Search in 2025 is no longer a single battlefield – you now have two discovery channels to contend with.
Traditional search engines and AI (artificial intelligence) answer engines; both influence how people find and trust your brand, but they behave in very different ways.
SEO – still essential, still competitive
Traditional SEO (search engine optimisation) has not disappeared. Google and Bing continue to use ranking signals such as site speed, backlinks, metadata and content relevance. If you want organic traffic, you still need fast pages, clear topics, solid internal linking and helpful content that answers the user’s question.
In practical terms, if you publish a “how to” guide on a topic in your industry, for example, SEO determines whether your article appears anywhere near page one. Titles, structure, entity usage and overall site authority all influence whether the search engines reward you with clicks.
You cannot skip this either, as strong SEO creates visibility, credibility and a steady flow of users who are still clicking on organic results every day.
LLM optimisation – the new layer you cannot ignore
AI assistants and answer engines work differently. They do not list results. They summarise information from their training data and deliver a single answer. This means your content must be written in a way that models can understand, trust and cite.
LLM (large language model) optimisation focuses on clarity, simplicity, structured formatting, updated content and strong demonstrations of expertise. Models prioritise clean explanations, consistent headings, question-based sections, named entities and credible authors. If the content feels chaotic or unclear, it gets ignored.
A good piece of content now needs to serve two purposes. It needs enough SEO structure to rank on Google and enough semantic clarity to be surfaced inside AI answers. If you get both right, your brand appears in front of users even when no click occurs at all.
Why both matter
More users rely on AI powered tools for research. If your content is not readable for both search engines and language models, you lose visibility in the fastest growing discovery channel of the decade.
If you want your website and content to perform across Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI systems, speak to Engage Web. We can help you optimise your content for real people, search engines and the models that now shape buying decisions.
- Can poor grammar stop your website appearing in AI Overviews? - December 5, 2025
- SEO vs LLM optimisation – how to keep your business visible online in 2026 - December 4, 2025
- My new website is not ranking. What am I doing wrong? - November 19, 2025
