Being findable used to mean showing up in search. You picked the right keywords, wrote the right meta description, and hoped your page landed high enough on Google to matter.
Now, being findable looks different. Search is more fragmented. Product discovery happens across marketplaces, snippets, reviews, feeds, and voice results. Content gets pulled, quoted, and summarized without warning. And most of it happens before a person ever visits your site.
For brands, this has made visibility more layered. Traditional SEO still matters. But it’s no longer the only thing driving exposure. AEO helps content surface in direct answers. GEO shapes how your messaging performs in retail and marketplace listings. LLMO pushes structured language to the forefront of discoverability, especially in environments where content is recombined or reframed. If your content isn’t clear enough to be pulled into an answer box, direct enough to appear in a product carousel, or structured enough to be cited cleanly elsewhere, you’re not showing up when it counts.
What’s changed is the expectation. Content has to earn its way into different kinds of environments. The clearer, more specific, and more organized your messaging is, the better chance it has to be surfaced, whether by a search engine, a retail platform, or a recommendation feed (Holliman & Rowley, 2014).
None of this is about writing for machines, but for real people. It’s about anticipating how and where people encounter your brand. Often, it’s not through your campaign. It’s through the sentence that got picked up, the description that answered a question, the paragraph that made the shortlist.
Brands that win understand this. They write with structure. They publish with consistency. They don’t just wait to be found, they make sure they’re ready to be seen by their audience.
Not louder. Not trendier. Just clearer.
REFERENCES
Clifton, B., Cutroni, J., & Meissner, T. (2012). Measuring the success of search engine marketing using analytics. In Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics (3rd ed., pp. 123–145). Wiley.
Fulgoni, G., & Lipsman, A. (2015). Digital game changers: How social media, mobile, and video are reshaping the digital landscape. Journal of Advertising Research, 55(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-55-1-011-016
Holliman, G., & Rowley, J. (2014). Business to business digital content marketing: Marketers’ perceptions of best practice. Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 8(4), 269–293. https://doi.org/10.1108/JRIM-02-2014-0013
Holcomb, M. (2023). What LLMO means for brand content strategy. Content Insight Institute. https://contentinsight.org/llmo-brand-strategyMurphy, A. (2023). AEO, GEO, and the new layers of search. Strategy & Signal. https://strategyandsignal.com/aeo-geo-layered-search