The last thing you want when doing SEO work for clients is another reason to go back and redo pages you’ve already worked on. That’s one concern I see AI search create. You wonder if your prior SEO work requires another round of optimization.
No, optimizing for AI doesn’t mean starting over. Much of what makes a page useful for traditional search also gives AI tools better information to work with. The difference is in how those tools use the information.
ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity: you don’t need a separate rewrite every time you optimize for a new search experience. As you learn LLMO, you’ll find that much of the work starts with things you should already be getting right, like making pages accessible and keeping important information clear enough to understand on its own.
Treating SEO and LLMO as separate jobs is where some of the extra work comes from. If you’re already checking whether a page is accessible, understandable, and well-supported, you can build many LLMO requirements into the same work.
Why the Rework Cycle Keeps Happening
AI search can make work you’ve already finished feel unfinished. You optimized the page for Google, and now the client wants to know whether it will appear in ChatGPT or in an AI Overview. It’s tempting to go back through the page and start changing things.
You can leave much of that work alone. Google says pages don’t need special AI files or schema to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The same basic requirements that make a page eligible for Google Search also apply to those features.
ChatGPT SEO starts with access, not content. Check whether the client’s site allows ChatGPT’s search crawler in. OpenAI runs a separate crawler for model training. To allow ChatGPT search access, the client’s robots.txt needs to allow OAI-SearchBot specifically. Allowing one doesn’t mean you’ve allowed the other.
Google and ChatGPT aren’t the only tools pulling from the web. Perplexity and Bing Copilot are part of the same landscape. The access logic applies to each one. Every crawler has its own identifier in robots.txt, and a client who wants visibility across AI search tools needs to have access sorted separately for each one.
Before you change anything, check whether the client is already appearing in AI answers for relevant queries. Search for something they should show up for and see what comes back. If they’re appearing, you have a baseline. If they’re not, that’s useful information, but it doesn’t automatically mean the content needs a rewrite.
If access is the problem, rewriting content won’t help. But if the information is unclear, then you have something on the page worth fixing.
What LLMO Adds to Standard SEO
Work that matters for SEO also matters for LLMO, and you’re probably already doing a lot of it. You make pages easy to find, answer the searcher’s question, link related pages, and keep important information up to date. When learning SEO, start with these fundamentals before adding LLMO to the mix.
Here’s where LLMO diverges from standard SEO: how that information appears when an AI tool uses your page to answer someone else’s question. The answer may pull from one part of the page rather than present the whole thing. That means the information in that section needs to make sense without a lot of digging around. How you handle sourcing becomes more important when an AI tool may use your page to support an answer.
The Elements That Make a Page LLM-Ready
You can fold LLMO into the page optimization work you’re already doing. Here are four things to take care of before you finish:
- Be specific with important details. If you give a price, say which product or plan it belongs to. If you mention where a company operates, clearly name its service area. Important details should still make sense when an AI tool uses only part of the page.
- Source claims that need proof. Link a statistic or research finding back to its original source. Name the source when you quote someone. One major study on generative search found that citations, quotations, and statistics can improve visibility in generated answers.1
- Keep sections about one thing. Give the reader the answer, then explain it. There’s no established LLMO rule that every heading has to be a question or that the answer has to fit within a certain number of words.
- Use schema for its regular job. Add structured data when it’s appropriate for the page. Google explicitly states that you don’t need any special AI markup or schema to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
When AI Gets the Client Wrong
AI answers can change even when the client’s website doesn’t. A business might show up in an answer today and disappear from it later. Seeing a site cited once doesn’t mean the work is finished.
An AI tool may also get something wrong about the business. Before making any changes for AI, check the source page. Is the information accurate? Is it clear enough to support the answer? If the page is outdated or ambiguous, fix the problem there first.
Build It Into the Work
LLMO works best when it becomes part of how you already optimize pages, not a separate project you tack on later. When you’re working on a page, look for the things that could cause problems in both search and AI-generated answers. Fix them while you’re there. That’s how you reduce rework without turning every SEO project into two projects.
1https://authoritytech.io/blog/share-of-citation