AI, LLMEO and Gated Ecommerce Content

In this post we discuss why we’ve decided to ‘ungate’ our resources content on the Volo website, against the background of AI developments and LLM engine optimisation.

Developments in – and debate on – Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to accelerate, encouraging more people to examine how they can consume AI-generated outputs but also put AI to work in their business, either to improve it or to more easily create new things.

If you have a website, even if you don’t directly sell products or services on it, you probably invest time and / or money in optimising it for search engines – so-called SEO. In the business-to-business arena, people who search using the keywords you optimise for may well become ‘inbound leads’ that you can then develop into serious buying prospects. In the business-to-consumer space, the same arguments apply: you need to be found so that you can be bought.

At the same time, the received B2B wisdom went, as well as offering landing pages and a contact page where people could open the conversation with you, you could also offer a range of best practice resource that they could download if they parted with their contact details. This is gated content.

LLM Engine Optimisation (LLMEO)

There are drawbacks to gating your content, though. Many people don’t want to leave their bona fide contact details, even at the expense of not getting the content they’re looking for. In addition, many browsing individuals are at the very early stages of their buying process – typically research and knowledge-gathering – and are simply not ready for or interested in starting the dialogue.

The challenge for the selling organisation is that they know buyers have often completed the majority of the buying process before they engage with a prospective seller, hence the desire to capture their details as early as possible. It’s a conundrum for B2B companies.

If you trust your content is valuable, however, putting it behind a form means that the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power AI can’t access it, use it and refer to it in the work they’re doing. What this means is that your LLMEO – your LLM Engine Optimisation – is operating with one hand tied behind its back. LLMEO may come to be as important as SEO in the coming months and years.

Volo Resources are now ungated

All of this has contributed to our decision to ‘ungate’ the best practice and ‘how to’ content on our Resources page. Yes, we might lose out on the SEO value of the individual ‘landing page’ for each resource, but it’s worth the sacrifice we belive.

From today, you can access any of the resources on the page without having to fill in a form. We’ve always tried to make sure our resources are ‘news you can use’ and the same goes for our social media posts, which goes against the immensely broad tide of companies and individuals who are simply publishing variations of ‘aren’t I great, or ‘aren’t we great’.

Perhaps in the long run we’ll also benefit from more genuine enquiries as well…


Speaking of which, to open the conversation about your AI-enabled ecommerce journey, get in touch with us here.