Adobe.com is “customer zero” for LLM discoverability

For decades, search engine optimization (SEO) has been the cornerstone of organic discovery and the primary mechanism through which users found and returned to digital experiences. Brands have created entire marketing programs around these rules — acquiring traffic, guiding journeys, and measuring it all in clicks. But with the rise of generative AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, the way consumers discover and interact with brands is fundamentally shifting.

Today’s internet is being built around conversational interfaces powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini. These tools are becoming the preferred entry point for consumers seeking information, products, and services. It is no wonder that traffic to U.S. retail sites from LLMs increased 3,500 percent from mid-2024 to mid-2025. Eighty percent of consumers rely on AI-written summaries for at least 40 percent of their searches. We now live in the era of generative engine optimization (GEO).

Adobe’s approach to LLM optimization

Brands need to pay attention — I certainly am. I oversee Adobe.com, one of the top 100 most visited websites globally and Adobe’s hub for customer engagement. With 18 billion annual page views and content localized across 94 countries, the site plays a critical role in driving customer acquisition and engagement for Adobe. And yes, my team has spent many years perfecting our SEO strategy. I empathize with our Fortune 100 customers when they ask, “How do I make sure my brand is showing up in the best way possible when an LLM talks about my industry, company, and products?”

Adobe’s own CMO, Lara Balazs, posed this question to my team. We had to understand the implications the new LLM landscape would have not only for our customers but for Adobe — not just the impact to our traffic but also what we could do to elevate our brand presence.

When we measured traffic across Adobe.com, it was telling: first, our referral traffic from LLMs was doubling every few months, and second, "zero click search" was on the rise, pointing to new customer discovery pathways through conversational interfaces.

What we learned was that if we wanted to drive LLM visibility, it would require a synchronized effort across the entire marketing organization. For GEO, we needed an integrated view of Adobe’s brand presence across each channel in order to intelligently recommend how our marketing colleagues across the business could be optimizing their marketing outputs for LLMs.

A 200 percent increase in visibility with Adobe LLM Optimizer

We needed to innovate a solution. To do so, we brought together a cross-functional team from strategy, marketing, product, and engineering to tackle this challenge, pulling in internal and external experts across various disciplines to uncover what we didn’t know. But the most valuable experts were the LLMs themselves: we asked each LLM to identify which sources they were consuming and detail how they synthesized information about brands.

From this direct testing we created three critical requirements we needed to meet:

• We needed to measure visibility — tracking how often our brand appears in LLM responses for key queries, using metrics like visibility scores and citations.
• We needed a way to optimize content for LLMs by recommending adjustments to earned, social, and owned media content to improve how LLMs surfaced and cited our web pages.
• We needed a new set of success metrics, moving beyond traditional SEO benchmarks to account for GEO-specific factors like sentiment and citation frequency.

These requirements led Adobe to develop Adobe LLM Optimizer, a groundbreaking tool designed to ensure brands are seen, cited, and chosen in the new world of AI-driven discovery.

We were the first customer, applying our new solution to Adobe Firefly and Adobe Acrobat landing pages on Adobe.com as our initial test. The results were impressive: within one week, we saw a 5x increase in citations for Firefly across LLM responses. Similarly, we saw a 200 percent increase in LLM visibility, and a 41 percent increase in referral traffic from LLMs for our Acrobat pages.

How did we do it? LLM Optimizer showed us how to focus content optimization in three key areas:

• Earned Media: we facilitated Adobe affiliate content, news, and listicles with outlets known to drive LLM ranking: trade outlets, new media, and business technology publications.
• Social Media: we influenced the conversation across social platforms by ensuring the Adobe brand was present, engaged, and authoritative.
• Owned Media: We followed frameworks to improve the discoverability of content on our pages, such as ensuring the LLM bots could crawl our content easily. We structured materials with LLMs in mind and tested which variations of content LLMs were most likely to surface.

We are busy at work scaling this operation across all of our products, and we can’t wait to continue to innovate with tools like LLM Optimizer.

Implications for the future

The shift from SEO to GEO represents more than just an evolution — it’s a reinvention of how brands build trust, authority, and influence. The transition to LLMs is happening at lightspeed. For all brands, optimizing discovery in this new era requires a cross-functional approach: integrating paid and earned media, partnerships, content strategy, and site architecture to influence LLMs. It also demands a focus on authenticity and trust, as consumers increasingly rely on AI-driven recommendations.

For Adobe, the future is clear: solving our own challenges with breakthrough innovations means solving those of our customers too. As we continue to refine LLM Optimizer, we’re excited to shape the next chapter of digital discovery. As the search landscape continues to evolve, tools like LLM Optimizer will play a critical role in helping brands stay visible, relevant, and authoritative in the era of generative AI.