Do I Need To Rethink My Content Strategy For LLMs?

For this week’s Ask An SEO, the question asked was:

“Do I need to rethink my content strategy for LLMs and how do I get started with that?”

To answer, I’m going to explain the non-linear journey down the customer journey funnel and where large language models (LLMs) show up.

From rethinking traffic expectations to conducting an audit on sentiment picked up by LLMs, I will talk about why brand identity matters in building the kind of reputation that both users and machines recognize as authoritative.

You can watch this week’s Ask An SEO video and read the full transcript below.

Editor’s note: The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and adherence to our editorial guidelines.

Don’t Rush Into Overhauling Your Strategy

Off the bat, I strongly advise not to rush into this. I know there’s an extreme amount of noise and buzz and advice out there on social media that you need to rethink your strategy because of LLMs, but this thing is very, very far from settled.

For example, or most notably, AI Mode is still not in traditional search results. When that happens, when Google moves the AI Mode tab from being a tab into the main search results, the whole ecosystem is set for another upheaval, whatever that looks like, because we don’t actually know what that will look like.

I personally think that Google’s Gemini demo (the one they did way, way back, where they showed customized results for certain types of queries with certain answer formats) might be what AI Mode ends up resembling more than what it does right now, which is purely a text-based output that sort of aligns with ChatGPT.

I think Google will differentiate those two products once it moves AI Mode over from the tab into the main search results. So, things are not settled yet. And if you think they’re not. They are not settled yet.

Rethinking Traffic Expectations From LLMs

The other thing I want you to rethink is the traffic expectations from LLMs.

There’s been a lot of talk about citations and traffic – citations and traffic, citations and traffic. I don’t think citations, and therefore traffic, are the main diamond within the LLM ecosystem. I believe mentions are. And I don’t think that’s anything really new, by the way.

Traditionally, the funnel has been messy, and Google’s been talking about that for a long time. Now, you have an LLM that may be a starting point or a step in that messy funnel, but I don’t believe it’s fundamentally different.

I’ll give you an example. If I’m looking for a pair of shoes, I might go to Google and search, [Are these Nike shoes any good?]. I might look at a website, then go to Amazon and look at the actual product.

Then I might go to YouTube, see a review of the product, maybe watch a different one, go back to Amazon, have a look, check Google Shopping to see if it’s cheaper there, and then head back to Amazon to buy it.

Now, you have…