B2B AEO Strategy: The Tactical Guide to Getting Found in AI Search

Quick summary: Most B2B marketing teams know they need an AEO strategy. Very few have a clear picture of how they are actually performing. Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, has spent 16 months building a platform to score B2B websites across the dimensions that determine LLM discoverability and conversion. Here is what the data shows, what to fix first, and what to stop doing entirely.

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If your best content is buried in PDFs, your case studies are behind forms, and your website still talks like a brochure, your B2B AEO strategy has a huge problem.

Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, has spent the last 16 months building a platform to score B2B websites across the dimensions that determine whether LLMs find them, cite them, and drive conversion. The findings are consistent: Almost every company has gaps in the same places, and the fixes are more actionable than most CMOs expect.

Learn what he shared with B2B CMOs who attended his AEO workshops at the CMO Huddles Strategy Labs.

Start Here: The Quick Wins

Before building new content or restructuring your site, there are two things every B2B website should have that most do not. Both are low-effort and can produce meaningful results quickly.

Step 1: Add FAQs to Every Key Page

AI engines use FAQ sections to understand what a page is about and pull direct answers. Three to five well-written questions at the bottom of each core page significantly improve how LLMs read and cite that content. The questions should be written in buyer language, not marketing language. Not “What is our enterprise integration solution?” but “How do I connect my existing systems to AI agents?”

One CMO in the community reported a 30 percent lift in site performance after adding a glossary page with every industry acronym and term defined. The glossary page is one of the most underrated AEO tactics available. Every term that gets defined is an answer to a question someone is asking somewhere.

Step 2: Add JSON Schema to Every Page

JSON schema is a small piece of code that sits in your page’s HTML and provides labels for AI bots. Think of it as the equivalent of SEO meta tags, but designed for how LLMs parse content rather than how Google crawls links. Your web team can add it as a module to your CMS. Once the template is built, it takes minutes per page.

Most content management systems, including WordPress, HubSpot, and Webflow, support schema modules. Once it's in the template, it rolls out across the site automatically. This is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort actions available, and it is absent from the majority of B2B websites Pedowitz analyzed.

The Content Problem: Writing for Yourself, Not Your Buyer

Across his dataset, the single most common failure Pedowitz finds is the same: Content is typically written in the company’s own language rather than the language buyers actually use to search.

Marketing teams develop internal vocabulary, name frameworks, and create acronyms. They refine a brand voice that becomes familiar inside the building and opaque outside it. Meanwhile, a buyer trying to solve a real problem is typing something like “how do I stop my AI agents from making mistakes in production” or “what does it cost to switch from my legacy data warehouse.” Those queries do not match the polished positioning language on most websites.

The fastest way to close this gap: Go to whatever LLM you use, enter your URL, and ask it to generate 100 questions a buyer would ask across the full buying journey, written in buyer language rather than how you talk about yourself. The result will be illuminating.

Those 100 questions are your content roadmap. The ones your site already answers well are your strengths. The ones it doesn't answer at all are where you start.

The Topic Cluster Strategy: How to Own a Category in LLM Results

The most powerful structural move available to a B2B marketing team right now is building topic clusters. This is not a new SEO concept, but the application to AEO has specific requirements that differ from traditional approaches.

A topic cluster consists of one master index page and a set of sub-pages, each addressing one specific question a buyer might ask across the full buying journey. The index page lives in the site navigation; the sub-pages do not. They exist to be found by LLMs through citations, not by humans browsing your nav.

How to Build One

1. Choose ONE topic you want to be the authority on. This should align directly with your positioning.
2. Generate 100 questions a buyer would ask about that topic across five stages of the buying journey: Unaware, Aware, Comparing, Evaluating, Deciding (twenty questions per stage).
3. Build one page per question. Each page follows a specific format: Question at the top, short direct answer, extended deep-dive content with tables and bullet points, links to relevant case studies or assets, and a FAQ section at the bottom.
4. Build the master index page that links to all sub-pages, organized by journey stage. This page goes in the nav while the sub-pages do not.

Pedowitz’s firm built 10,000 pages across 100 topic clusters as a data-gathering experiment. He is explicit that no client needs to do this. The experiment revealed that one to three well-built topic clusters, producing 100 to 300 pages, is sufficient for even large enterprises to see meaningful AEO results. Some companies have seen LLM citation traffic within 24 hours of publishing their first cluster pages.

AI can do most of the heavy lifting here. Enter your URL and a topic into Claude or ChatGPT and ask for 100 buyer questions organized by journey stage. Then ask it to build an AEO page for the first question. The output will be roughly 80 to 90 percent of the way there. A marketer reviews, tightens the language, connects the links to real assets, and publishes.

One CMO in the Strategy Labs moved from a year-long content backlog to clearing her top 100 pages in weeks using this approach, giving the web team more autonomy and a 48-hour turnaround expectation instead of routing everything through product marketing approval.

What to Stop Doing: AEO Strategy is a Subtraction Problem, Too

AEO is partly an addition problem and partly a subtraction problem. Several standard B2B marketing practices actively work against LLM discoverability and should be reconsidered.

PDFs for Case Studies

LLMs cannot read PDFs sitting on a website. Case studies are some of the most valuable conversion evidence a B2B company has, and the PDF format contributes nothing to AEO. One CMO in the room called PDFs “the rust of the internet.” The description holds. Thus, converting case studies to indexed web pages is one of the highest-value content format changes available.

Gated Content

LLMs cannot read content behind a form. If your best thinking is locked behind a lead capture form, it's invisible to AI engines and to the buyers who now research primarily through those engines. For most top and middle-funnel content, the cost of gating now exceeds the value of the lead data captured.

Microsites and Content Sprawl

Multiple domains, orphaned landing pages, and ungoverned microsites fragment your authority signal across the web. LLMs reward concentrated authority. A site that goes deep on a focused topic outperforms a site that goes shallow on many.

Over-Designed Pages for AEO Content

AEO pages are written for AI bots first and humans second. They follow a formula, they're dense, and they link to everything. They don't need hero images, animated modules, or brand design flourishes. The resolution is clear separation: Main marketing pages get the design treatment, AEO cluster pages get the content treatment.

Beyond Your Website: Reddit and Quora

Everything above lives on your owned site, but your AEO strategy doesn’t stop there. Pedowitz points to Reddit and Quora as two of the most valuable channels for LLM citation that most B2B teams are ignoring entirely.

The reason Reddit and Quora score so highly is the same reason they feel unfamiliar to B2B marketers. These platforms are unfiltered, with conversations in plain buyer language. That authenticity is exactly what LLMs are trained to value.

One cross-functional approach that works: A standing team that includes PR, social, content, and marketing representatives who monitor relevant subreddits and threads weekly, flag discussions worth engaging, and pull in subject-matter experts to respond authentically.

⚠️  You cannot use AI to respond to people on Reddit. Automated or AI-generated responses will be identified immediately and will damage your brand reputation on the platform. A real person has to respond. The authenticity is the point.

The company can advertise on Reddit cost-effectively and amplify its best organic posts with paid promotion. But the foundation has to be genuine participation.

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Jeff Pedowitz is President and CEO of The Pedowitz Group, a revenue marketing agency. He facilitated multiple CMO Huddles AEO Strategy Labs in 2026. Individual AXO reports and follow-up sessions are available at thepedowitzgroup.com.

Want more?

For the strategic case for going beyond AEO to AI experience optimization, read: AI Experience Optimization: Is Your B2B Marketing Ready for What’s Next?

Here are 8 more lessons for B2B CMOs trying to show up in LLMs: 8 AEO Lessons for B2B CMOs: How to Show Up in AI Search 

CMO Huddles brings together senior B2B marketing leaders for candid, peer-to-peer conversations on the challenges that matter most. Starter membership is free.

FAQs About AEO Strategy for B2B Teams