A growing share of your customers no longer google "best video production Dubai" — they ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and get a direct answer with three names in it. If yours isn't one of them, you lost the deal before you knew it existed. Optimizing for that moment has a name — LLM SEO (or GEO, generative engine optimization) — and it's the discipline we practice on our own site.
How AI assistants pick their answers
Different assistants source differently, but the pattern is consistent: they combine a live search layer (Gemini leans on Google's index; ChatGPT's browsing leans on Bing) with what the model already learned in training from the open web. Both layers reward the same things: crawlable pages, clear factual statements, and third-party corroboration.
The practical checklist
- Let AI crawlers in. Your robots.txt should explicitly welcome GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. Blocking them means opting out of the answers.
- Publish an llms.txt. A plain-text summary of who you are, what you do, your proof and your pages — a menu written for machines. Ours lists every service, case study and fact an assistant might need.
- Say facts in plain sentences. LLMs quote claims they can lift cleanly: "Mirror Production delivered a 10X return on ad spend for H&Co" is machine-quotable; a vague vibe paragraph is not.
- Structured data everywhere. Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article schema turn your pages into machine-readable answers.
- Server-rendered content. Many AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. If your content only exists after a framework boots, you may be invisible.
- Earn mentions elsewhere. Models trust names they've seen in multiple places — press, directories, client sites. PR and LLM SEO are the same project now.
How to check where you stand
Ask the assistants what your customers would ask: "best branding agency in Dubai," "who should produce my commercial in the UAE?" Note who gets named and why — the cited sources are your roadmap. Then re-ask monthly; these answers move faster than Google rankings.
The honest timeline
The technical layer (crawlers, llms.txt, schema, plain facts) is a week of work. The authority layer — being mentioned in enough places that models believe you belong in the answer — compounds over months, exactly like classic SEO. Start now or start behind. If you'd rather have it done for you, this is part of every growth engagement we run — and you can inspect our own homework at mirrorholding.com/llms.txt.