How LLMs decide what to recommend (and how to influence it)

By the For You Co. team · 7 min read

Every month, more of your buyers skip Google entirely and ask an LLM instead. If ChatGPT recommends your competitor when someone asks for a tool like yours, that's a revenue problem — and it's fixable.

There's a lot of mysticism about how LLMs pick brands. Most of it is wrong. LLMs aren't magical recommendation engines; they're pattern-matchers that learned from a specific corpus of text. Once you know which text they read and what they weigh, you can influence the output.

The three sources that actually matter

In our testing across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, the vast majority of brand recommendations trace back to three kinds of sources:

• Reddit & forum threads — especially ones that already rank on Google for buyer-intent queries.
• Structured reference sites — Wikipedia, G2, Capterra, industry wikis, and "best X for Y" listicles with authority.
• Your own structured data — a clean website with schema, entity signals, and an llms.txt that clearly explains what you do and who you serve.

Why paid media won't save you here

Paid ads don't make it into training data. Influencer content sometimes does — but only if it lives in a place LLMs crawl. If your go-to-market is 100% paid, you are completely invisible to this channel.

What to do in the next 30 days

Start with an audit. Ask the top 4 LLMs the 10 queries your buyers ask about your category, and see who gets recommended. If you aren't in the list, find out why: usually it's because your name doesn't appear in the sources the model was trained on.

From there, prioritise Reddit presence in the subs your buyers live in, get listed on the category directories that rank for your core queries, and publish content that is likely to be cited rather than copied. That last point is a whole separate post — but in short, LLMs cite primary sources more than rehashed content.

This is a long game, but it compounds

Unlike paid, which resets to zero the day you stop spending, LLM visibility compounds. Every citation you earn sits in the next training cut. Every Reddit thread that gets surfaced helps the next buyer.

If you want to talk through how this looks for your specific category, the first call is free.