How are leading mid-market businesses delivering on LLM marketing

Many mid-market businesses still measure marketing success through impressions, website traffic, keyword rankings, and click-through rates. While these metrics still have their place, they are becoming less reliable indicators of whether your business is actually visible to your audience.

At our recent ECI Unlocked webinar, digital strategy consultancy OMMAX shared their expertise with our portfolio marketing leaders on how AI is reshaping the buyer journey. Their message was simple: "People don't want search engines anymore. They want answer engines."

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews… they are now sitting between your brand and your buyer. We look at the ways best in class marketing teams are adapting to the next era of discovery.

1. Understanding brand equity inside LLMs

Visibility within LLMs is now measurable. Tools like Croud's BrandCI can help businesses track:

Disruption - how much of your traffic could be at risk as Google's AI Overviews reduce clicks to traditional search results? New tools can track this, including brand sentiment (is the AI saying good, neutral or bad things about you?), presence (in what share of relevant searches do you get a mention?), citations (how often are LLMs linking to your site?), and disruption (how far Google's AI Overviews have already dented your existing SEO rankings).

Sentiment - is AI describing your brand positively, neutrally or negatively?

Presence - how often does your business appear in relevant AI-generated responses?

Citations - how frequently do LLMs direct users back to your website?

OMMAX has run around 250 of these assessments and found that many businesses appear in about 20-25% of relevant LLM answers. Strong brands can reach 80%, while some are sitting at 8%.

For mid-market businesses, sentiment matters more than the numbers. As OMMAX put it: "The only thing worse than not being visible in LLMs is being visible with a negative brand sentiment." They shared a client example where, in response to almost every prompt about their brand, the LLM responded with something along the lines of: yes, they exist, but I wouldn't recommend working with them. The culprit? Comment sections on old YouTube videos the company had long forgotten about.

2. Have you changed channel focus?

The channels that matter for LLM visibility are not the same ones that drove SEO performance, and your team's channel mix should reflect that.

According to OMMAX, LinkedIn is the most cited domain within ChatGPT, and YouTube is the most cited domain within Gemini. Facebook, on the other hand, is largely unreadable by LLM crawlers. So if your marketing team is putting energy into channels that LLMs can't access, that effort isn't building the visibility that matters right now.

Third-party content matters more than it used to. With the previous focus on SEO, a mention without a link-back counted for little. However LLMs work differently, they don't just crawl your website, they draw on press coverage, review sites, forum threads, and discussion boards. Earning mentions, even unlinked ones, across independent sources is now a core part of building what OMMAX calls 'algorithmic brand equity'.

Paid search deserves the same scrutiny. The view from some leaders is that PPC has been performing for Google rather than for its clients, with revenue up on price even as click volumes fall. If your team's reports show costs per click rising against declining volume, that's the shift playing out in your own numbers, and it strengthens the case for rebalancing spend towards the channels LLMs actually read."

The practical question for your team is, are they actively pursuing coverage, reviews, and presence on the platforms LLMs read?

3. Has your content adapted?

This one might sting a little but since ChatGPT launched, the internet has been flooded with mediocre AI-generated content. The irony is that to be visible inside LLMs, you need content that stands out from all of that. As OMMAX said: "We don't just need to produce more content, we need to produce better content. Content that stands out from the clutter."

If you've invested properly in SEO over the years, you have a head start here. LLMs have learned which brands carry real domain authority, and strong organic foundations feed directly into that. But authority alone doesn't win the answer. LLMs then look for another level of insight relevant to the specific question being asked, so content that was broad enough to rank on Google now needs to be developed further and personalised to the questions your buyers are actually asking.

But there's also a structural issue, not just a quality one. The ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic bots all behave very differently from Google's crawler, and they're considerably less mature. One OMMAX client's website was fully readable by Google, but the ChatGPT bot couldn't access the news section at all, meaning ChatGPT was completely blind to every update the company had ever published. Machine readability across all major crawlers is now a basic technical requirement, not an advanced consideration.

Key takeaways

Having a clear view on LLM performance and adapting channel and content strategy accordingly should be front of mind for all marketers at the moment. Marketing teams are really refocussing on the fundamentals. As OMMAX put it, "Building LLM visibility isn't about tricking an algorithm or finding growth hacks. It's about having a great product, communicating about it effectively, understanding which channels matter, and keeping your content hygiene in place."

The good news is that when brands get it right, LLM referrals tend to lead to conversion rates seven to nine times higher than normal because users arrive already informed, looking to confirm a decision rather than gather information. The traffic is smaller in volume but dramatically higher in intent.