"LLMs favor content that does X" is not a thing!
LLMs don't favor anything. They're not information retrieval systems; they're next-token predictors. They guess the most statistically likely response based on patterns in training data.
The search engine layer bolted on top via RAG? That's IR (Information Retrieval)!! The base LLM model? Not even close.
During training, LLMs process text from across the web, but they don't log URLs, store sources, or remember where anything came from. What's left is a frozen statistical snapshot (Gao et al., 2023). Not an index. Not a database.
Search engines do the crawling, indexing, and retrieval. LLMs lean on them heavily to surface real-time info (because on their own, they can't).
Stop optimizing for 'AI.' Optimize for search engines (so retrieval-based AI can cite you) earn third-party coverage (so the model already knows you before the prompt is typed).