over and over again. They don’t remember brands themselves, but they know the statistical relationships between them. That’s how they know the two brands are relevant: when they keep appearing in the same articles.

Depending on your niche and business, you can build this entity co-occurrence by:

• Providing original commentary on topical events. Journalists actively seek experts to provide context and insight on newsworthy topics. Position yourself as a trustworthy source to boost your authority with inclusion in relevant publications.

  
  

• Appearing in podcasts or articles with other experts

  
  

• Sponsoring industry events (and being featured on the event page alongside other businesses)

  
  

• Claiming your business in niche directories. For example, G2 for SaaS, TripAdvisor for travel, and so on.

  
  

• Collaborating with niche experts on industry research studies

  
  

• Guest blogging for high-authority niche publications

Relevance and clarity: the two strongest signals for LLMs

Building topical authority takes time and effort, whether you are doing it for organic search or LLM visibility.

But building topical authority requires a different strategy if LLM visibility is your goal, because you need clear, relevant associations to earn visibility in AI answers.

Take some time with the first step in this article. Unless you clearly understand what you want to be known for, you cannot build a strategy. I'm not quite there myself, to be honest. But once you define your topical authority for yourself, it's just a matter of making sure your digital footprint reflects that.