What it means
LLM experience gain, a term coined by Zack Notes, is the practice of building new user experiences with LLMs across your content and website. Instead of treating LLMs only as a retrieval layer that cites your pages elsewhere, you add interactive AI features (answer boxes, assistants, generated summaries, product-description scoring) that make the on-site experience better. The point is a better on-site experience powered by AI you control.
Why it matters
Most AI-search advice optimizes for being read by an LLM somewhere else. LLM experience gain flips the question: What can an LLM do for the person already on your page? That matters because LLM referral traffic is volatile and concentrated. Kevin found that ChatGPT controls 85% of LLM referral traffic, and that the more organic visits a site gets, the lower its share of LLM traffic, so leaning only on external visibility is fragile. Interactive AI features keep the value on your own property.
Say a mid-market B2B SaaS company adds an AI assistant that turns its pricing docs into a tailored quote. Time on page rises from 40 seconds to 3 minutes, and demo requests from that page climb 18%, without depending on any external LLM to send the traffic.
How to use this knowledge
Audit where an interactive AI feature would beat a static page: Long product descriptions, complex docs, comparison tables, configurators. Build for both LLMs and humans, using Kevin's marketplace test: Find the parts of your site an LLM would flag as thin or low-trust, and enrich them with real user data or visualizations. Score your own content the way an LLM would, the same way Kevin shipped an audit tool that scores product descriptions, to find weak pages before adding AI features. Keep the experience on your domain so you capture engagement even when external LLM referral traffic dips.
Growth Memo guidance
Plan content quality for both LLMs and actual humans. — Effective Marketplace SEO is more like Product Growth
ChatGPT controls 85% of LLM referral traffic. — LLM traffic is shrinking
Search engines and LLMs are mapping relationships between entities and judging your brand's authority accordingly. — Internal Linking Grows Up: Evolving from Link Juice to Entity Maps
Answer engine optimization (AEO) — optimizing to be the answer an LLM gives, the visibility side that experience gain complements on-site.
LLM referral traffic — the external clicks from AI tools that experience gain reduces your dependence on.
Topical authority — deep topic coverage that makes LLMs surface your brand and feeds better on-site AI experiences.
Product-led SEO — using your product itself as the experience that drives growth, the closest cousin to building AI features into the page.