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LLM SEO is the work of making your brand and your pages easy for AI assistants built on large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, to find, understand and cite when patients ask them health questions. You will also see it called LLM optimization or LLMO. Curve Compliance helps healthcare brands see how those assistants describe them and improve the pages they read: AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. The managed service is Curve AEO, where Curve's team handles the strategy and execution for you.
Want to see whether ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini name your brand when patients ask about the care you offer? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.
How LLM SEO differs from Google SEO
An assistant can know about your brand in two ways: from what it learned in training, and from pages it retrieves from the web when it answers. The companies document both. OpenAI says GPTBot crawls content "that may be used in training our generative AI foundation models," while "OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features" (OpenAI). Anthropic runs ClaudeBot for training and Claude-SearchBot for search, and says disabling Claude-SearchBot "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results" (Anthropic). Perplexity says PerplexityBot "is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models" (Perplexity).
Retrieval is where most LLM SEO work shows up, and it does not simply copy Google. OpenAI says ChatGPT search sometimes partners with other search providers, and when it does, it "typically rewrites your query into one or more targeted queries" that it sends those providers (OpenAI). In Ahrefs' study of 15,000 prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average, and 80% of those citations didn't rank anywhere in Google for the original query. Perplexity was highest at 28.6%, and the other assistants hovered around 8% (Ahrefs).
Search is not switched on for every answer, either. Semrush's clickstream data shows ChatGPT enabled web search on 34.5% of queries as of February 2026, down from 46% near the start of its study, and the share ranged from as low as 15% to as high as 66.3% over the study period (Semrush). Without a search, an assistant leans on what it learned in training, so your brand's presence across the web matters too.
LLM SEO by the numbers
Each figure is quoted from the publisher that ran the study, or from the GEO paper (arXiv).
| Finding | What it means for LLM SEO | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average (Perplexity 28.6%, the others around 8%) | Ranking in Google helps, but it is not the whole job | Ahrefs, 15,000 prompts |
| 37.9% of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 results | Google's own AI answers track its rankings more closely | Ahrefs, 863K keyword SERPs |
| In BrightEdge's data, healthcare has the highest AI Overview to top-10 overlap of nine industries, at approximately 24%, against about 17% across all industries | Studies measure overlap differently, and healthcare AI Overviews still cite many pages outside the top 10 | BrightEdge, nine industries |
| URLs cited by AI assistants are 25.7% fresher on average than URLs in Google's organic results | Real updates to key pages matter | Ahrefs, 17 million citations |
| YouTube mentions show the strongest correlation with AI visibility (about 0.737); number of site pages, about 0.194 | Mentions of your brand elsewhere track with visibility more than page count does | Ahrefs, 75,000 brands |
| ChatGPT enabled web search on 34.5% of queries as of February 2026 | Training data and live retrieval both shape answers | Semrush, US clickstream |
| 50% to 83% of citations are gone the next day; about 75% of those come back within 20 days | Judge visibility over many checks, not one | Ahrefs, about 37,500 citations |
| Keyword stuffing offered little to no improvement in generative engine responses | Old SEO habits don't carry over | Aggarwal et al., GEO-bench, 10,000 queries |
Why LLM SEO matters for healthcare brands
Patients already bring health questions to these tools at scale. OpenAI said in July 2026 that more than 300 million people turn to ChatGPT with health-related questions every week (OpenAI), and it says ChatGPT now serves more than 1 billion weekly active users (OpenAI).
They use them to choose care, too. In rater8's 2026 survey, 47% of patients said they had used an AI tool to research healthcare providers, up from 31% in 2025, and among patients who searched for a new doctor, AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude were cited as an influence by 36% of searchers, ahead of Google search results at 34% and doctor referrals at 32% (rater8). West Health-Gallup found that among recent AI health users, 61% used general chatbots such as ChatGPT or Copilot, and 55% used AI tools built into web search, such as Google's AI summaries (Gallup).
The clicks are still small, which is why many teams miss the shift. Conductor found AI referrals were 0.64% of all website traffic in the health care industry, and that ChatGPT drives 83.8% of that AI referral traffic (Conductor). In Semrush's U.S. clickstream data, outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to the rest of the web grew 206% in 2025 (Semrush).
Accuracy is part of LLM SEO in healthcare
Being named is half the job. The answer also has to be right. Among patients who had used AI to research providers, 66% said they had encountered incorrect provider information from an AI tool, such as wrong addresses, phone numbers, insurance details or office hours (rater8). On medical questions, Stanford researchers found that between 50% and 90% of LLM responses were not fully supported, and sometimes contradicted, by the sources they cited (Nature Communications).
The response is the same in both cases: state your facts plainly on your own pages, keep them current, and have clinicians review anything medical. See what to do when AI gets your practice wrong.
An LLM SEO plan for a healthcare brand
- Let the search crawlers in. Allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, then check that your firewall or CDN doesn't block them. OpenAI's help center says that to make a site eligible, you should "allow OAI-Searchbot to crawl the site and confirm that the website host or content delivery network allows traffic from OpenAI's published searchbot IP addresses" (OpenAI). Training crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot are a separate decision. See which AI crawlers a healthcare site should allow.
- Put your facts in plain text. Services, locations, providers, hours and the insurance you take belong in the text of your own pages, not only in images, PDFs or scripts. Google lists "Making sure that important content is available in textual form" among the basics for its AI features (Google). See how to optimize a healthcare website for AI search.
- Answer the questions patients ask, with evidence. In the GEO study, adding citations, quotations and statistics achieved a relative improvement of 30% to 40% on the researchers' benchmark, measured with the paper's Position-Adjusted Word Count metric, a measure of visibility inside the answer, and visibility improvements of up to 37% in a test on Perplexity (Aggarwal et al.). See AEO content for healthcare.
- Update pages for real. Ahrefs found AI assistants cite URLs that are 25.7% fresher on average than Google's organic results (Ahrefs). Google asks site owners whether they are "changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed" (Google), so change the date when the content changes.
- Earn genuine mentions. Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found branded web mentions correlate highly with AI visibility, at 0.66 to 0.71, while the number of pages on a site showed almost no relationship; Ahrefs adds that correlation isn't causation (Ahrefs). Google says seeking inauthentic mentions "across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem" (Google). Press coverage, clinician interviews and useful videos are the honest version of this work.
- Measure across assistants, over time. Ahrefs tracked about 37,500 citations and found 50% to 83% were gone the next day, though about 75% of those came back within 20 days (Ahrefs). Track the same patient questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features over weeks. See AEO tracking for healthcare.
LLM SEO, GEO and AEO: one job, several names
LLM SEO, LLMO, generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) all describe the same goal: being found, named and cited in AI answers. Google's position is that "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO" (Google). For the distinctions people draw, see AEO vs GEO vs SEO and generative engine optimization for healthcare.
What to skip
- Special AI files for Google. Google says you don't need "new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown" to appear in Google Search, including its generative AI features, and that Google Search ignores llms.txt files; other services may read them (Google). See llms.txt for healthcare sites.
- A page for every phrasing. Google says creating content for every variation of a query "primarily to manipulate rankings or generative AI responses in Google Search violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy" (Google).
How Curve Compliance helps
AI Visibility is a feature in Curve Compliance, and Curve also offers it as a managed service. In Curve, the feature is called AI Visibility (AEO), and the managed service is Curve AEO. Introducing Curve AEO: a service that helps you understand how your brand appears in AI search, with a team that handles the strategy and execution for you.
What You Get with Curve AEO:
- AI Visibility Tracking. See how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers.
- Optimize Your Site for AI. We make technical improvements that help AI assistants find, read, and understand your content.
- Competitive Insights. Understand who's getting recommended instead of you.
- Content Roadmap. Identify gaps and prioritize opportunities to improve performance.
With the managed service, Curve's team sets up your questions, competitors and topics, writes the pages on your roadmap, and makes the technical fixes that help AI assistants read your site. Your clinicians review and approve anything medical before it goes live. Each month, Curve's team walks you through your results on a call and sends a one-page report. Curve's team turns those insights into action: building your strategy, creating and optimizing content, and tracking progress.
In one AI Visibility program we've run, for a HIPAA-focused healthcare software brand, AI assistants named or cited the brand in more than half of their answers to its 40 core buyer questions about five weeks in. Across 184 buyer questions, its site was cited in more AI answers than any competitor's, more than 2.5 times as many as the nearest one.
AI Visibility shows where competitors are named and you aren't, who leads each topic, and which sources AI cites. It's built for healthcare: only the marketing question you track is sent to AI assistants, screened for PHI first, and never anything about a patient. Curve is SOC 2 Type II and signs a BAA on every plan. Built for healthcare marketers, Curve connects the entire patient funnel in one platform: paid ads, web analytics, and now AI search. See AI Visibility in Curve. AI Visibility is available on request: book a call to get started.
Sources (checked November 6, 2026): OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI Crawlers; OpenAI Help Center, Searching the web with ChatGPT; Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web; Perplexity, Perplexity Crawlers; Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features (updated July 10, 2026); Google Search Central, AI features and your website; Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content; Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024); Ahrefs, Only 12% of AI Cited URLs Rank in Google's Top 10 (August 11, 2025); Ahrefs, Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10 (March 2, 2026); BrightEdge, AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark (February 12, 2026); Ahrefs, AI Assistants Prefer to Cite Fresher Content (July 28, 2025); Ahrefs, Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (December 12, 2025); Ahrefs, How Stable Are AI Citations? (October 29, 2026); Semrush, ChatGPT traffic analysis (updated April 7, 2026); OpenAI, Launching Health in ChatGPT (July 2026); OpenAI, A milestone in expanding access to AI (August 31, 2026); rater8, 2026 Patient Choice Report; Gallup, Americans Turning to AI to Supplement Healthcare Visits (April 14, 2026); Conductor, Health Care Industry: 2026 AEO / GEO Benchmarks; Wu et al., Nature Communications (April 16, 2025); Alphabet, Q3 2026 earnings call remarks from the CEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is LLM SEO?
LLM SEO is the work of making your brand and pages easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to find, understand and cite. It is also called LLM optimization or LLMO.
How do you do LLM search optimization?
Let search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot reach your site, publish clear, sourced pages that answer the questions patients ask, keep them current, and track how assistants answer over time.
Is LLM SEO different from SEO?
It builds on SEO but isn't the same. Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, Ahrefs found only 12% of cited links ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt on average (Ahrefs), so strong rankings alone don't mean assistants will cite you.
Does llms.txt help LLM SEO?
Not for Google, which says Google Search ignores llms.txt files (Google). Some other services may read them, so treat the file as optional.
Should a healthcare site block GPTBot or ClaudeBot?
That is a choice about model training, separate from search. OpenAI and Anthropic run separate search crawlers, OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot, so you can limit training crawlers and still allow search (OpenAI, Anthropic).
Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?
Evolving. Google said in its Q3 2026 earnings remarks that its year-over-year query growth rate is the highest it's been in the last five years (Google), and the work now covers AI answers as well as links.
How do you measure LLM SEO?
Track the questions patients ask across assistants and read three numbers over time: mention rate (how often AI answers name you), citation rate (how often they cite your site) and share of voice (your share of the mentions among the brands you compete with). AI Visibility in Curve Compliance shows them for the questions your patients ask.
Can Curve run LLM SEO for us?
Yes. Curve AEO is the managed service: Curve's team builds your strategy, creates and optimizes content, and tracks progress, and your clinicians approve anything medical before it goes live.
Talk to Curve Compliance
Want to see how AI assistants answer your patients' questions about your brand today? Book a call to see AI Visibility on your own questions, or to talk about the managed service.