What Drives Visibility in LLM-Powered Search | SE Ranking’s 1M-Query Study (BrightonSEO US 2025)

I hope you're already set up for for as experiences from all the conversations today and and yesterday. So without a further ado, let's me do the quick intro about myself. I Mike Korenugin. I am in director of product here at SE Ranking. I've been in deeply in saas for over 10 years, but also I did digital marketing for about 3 years at an agency, which kind of helps me understand the day-to-day issues that you guys are facing. And SE Ranking is has been around for about 12 years now. It all started really all the way back in 2013 with just bio people working on a very simple rank tracking tool. But the thing is that our vision and the dream was always much much bigger. We were working on is we want to create a future where growing your businesses online with the tech is much easier than it is today. And that's why today we are over 200 people strong. We have eight global hubs across the world and we offer one of the one of the most comprehensive SEO platforms. On top of that, recently we started to offering three more products where one of them is a social

media management Planable. The other one is our data pie that help you build your own research in matter of seconds if you're connecting that with MCP for ChatGPT for example and our AI Search visibility solution SE Visible. The reason we're working on these three I think should be fairly evident to all of you with with all the previous conversations but we're also going to go over live the scenarios to you over the coming minutes. The topic of today's talk as you see it on the screen what drives visibility in LLM powered search in the US but rather instead of focusing on mentions and you getting a mentions of your brand in Chat GPT and AI Mode what we looked into is what drives what are the key factors that are making your brand your website becoming a source or the answer and that's what we're going to be focusing on you might have already seen or heard or read a lot of our previous research articles so the past two years published over a good dot up a few dozen of research pieces and this is our latest one. And just for fun of it, so it's more relatable,

I decided to make the focus of the stock the shoes us. Let's imagine that we are developing a company who's selling shoes and through that lens, we're going to be experiencing this talk. You know the drill, how it used to be just a decade ago. Your your parapit buyer, what it does, it goes to Google, it types in the kind of shoes they're looking for. Your goal is to make sure that your website appears in top 10, ideally top three. But the thing is that over the past five years or even the last two years, that's no longer the case with many many things impacting that. But before I sort of what are the things that are impacting that, maybe you can help me out and show me that you're alive and listening and telling me what is that one word that in the industry that we both heard the most over the last two years. Come on, Peter. AI. Yeah. Exactly. AI. Yeah. That beast has been driving the hype train with past two years for sure and created a lot of change for all of us. Yeah. One more. I promise. I promise. Just the last question. And what is that prediction that you probably all heard the most over the past two years or maybe even more. SEO

is dead. Yeah, that's that's probably SEO is dead. But obviously it's not the case because all of us are still here, right? And we have our jobs. So let's figure out what's really going on. The thing is that we at SE Ranking we've been doing deep research on LLM search capabilities over the past two years. Ever since Google has introduced them called search generative experiences that what we now know as data overviews and when O pen AI introduced their boil GPT search back then we'll also run a research from that on that and now we have one of the most comprehensive data sets on AI surge evolution and trends today and what we're going to go through is some of the caveats of what we learn. So let's start with the elephant in the room. I know a lot of people are concerned and just thinking if it's even worth investing into AI because Google is still so big in organic, right? What you can see here is that yeah, it still owns 93% of all the organic traffic and maybe dropped like 1.75% over the past 2 years, but it's still the big one and the only one that we should care

about probably. Yes, ChatGPT and Perplexity, they've made some gains and others too, but they seem modest. Although if you dig deeper, what happens is when websites remain higher in AI Search, what would happen is their direct traffic is going to grow too and it's going to become much higher quality. And what what happens there is typically people when they get their AI answers, they they go through it as research, right? And so once they've made up their mind, they'll just open your website directly. That's why you won't necessarily see that in referrals. But also since organic doesn't tell the full story, we have to figure out how do we find out like what what really matters like why do we call Casera still and these numbers over here might help you a bit in understanding like what is the what is the volume of queries at these per day and Google is still it's still the beginning they have about 80% of all the queries and even if we consider the fact that for in AI search roughly half of all the prompts make the question like cor that is more related to search AI search is already at 10% of all the search queries which is

big. It is something that I care about. So let me make my case to you. We at SE Ranking believe and probably something that you've heard from a lot of other speakers is that the internet right now is experiencing fragmentation in search like never before. And this new wave of personalization is and change is obviously powered by AI and AI agents. There's one more thing that we have to add to this is that yes over the past I guess five years maybe a bit more search has also been changing because a lot of people started searching on YouTube, Tik Tok and other platforms where the content is different where the user generated content probably they feel like it's more relatable and the teams behind LLMs know that damn well too. That's why you see here these numbers where YouTube is one of the most cited websites by both Chat GPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. And when it comes to Chad GPT specifically, it loves all kinds of user generated content including YouTube, but also Reddit that's so big right now, Wikipedia, Tik Tok, and others.

And with the fairly recent news of Instagram making their stories and reals search indexable, I guess there's no other way for us but to admit the fact that we we have to expand our inbound efforts from traditional SEO to social and AI. Basically what this slide tells you is that we no longer have this that luxury of a straightforward algorithm where we can only care about bullying. Right now we got to make sure that we're visible. where are our potential buyers are which is traditional search yeah it's still big and it's important but also LLM chats and also social and AI agents that's everything that we should care about I guess now with that set up we can approach the the how so what do we really do how we sell this these goddamn shoes I'm going to answer that in a moment just a bit about the methodology of what we did here we have picked about a million of different keywords And we ran them through ChatGPT and AI Mode. For each response, we took all the

sources which is like a few million different sources and we rar against a panel of more than 50 different on-page and off- page factors. After that we applied shap method. Essentially this is like machine learning technique which called sharply editor explanations method. What it does is it helps us assess the relative weight of each factor against your likelihood of becoming a source for ChatGPT or AI Mode. And so each factor has a relative weight which we're going to dive into. And there's also going to be a bonus spark bonus section. We've explored the volatility of AI Mode or basically how unstable it is in returning different domains and URLs for the same grip. All of this data has been prepared exclusively for Brighton SEO US and it's fresh as a middle VRS. This slide is essentially it. I guess it might be a bit hard to read, but these are the top 20 factors on page and off page or ChatGPT and AI mode. We could have called it a day right here, I guess. But uh yeah, I suggest you you take a quick picture and we dive into what are these

messy hearts actually mean. Let's start with the unique taste of AI Mode. AI Mode, it has a few parameters, a few factors that are unique to it. I'm going to name them two so it's a bit easier. The first one at the top that's highlighted is brand search volume. This is our proxy for your brand mentions overall. And what we believe is that AI Mode basically cares about your brand being talked about. That's actually something you need to a mode as opposed to ChatGPT. There are also a few factors here that you might have already heard of which is content fashions is like the how recently your content has been updated or published is a really big deal to AI Mode. And then there's also one more piece or there two. The first one is the presence in top 10 at Google is obviously a big deal for AI Node. And another one here that's interesting is that Google is focusing on a individual page backlink profile page trust and all of that while to the conscious of Chat GPT who's more focused on your overall domain trust on their overall backlink profile. That's like one

of the big findings here. I'd say another thing that's unique about ChatGPT compared to AI Mode is that it's more sensitive to the technical factors to your website speed. The names and metrics are essentially like first contental paint or your overall speed indexes. These are the things that are unique in ChatGPT. One more thing that it takes into account that is that did not make to the task for a network is um your presence on review plants. Surprisingly, there are also quite a few factors that are present for both platforms. what are valid barrier I've kind of already started pairing this you can see here that the the total number of referring domains is a much bigger deal for ChatGPT compared to any so back to a point of chuk we're focusing on your overall website pro back profile domain trust and a mode focusing more on the individual page here what's interesting about AI mode is at the the top two item there is the content life AI mode

really loves it when your content is rich when there's a really long article. So based through all long range are back and kicking for egg that's the thing I would have to say most of the factors are shared across the the systems and their value very similarly so to make all of these factors a bit easier to comprehend and act upon because I know this might not even be visible to all of you. We assembled them into four categories with a few tips for how you up with that. The first two categories, we coupled them together. They are your domino tower and authority and brand power. Essentially, what's here is your overall total domain traffic, including that direct traffic that we talked about. It's your mentions across the across the web and it's your backlink profile. So, these are the factors to put it on slide that's a bit easier to read. There it is. Essentially, the more your brand is out there in a variety of channels, the higher the chances of you getting silent, becoming a source for both ChatGPT and AI Mode. What we at SE Ranking believe is that

to succeed with that, you want to make sure that your SEO brand and social teams work together. That's what we do ourselves. They had for us in our team SEO brand and social teams they have a shared set of KPIs that they work on together and all of the work from technical SEO to content to social to PR is all part of a single motion and that's the way you succeed in AI Search there's obviously a less fancy category less innovative that doesn't require any kind of organization or change to succeed which is technical SEO again if you need it easier to read just free basic like Mondays shoes a you want to make sure your website is fast or basically pay attention to core web vitals or use lighthouse or something that will tell you getting in the green there is essentially what you want number two you want to make your URLs user friendly so include keywords making make them human readable that's something that should both ChatGPT and AI Mode care about

and number three is you want to take care of the title and description because both title and description are the first grammars that will be taken by these systems into a found when they're evaluating which source to to pick. This might sound a bit controversial, but the thing is that we didn't find any significant impact or schema or LLMDC on you becoming a stores in AI Mode or ChatGPT. Maybe that's not the case for mentions, but for citations, this is definitely not as important. The error is new, right? It's it's AI search for your old but bold technical SEO methods are still there and steal your trusty friend. Don't neglect it. And the last and not least is content optimization. I've already talked about how for AI mode content length is a much bigger reveal than it is for ChatGPT. But then they also have a lot in common. They all care about you covering all the topics and subtopics within a single article really deeply.

They all care about your content being fresh. They all want you to have clear questions in headings and even more clear answers in the content. And for AI Mode specifically, ranking in the top 10 is a big deal too. When it comes to keywords in the content, this is not as important as in traditional SEO rank. So just an exact keyword not is not is not going to cut it. You want to use the query finale. There are plenty of tools out there and you want to make sure that you cover as many different variations of these questions that people are asking within the contest and bonus part I was talking about AI Mode volatility. So what it means is essentially when you put the same cron into a mo three times in a row the sources are going to be different and the numbers that you're seeing like 85.3% that means that you three three times you put on the same query 85% of the domains are going to be different in the results. So the sources they're using are going to be very different. When you're searching on the US level, which is not really what a lot of people

would do with the US level 18, not a particular sale, the download volatility is crazy. Like just 15% domains, not even URLs dings stay the same. When you compare the metrics between three different cities, you will see the volatility drop to 75%. And if you look within just a single city, you see the 65% number. And only if you add the actual name of the location into the query downline volatility drops to I guess more or less acceptable 44%. What we believe is happening here is Google is still learning from us from people who search what kind of content provides better response and they're calling from a huge range of sources depending on the location you're in. And so the what you want want to do with this is not just focus on having some kind of backlinks but also focus on on getting PR and support locally because when your your customers are going

to be in different cities in different states and Google is going to be calling from a different list of domains in different locations. On top of it, Google really trusts their own content more than anything. And roughly 9% or more than 9% of all the links, all the sources in AI Mode are Google business profiles, Google maps profiles. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that yours is looking sharp to get your like nook of getting sighted high. I guess that's it with the numbers and let's just sum it up really quickly. There are four categories of factors that you want to care about when it comes to optimizing for AI Search. There's domain authority and brand power. Essentially, your total traffic, the direct traffic, right? Where is your backlink pop out? How many good pages you had, right? How many mentions you have across the web bring you back on social? There's obviously Tech SEO, how fast the website is, how well your URLs are optimized and then obviously content optimization with those longer articles are rich in content. Yeah,

the internet is obviously going through a lot of change right now. Search is changing. The way people search is changing and the attitude or rather not the attitude but what we want to do to paraphrase the famous marketeer Seth Godin AI is not a threat for us, it's an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, selling shoes is. I hope you don't mind me butchering the famous phrase like this but um that's the mentality that we all need to have to win in these new AI search era if you guys are interested in how we use SE Rankings schools to get the data for this research or how we can help you navigate these changes. Meet us at the booth number 21 that's right outside the door. Hit me up on LinkedIn. You can also find this research that we've just published and many others on our blog if you don't have the time to meet us in person. Thank you everybody for coming.