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Is Google SEO the past?

My thoughts on how to future-proof your brand for the LLM Era. Every marketing team I speak to is still investing predominantly  in Google: * SEO strategies fighting for Page 1 or Result 1 * ...

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My thoughts on how to future-proof your brand for the LLM Era.

Every marketing team I speak to is still investing predominantly  in Google:

  • SEO strategies fighting for Page 1 or Result 1

  • PPC budgets bloated with branded terms

  • Content plans optimised for keywords

Meanwhile, the way people actually discover answers is changing fast.

LLMs have changed the game

People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini to:

  • Recommend products

  • Summarise comparisons

  • Explain options

  • Make decisions

This shift means the SERP (search engine results page) is no longer the gateway. The answer is.

What this means for your website

If your site is only designed to rank, you could become invisible.

How Google measures value (Core Signals):

Google rewards pages that:

  • Match search intent with on-page keywords

  • Attract backlinks from high-authority domains

  • Load fast and work well on mobile (Core Web Vitals)

  • Generate high engagement (click-through rate, low bounce)

These are external, behavioural signals: Google waits to see how users interact.

How LLMs infer value:

LLMs surface sources that:

  • Provide clear, factual, well-structured information

  • Use consistent schema and entity naming

  • Repeat meaningful patterns that models can rely on

  • Appear across trusted domains (Wikipedia, Reddit, GitHub)

These are internal, semantic signals: LLMs decide based on the quality of the content itself, not how people react to it.

That’s the core shift: from popularity >>  reliability.

If your site is designed to answer, you’ll be surfaced, cited, and integrated into LLM responses.

LLMs don’t rank pages.

They read, summarise, cross-reference, and infer.

They care about:

  • Structured data (JSON-LD, schema.org)

  • Clean facts (bullet points, specs, summaries)

  • Entity clarity (What is this? Where? How much?)

  • Repetition and reliability

They don’t care about:

  • Keyword density

  • Bounce rate

  • Page speed

  • Link-building gimmicks

So how do you optimise for LLMs?

Start thinking like a data provider, not a content marketer.

Here’s what that looks like:

  • Use structured schemas (Dataset, Product, SoftwareApplication)

  • Publish JSON or CSV summaries of your data

  • Make your pages machine-readable — consistent, semantic, specific

  • Add ai.txt to tell AI crawlers where your datasets live

  • Focus on facts, not fluff. Answer the question clearly.

Instead of:

“Top 10 EVs for 2025”

Try:

A table of all EVs under £30k, updated monthly, with range, battery size, and price — in JSON, HTML and CSV

Why we took this seriously at Marketcheck

We sell real-time automotive data to OEMs, finance companies, dealer groups, and investment firms — not consumers. 

Our message is lost in all the automotive consumer content. 

So instead of trying to rank or compete with consumer automotive websites, we focused on how LLMs could discover our data.

We published structured, factual summaries like this:

https://marketcheck.uk/market-analysis/uk-weekly-used-car-market-data-31st-may-2025

These pages are optimised to be used in answers — not read like blogs. They may not look exciting or interesting to you but….

The result? 

Over 30% of our inbound leads for automotive data now come via ChatGPT and Perplexity, and they’re higher-quality than anything we get from PPC.

What you can do today

  1. Identify what your company knows that LLMs might use.

  2. Make that data structured, clear, and crawlable.

  3. Build content for agents and tools — not just humans.

  4. Track who’s discovering you from AI, not just Google.

A note on expertise in the LLM era

There are no true “AIO” (AI Optimisation) experts - I am certainly not claiming any expertise. 

This is a new frontier.

Most SEO expertise today is based on:

  • Iterating on known Google patterns

  • Following what has worked for others

  • Building backlinks, writing keyword-rich content, improving load speed

But LLMs don’t use those rules. So anyone claiming to be an LLM visibility expert is experimenting — just like you could.

This creates a rare window: a level playing field where early adopters and smart explorers can get ahead without needing domain authority or legacy traffic.

If your organisation can test, learn, and structure its content faster than others, you can become the trusted source LLMs lean on.

Final Thought: Be the Answer, Not the Ad

SEO isn’t dead. But it’s no longer enough.

If you’re building your content, website, and brand purely for Google’s rules, you’re already behind.

The next wave of discovery belongs to those who understand:

LLMs don’t show links. They show answers (with links). Make sure it’s your answer.