The Recipe Brands Use to Rank in LLMs

Imagine you’ve just published a beautiful new page on your website, expecting new visibility and a wave of buyers.

One problem. Many of your target users are turning to ChatGPT or Gemini, and your brand never gets mentioned. Not once. The shortlist appears, and you are invisible.

This is the new migraine for SaaS and technology companies. 

Across the board, even the strongest brands are seeing fewer impressions, weaker citations, and lost opportunities when AI answers replace search clicks.

At MADX, we have developed several strategies to stay ahead in the early days of AI-powered organic search.

What We'll Cover

Key Insights and Definitions

• LLMs: Large language models are the powerhouse behind platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini (and Google's AI Overviews). 
• Generative AI: Uses the LLMS to understand user search queries and generate summaries or direct answers within the conversation box or on the search results. 
• AI search: When people search for information through an AI platform instead of a traditional search engine.
• AI mentions vs. citations: AI tools more often mention brands by name than link out to sources. For example, ChatGPT mentions brands over three times more frequently than it cites web sources.
• Current AI landscape: Different AI platforms behave differently. Google’s AI-generated search results list about 6 brands per query, while ChatGPT averages 2.4.
• Why this matters: AI-based search is rapidly growing, and users tend to trust the human-like, conversational answers from AI tools.
• Strategies for optimization: To secure AI brand mentions, companies must combine strong SEO fundamentals with a targeted LLM strategy.

How to Win Mentions and Citations From AI Assistants

Let’s start with what you are optimizing for.

AI assistants compress the web into niche-specific answers. They prefer brands and sources that are easy to trust, easy to explain, and easy to reuse. That means you are optimizing for two outcomes.

• Mentions: The assistant says your name when it recommends solutions.
• Citations: The assistant credits your page or a respected third‑party page as evidence.

Mentions create consideration. Citations create confidence. You want both, because buyers move faster when they hear your name and see a clean source attached to it.

Users will often Google your brand name after seeing your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. This is why the SEO/AI synergy is essential for this strategy to shine.

How AI Decides What to Mention

Think of three channels that converge inside every answer.

1. Model memory: What the model already knows from its training data.
2. Retrieval: What the assistant pulls in real time from the web to justify an answer.
3. Reputation: What people say in public spaces that the model reads, summarizes, and repeats. 

You cannot control the ocean, but you can shape the river inflows. 

Each of the steps below strengthens at least one river, usually two. Do the work consistently, and the current starts to carry your brand.

Check the source for each result. 

Take SaaS SEO Agencies. This is a professional field with serious players.

• MADX Digital
• Titan Growth
• Smash Digital
• BreakingB2B

Healthy competition is a gift. It proves the demand is real, and it sets a visible standard for quality. 

Your goal is to pass that standard, then compound growth over time.

Create one authoritative page that explains your brand to both people and models. 

This is your LLM Page. It is the single source of truth that everything else points to, and it is boring on purpose because clarity is the feature.

What to include

• Short company story covering cold facts
• List all the products and/or services
• Defined target market
• Three to five use cases with crisp outcomes.
• Integrations, security, and compliance notes
• Compact FAQ that mirrors real prompts and objections
• Links to press, reviews, and case studies
• Visible “last updated” date
• Make it canonical & crawlable

How to format

• Plain semantic HTML
• Descriptive headings and short paragraphs
• Indexable text
• No critical images
• Light FAQ or How‑To schema

Why it matters

LLMs need a clean anchor. Editors need a canonical description when they mention you. Sales needs one link that always tells the truth. When this page is solid, it lowers friction everywhere and makes every later citation easier to win.

What we did

We built the LLM Page for MADX. It standardizes our language, anchors media and partner references, and gives assistants a safe page to cite. It's a simple page with big leverage.

When buyers ask for recommendations, LLMs often reply with short lists. 

“Top tools.” “Best agencies.” “Alternatives to X.” Lists drive attention. Write them well and they become reference objects that the web cites and models reuse. If lists are part of your content optimization strategy, they should be. 

On your site

• Publish balanced listicles for your category
• Include competitors by name and explain who they are for
• State the criteria up front so the reader understands the frame
• Add a compact comparison table
• Close with a buyer’s checklist that helps with the next step
• Refresh quarterly so the page never feels stale
• Here’s a MADX example

On other sites

• Offer expert quotes and original data
• Provide clean descriptions and media assets so editors can include you quickly
• Respect editorial voice. No sales copy in borrowed homes
• Here’s a MADX example of a list on another site

Biased lists alienate editors and models. Balanced lists earn citations, and balanced lists get shared by the very people you hope to serve.

What we did for our agency

We create content like listicles that are useful and fair. Publishers cite them. We see them in LLM rankings and citations. AI assistants pick them up. Our name sits in the company we want to keep, which is the real win.

Models respect consensus. Consensus forms when the same useful idea shows up in multiple quality homes. Use syndication (getting the same piece of content published on other websites) to create that pattern without spamming the web.

The loop

• Take the list published on your site
• Hire a content syndication service (You could also do it yourself, but that’s going to be very laborious. Hire a service. Save time. Create disproportionate returns.)
• Watch your list get syndicated across hundreds of media outlets

Your content is already strong. Syndicated volume is the next step. The consistency across placements is the signal that travels farthest.

What we did

At MADX, we syndicate carefully. The ideas travel, and because the language matches, our name travels with them.

Backlinks matter. 

For ranking, for discovery, and for the subtle signal that your ideas are traveling through respected networks. Focus on editorial links earned with content that teaches, not content that shouts.

What earns links reliably

• Backlink web outreach
• Good research content
• Expert explainers
• Case studies with real strategy plans and outcomes
• Thoughtful guest essays that add a missing perspective
• Partnership stories that show substance, not just logos

Avoid low‑quality link schemes. This is the road into oblivion.

They pollute your brand’s footprint and leave traces that models might carry forward. Your goal is to create a link graph that feels natural and clusters your name with credible domains.

What we did

We publish research and points of view that editors want to reference. The result is a backlink profile with context, not just a count. Mentions follow, and citations become easier to earn.

Public forums are a strong ranking factor in the eyes of LLMs because they hold the raw, unfiltered questions the market actually asks. 

They also get scraped to train AI models, summarized, and quoted.

Start with Reddit and Quora. Choose threads where you can help. Write like a human. Disclose your role. If a competitor is a better fit in that case, say so. Use links sparingly and only when they genuinely help.

You are not planting ads. You are contributing answers. Over time, those answers and the organic replies they attract become part of the public conversation the models learn from.

What we did

We participate consistently. We have brand mentions on Reddit and Quora that we did not force. They happen because we’re being relevant and helpful. That is the only durable way to do community work.

You cannot improve what you do not measure. That’s where brnd monitoring comes in 

Get a prompt tracking tool to see what assistants say today and how answers change after you earn links.

What you should track: 

• Buyer prompts for your category
• Comperitor brands
• Often cited sources
• The order of mentions
• Movements after your content or PR goes live

Run the list monthly across the major assistants. Keep it simple. A spreadsheet is fine at first. 

Then migrate to a software solution designed to track your visibility across models.

Patterns appear faster than you think, and the gaps tell you precisely what to build next.

What we did

We use prompt tracking as an operating rhythm. 

It informs our briefs, guides our outreach, and shows whether our name is gaining ground. It turns opinion into a signal.

Pick a tight set of KPIs that describe reality, not vanity.

• AI share of voice for your core prompts.
• Citation coverage across your own pages and friendly third‑party sources.
• Source quality by domain and editorial relevance.
• Community velocity is measured by the number of helpful answers shipped, not link drops.
• Editorial backlink wins per quarter with context notes.
• Freshness score for key URLs reviewed in the last 90 days.
• Consistency score for resolved fact conflicts across profiles.

Review monthly. Make one improvement per metric per cycle. Compounding is the strategy.

Shortcuts feel tempting. They also leave stains that last.

• Do not buy low‑quality links.
• Do not stuff communities with random brand mentions.
• Do not publish biased, low-quality lists
• Do not invent “research”
• Do not allow fact conflicts to linger across profiles
• Do not block reputable crawlers without a policy reason

Choose craft over tricks. The models and the market both notice.

Your bottom line will thank you.

Back to the First Prompt

AI assistants are rewriting how people discover brands. 

You can publish quality pages, but remain unseen if you don’t adapt. Traditional SEO will only take you so far.

With the right mix of SEO (search engine optimization) fundamentals and LLM-specific strategy, invisibility is not permanent.

We built the LLM Visibility system at MADX to solve the migraine of disappearing traffic. It works because it’s simple, structured, and repeatable: a crawlable site, credible backlinks, quality content. Plus, the LLM layer includes digest pages, listicles, syndication, and prompt tracking. 

Combine the two, and LLMs will notice you.