Pain Point LLMO: Why Product-Centric Content on Your Own Site Beats Reddit & PR

We’ve seen a ton of commentary online about optimizing content to get large language models or AI search tools to send you traffic — often dubbed LLMO (large language model optimization) or GEO (generative engine optimization). We’ll use both terms interchangeably below.

A lot of the advice makes it sound more complicated than it needs to be:

• Add special structures and .txt files so you get indexed. (Not necessary.)

• Structure your headers as questions because “AI likes questions.” (Really?)

• Get mentioned on Reddit! (Okay, but how?)

• Do traditional PR! (How much? Which publications? What should the articles say?)

We have dozens of clients for whom we produce SEO-focused content (you know, the Google kind). Every single one gets mentioned by LLMs — without following any of those influencer-approved LLMO “tips” above.

Personally, Grow and Convert has been getting leads (not just traffic) from ChatGPT every month for months, without doing a single “LLM optimization”.

We’ve carefully thought through and analyzed how and why our clients’ content is being picked up by LLMs and settled on a simple, effective LLMO strategy.

We’re calling this strategy Pain Point LLMO, in a nod to our long standing Pain Point SEO strategy.

It focuses on three key elements:

1. Create product-centric, bottom-of-funnel content

2. Optimize for traditional SEO keywords

3. Publish on your own site — not third-party sites

Below, we break down each part of this strategy and use data where possible to show why it works better than the tactics others are touting.

We believe sharing this approach helps even companies that don’t work with us — because it’s way simpler, more controllable, and easier to pull off than most of the GEO advice online.

If you’re interested in working with us on this or content marketing in general, you can learn more or reach out here.

Part 1: Produce Product-Centric, Bottom-of-Funnel Content Based on Customer Pain Points

The first and most important part of our strategy is that your brand needs to produce its own product-centric, bottom-of-funnel content. This content should explain exactly what your product does, its features, who it’s for, the pain points it solves, and anything else you typically cover in sales conversations.

We’re not talking about “ultimate guides” or generic top-of-funnel content brands have been producing for years. We mean content that unapologetically sells your products or services, and explains in detail why.

Why is this self-focused content so important?

Because LLMs don’t drive traffic from top-of-funnel or general how-to prompts. If a user asks ChatGPT for general advice like “help me set up a content strategy for my SaaS company” it will just answer it by itself — no links or brands mentioned. We covered this in detail in our recent post about how AI search differs from Google.

LLM “optimization” means getting these models to recommend your brand when users ask specifically about products or services in your space — or when the LLM decides a product recommendation helps solve the user’s problems.

That’s the only thing worth optimizing for: those product-centric conversations. And to make that happen, your most essential step is creating content that clearly describes your product, who it’s for, and the pain point it solves. Without that, you’re not giving LLMs the raw material they need to consider recommending you.

The Google AI Overview and Perplexity Exception: Not Worth It

Yes, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity are exceptions because they link to and cite sources even for top-of-funnel queries.

But focusing your LLMO strategy on these top-of-funnel queries isn’t the best use of your time because they’re:

1. Low traffic: Despite the Google CEO claiming links in AI overviews get more clicks, multiple studies and common sense show SERPs with AI overviews get far fewer clicks than those without.

2. Low conversions: As we’ve been shouting for years, top-of-funnel traffic rarely converts well.

So chasing an LLMO strategy to get your informational content cited by AI overviews or Perplexity means targeting a channel that’s both low-traffic and low-conversion. Not a great idea.

The Real LLMO Opportunity: Product Recommendations

The real opportunity is when ChatGPT or other LLMs mention your brand in response to users asking about products or services like yours. That traffic carries extremely high buying intent — the AI equivalent of bottom-of-funnel or Pain Point SEO traffic.

So how do you get LLMs to recommend you there?

They need to ingest content that associates your brand or product name(s) with bottom-of-funnel terms in your space. By “bottom-of-funnel terms,” we mean the words, phrases, and concepts customers use to look for products or services like yours.

And — this sounds painfully obvious but is central to our thesis — the best shot at getting LLMs to ingest content like this is for you to produce it. Not Redditors. Not your favorite industry magazine. Your team. (We’ll explain why shortly.)

Finally, for situations where users don’t explicitly ask for product recommendations — but LLMs suggest them anyway — you also need content that clearly details the problems your customers face and how your product solves them.

The Content We Produce to Create These Word Associations

As it turns out, our existing content strategy has been creating these word associations for our clients for years.

Our core content marketing service involves creating 2,000–5,000 word articles optimized around SEO terms people use to describe our clients’ products. We call this strategy Pain Point SEO (linked above), a term we coined back in 2018.

This is exactly the kind of content that gets LLMs to associate your brand name with pain points, use cases, features, and more — everything people search for related to your product space.

Of course, when we created this process, LLMs weren’t even a thing. We did it for humans — specifically, our clients’ customers. We wanted them to understand how our clients’ products could help.

But as it turns out, LLMs understand language just like humans, and it’s humans on the other side telling the LLMs about their problems and asking for help to solve them. So content explaining how our clients’ products solve their problems is passed along by LLMs to the humans.

Who would have guessed.

Pain Point SEO content falls into 3 buckets:

1. Category Keywords: Things people say or type when they’re literally looking for a product or service like yours (e.g. “best CRM software” or “content marketing agency”).

2. Comparison and Alternatives: Content that compares your brand to competitors and highlights why and how you’re better (e.g. “salesforce vs. hubspot” or “peloton alternatives”).

3. Jobs to be Done: Content that positions our clients’ products as solutions for specific problems users have (e.g. “how to manage sales leads” or “saas content strategy”).

These articles describe our clients’ products, features, value propositions, differentiators, benefits, and use cases in extreme detail.

Our Content Creation Process: Why The Details Matter

The content we write is long and detailed. For example, when we write about project management software for a client, we don’t just list features.

We interview their sales team to understand the exact pain points that drive customers to seek project management solutions, the specific workflows their software improves, which integrations matter most to different customer segments, and how their approach differs from competitors like Asana or Monday.com.

Length isn’t what matters — detail does. As Benji explained at length in his article about AI search versus Google search, people don’t just type keywords into ChatGPT; they give it long prompts or have extensive conversations. This gives ChatGPT far more context about the user’s exact problems than Google ever did.

Here’s an illustrative example of the difference:

This means that, continuing the example above, when it’s time for ChatGPT to recommend project management software, it has detailed context about the user’s specific challenges — their job, industry, team size, tools they’ve tried, features they need, problems they’re facing, and more.

So ChatGPT will look for solutions that match those exact needs. If you’ve created content positioning your software as the answer, you have a shot. If not, you’ll need to be one of the big brands — otherwise, it’s going to be tough.

Part 2: Optimize This Content for Traditional SEO Keywords

The second part of our process is getting this detailed content to rank for traditional Google SEO keywords. Why? Because Google rankings strongly correlate with LLM mentions.

Our recent study found that when a client ranks in the top 10 for a given SEO keyword, entering that keyword as a prompt into ChatGPT and Perplexity leads to our client being mentioned 67–77% of the time.

When we’ve ranked clients in the top 3 positions, those numbers jump to 72–82%.

And we’re not the only ones seeing this pattern. Researchers like Tomas Rudzi of Ziptie have also found that higher organic rankings tend to lead to more mentions by AI tools.

While this isn’t proof of causality (we can’t say for sure that ranking on Google causes ChatGPT to mention you), it’s a strong correlation backed by qualitative evidence (more examples below).

OpenAI and Perplexity have confirmed they use “third-party search providers” to supplement their data. In other words, LLMs likely pull from Google — or Bing, whose results largely mirror Google’s — for up-to-date information.

So ranking your product-centric content on Google is a powerful way to get LLMs to ingest it.

Part 3: Publish This Content On Your Own Site

As we’re writing this, a lot of the GEO discussion centers around how LLMs supposedly prefer a handful of well-known forums and directories — so your marketing efforts “should” be focused there. They say this because when you look at citations LLMs make in their outputs, a few famous sites come up again and again. The golden child of this list is Reddit — often followed by Wikipedia and industry-specific publications or directories.

We have no objection to the assertion that LLMs cite Reddit a lot. They do. We also don’t object to the idea that if your product is consistently recommended on Reddit, that’s good for your GEO — of course it is!

But we do have an objection to this turning into a prescription that brands should then “focus on Reddit.” Our objection is multi-fold.

Good Luck Marketing On Reddit

First, what does “focus on Reddit” actually mean? What exactly are you supposed to do? Have you tried marketing on Reddit before? We have. Back before we came up with Pain Point SEO, we promoted our client’s content exclusively through communities — including Reddit.

What I’m most proud of from that time is that we made it out alive. Reddit is a brutal place to market. Redditors hate marketing. And they have a sixth sense for sniffing it out.

Is it impossible? No.

If you know how to do it, by all means, please do.

But none of those LinkedIn posts or white papers with graphs showing Reddit as the most-cited source tell you how to actually “focus on Reddit”.

So, what do you do? Pay people with Reddit Karma to talk about you? Try to build your own Karma? Start your own posts? Write long product explainer posts? Or drop quick comments recommending your product?

You Don’t Control the Narrative

Even if you push forward with a “Reddit strategy”, you don’t control the narrative. And that brings serious downsides.

First, the risk of backlash or negative reviews. Redditors notoriously hate marketing — they’ll downvote you, call you out, or flat-out say they hate your product. And they’ll do it right on the threads you’re trying to “market” on.

Remember, ChatGPT and other LLMs understand natural language — all of it, including the bad stuff.

Second, Reddit isn’t a long-term strategy. Let’s say you ignore everything we’ve said and pay some people with Reddit Karma to mention you in a few relevant subs. No one downvotes you. No one says anything negative. Great. Will this help your LLM mentions? Probably.

But then what? What’s your move next month? Next year? Are you seriously going to keep commenting on Reddit posts in the same subs for years? And you don’t think anyone’s going to notice or object?

Similar objections apply to advice about getting into or mentioned by other famous sites that show up in citations. Wikipedia, for example, is often mentioned. How are you getting into Wikipedia? For what term? And if you do, congratulations, that’s awesome. Then what? What’s the plan next week?

You Can’t Add Enough Detail on Third-Party Sites

Reddit discussions and PR mentions rarely allow the depth needed to cover your product, the pain points it solves, and specific features required for an LLM to recommend you in highly specific user conversations.

If you get mentioned in a magazine or popular publication, it’s usually brief. Even a full feature is just one piece of content.

Many of our clients have dozens of features and use cases, each tied to different pain points. If someone’s interacting with ChatGPT about a specific problem one your products solves, you want it to have ingested content that connects your brand with that exact issue.

Getting enough PR mentions to cover all those scenarios is difficult, expensive, and not scalable for most brands.

Publishing on Your Own Site Lets You Provide Detail and Control The Narrative

In contrast, publishing content on your own site is a long-term strategy. We have clients for whom we’ve consistently published content every month for over five years.

You get to control the narrative and go into as much detail as you want. Some of our clients’ posts top 5,000 words — not because length is king, but because you get the freedom to be as detailed as necessary to cover the content properly.

Plus, on your own site, you can publish a variety of content. You can create custom pieces for every pain point and use case your customers might search for.

One post can focus on how your product helps construction companies, another on how it helps doctors’ offices. One might explain how accounting is easier with your product, another might dig into how it supports a totally different business function.

Evidence That LLMs Ingest Your Content Directly

All the benefits of publishing on your own site only matter if LLMs actually ingest your content and use it in their responses. Here’s the evidence they do — across multiple LLM chat tools:

ChatGPT

Our client Constitution Lending is a private lender for real estate investors (e.g., folks flipping houses). One of their main loan types is “DSCR loans.”

Their differentiator? Lightning-fast closings and high loan-to-value (LTV) ratios — a major win for borrowers.

Here’s what ChatGPT gave us when we asked for fast-closing, high-LTV DSCR lenders in the US:

Not only does it mention Constitution Lending, but it also links directly to the DSCR lenders post we published on their site.

It cites the exact value props and features we outlined — like loans up to 80% LTV, quick pre-approval letters, and closings in as little as four days:

And it’s not just us — look at the first result in the ChatGPT screenshot above, New Silver. There too, ChatGPT links straight to a page on New Silver’s site, not a third-party review site or Reddit.

Google AI Overview

We’ve seen plenty of cases of this in Google AI overviews.

Here, it names our client Insider as one of the best CDPs (customer data platforms):

It cites and links to the article we published on their site about the best CDPs.

In fact, clicking the link doesn’t just open the page — it scrolls down and highlights the section where we discuss the 5 best enterprise CDPs, naming Insider first and discussing their platform in great detail:

We’ve also seen mid-funnel JTBD-style content cited by Google AI overviews, like the query “record website visitors”:

In fact, all three articles on the left are blogs hosted on software companies’ own sites — not Reddit or software review sites.

Perplexity

Here’s another JTBD query packed with serious buying intent (they’re trying to sell their business) and laser-focused specificity (healthcare space).

Our article for Axial — a company that helps business owners looking to sell find a broker — appears as the first source on Perplexity:

Notably, this article ranks #1 on Google for “how to sell my healthcare business.”

At the time of writing, Raincatcher and Weaver — cited second and third by Perplexity — also hold the same spots on Google, suggesting Perplexity leans heavily on Google rankings.

This Works Best When LLMs Search the Web

As a final note, we’ve found this strategy works best when LLMs actually search the web.

We can’t say for sure, but when they don’t, they tend to default to the biggest, best-known brands. At that point, getting mentioned becomes a long-term brand-building game.

But when they do search the web, they start citing real articles — and our data shows many of those rank highly on Google (or Bing) for similar topics.

As an example, here’s what Claude returns when asked to suggest innovation or idea management software:

It didn’t search the web and gave three dedicated innovation management platforms — but also suggested extremely general tools like Asana, Airtable, and even Google Forms.

Notice there are no links. Nothing is cited. And no one outside of Anthropic’s engineering team can say exactly how these responses are generated, other than the usual vague “it uses its training data” (obviously).

But I then explicitly asked it to search the web for more options. And lo and behold — it cited our client InnovationCast, linking directly to the article we wrote about idea and innovation software.

Claude came up with the exact search query on its own — not the exact one we targeted in the article, but close.

And for this query, our article ranks #1:

For completeness, here’s what that article is ranking for on Google:

Note that all these reports online claiming Reddit and Wikipedia as the #1 sources used by LLMs refer only to instances where citations appear. The same applies to third-party sites and directories — they push you to get on those platforms because that’s what they see cited.

But our examples show you can get cited by LLMs with content published on your own site. Mentions on third-party sites, Reddit, and Wikipedia are a bonus — but as we’ve explained, they’re often tough to get, don’t let you control your narrative, and simply aren’t necessary.

Want to explore executing this strategy for your brand? Reach out to us.

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