SEO is out, LLM-SEO is in—and one publisher just showed us what the next traffic war is going to look like.
If you thought the SEO arms race was wild, wait until you see what’s happening with LLM visibility. Future (the publisher behind TechRadar, Tom’s Guide, etc.) has basically decided, “If AI is going to answer everyone’s questions, we’re going to make damn sure it keeps saying our name.”[4] They built an internal tool called Future Optic whose whole job is to boost how often their content gets cited inside AI search experiences like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT.[4]
Here’s the crazy part: it’s apparently working. Future says TechRadar is now among the most cited sources for ChatGPT and Claude in certain verticals, and a Samsung campaign using this system saw a 28% growth in citations from Future-owned sources in three months, with thousands of LLM citations logged.[4] In plain English: they’re treating AI models like a new kind of search engine and optimizing for “answer mentions,” not blue links.
As a developer, this hits closer to home than it looks. If you’re building docs, a dev tool, an open source project, or even a personal blog, the old “rank on Google” playbook is going to feel less and less relevant. The new question is: “How do I become the canonical source that models quote when users ask stuff in my niche?” That might mean structuring content so it’s easy to chunk and cite, publishing “definitive” explainers in narrow sub-verticals (Future tracks niches like “music making” instead of just “music”), and thinking about how your data shows up in model training and retrieval.[4]
The slightly dystopian angle: once there’s a playbook for “LLM-SEO,” you can bet it’s going to be gamed just like regular SEO—content farms, prompt-shaped articles, citation farms, the works. But the optimistic read is that deep, well-structured, authoritative content might actually win again because models favor clarity and coverage over clickbait. If you maintain docs or technical blogs, are you already thinking about how AI search discovers and cites your stuff, or are you still optimizing only for Google?
Source: Digiday