AEO, SEO, and the New Fight to Shape the Answer

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back.

Hello, Huddlers. Drew Neisser here, Penguin-in-Chief of CMO Huddles, and today's a very special Drew on Drew episode where I interview myself.

Drew: Yes, Drew, I'm thrilled to be here.

Drew: Yeah, yeah. You say that every time.

Drew: Because you are a fantastic interviewer.

Drew: What's the deal with the lab coat?

Drew: We just got back from the Strategy Labs where we were in four markets in four days.

Drew: Well, actually we were in three markets, physically in one market and virtually in another because we had the bomb cyclone. But anyway, it was an amazing strategy lab tour — Boston, New York, Durham — and we talked to about 40 CMOs. And one of the big topics, not the only topic, but one of the big topics was AEO.

Drew: Interesting, okay. Well, what's the deal? Why are we talking about AEO right now, and why is it such a critical thing?

Drew: Well, Drew, you finally asked a good question. The reality is, it is pretty damn important that you have an AEO strategy. And it's obvious why. So first of all, we probably should define what AEO is — it's Answer Engine Optimization. And I just want you to know, you could call it GEO, or LLM search. We've just decided on AEO. It's just easier. So you've got SEO for search engines and you've got AEO for LLMs. All right, so we're going to settle on that.

Drew: All right, I got it. We're going to do AEO, but why are we talking about search engines and LLMs in such revered terms right now?

Drew: Well, Drew, if you hadn't noticed — without your penguin hat, you probably can't think. But here's the deal: more and more searches are running through answer engines. More and more folks are actually taking action as a result of their searches. And this doesn't matter whether we're talking B2B or B2C. So it's a pretty basic thing — if someone does a query in your category looking for your kind of service, and you don't show up, you don't exist. So it's a fundamental problem and it's a nascent science, if you will. People are still trying to figure it out, but the goal is to show up, right? The goal is to show up in the answer engine.

Drew: Can I just ask an important question on this? Isn't that hard? I mean, don't the answer engines give different results every time?

Drew: Yeah, they do. And that can be really annoying. I mean, what's interesting is if you're creating stuff, sometimes you want to do two or three searches to see what answers come up. So yes, unlike SEO where you put in a keyword and you rank in the top 10 or something like that, in AEO terms, what we're talking about is the percentage of time that you show up in, let's say, a hundred searches. Do you show up once? Do you show up 30 times? Do you show up 70 times? Again, it's still a big deal. It's a small number now relative to all searches, but it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And looking at the way Google is integrating Gemini, it's quite likely that in the next 18 months we won't be thinking about these two as really different things.

Drew: Okay. That's kind of profound on its own, so thank you for that. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things that Guy Yalif shared. Guy is from Webflow — Webflow was the sponsor of the Strategy Lab. And what was great about Guy is he provided meaningful insight and stats that they have been able to test on not only their site, but the thousands of sites that are hosted on Webflow. So the question is: we lived through SEO and social search — why is AEO different?

Drew: You know, the hat thing is really a trick. It gives me time to think about the question, so thank you for indulging me on this. So there's the interface shift. Obviously, AI gives one synthesized answer instead of 10 links. Now, depending on the engine, some of them provide links — like Perplexity always gives you the links, and sometimes you have to ask for the links on the other ones. So visibility now completely depends on being cited by the model.

Drew: Okay, cool. So you mentioned Guy, and you were about to talk about Guy and then you forgot about Guy. Let's talk about what made the room — all 40 CMOs, whether they were virtually there or not — what made them sit up and really pay attention?

Drew: So he described it as a massive opportunity, and it's a window similar to the early days of SEO, where with a few little tricks up your sleeve, you can actually show up in AEO in some of the engines. And he also provided some practical tactics that can move these citations really quickly. I really enjoyed that because we had a lot of fun going through some of the things, and he provided specific examples.

Drew: All right, well, that was a little vague. I'd like you to get more serious about the specific things that are going on with LLMs.

Drew: Okay. So specifically — people are putting in queries 30 words long, like: "I am looking for software that competes with this software, that is perfect for an enterprise of this size with these types of problems." And boom, you're at 30 words. So that changes a lot. Suddenly when you have queries that are a long list of questions and scenarios, the content must answer these questions clearly instead of just simply targeting keywords. It's a more complex notion. Fortunately, Guy provided a very simple two-key-thing answer. One is making sure that all the questions you think your customers or prospects might have are on your website. And it's interesting — it's not just about having a gigantic FAQ. One of the light bulbs that went off for me is that Guy and his team tested just adding Q&As at the bottom of their most popular product pages. And it was fascinating because just doing that on six product pages — and I've got some numbers I'm going to have to look up here — resulted in 57% new citations in two weeks. Same content, just adding Q&As. So yes, you want to have FAQs on your website that answer the common questions, but even reshaping your existing content helps. Still have a blog post, still have really good research, but add the Q&A. There was also some talk about the power of adding a table of contents, so you might have a long blog post, and so you add the table of contents upfront, you have the blog post, then you have the Q&A, and they saw a slight lift with just doing those things. You already have this content — that was the unlock for me. We've got lots and lots of content that performs very well on a search basis, but it doesn't have the Q&As. Boom. We can do that.

Drew: Okay. So that's just taking your content and making sure that you've got Q&As with all of that content. And so now we're starting to cover a lot of possible Q&As. Is there anything technical that Guy prescribed?

Drew: Well, funny you should ask — and thanks for that softball. Yes, there's this thing called schema. Don't ask me exactly what it is or to define it other than it's bits of code that the LLMs understand and can search and can find the content that you're providing for them. LLMs want the content, want the schema. Most websites don't have it. In fact, you can go to Webflow and have it create schema for you — it's very easy to do. I've actually been able to do it, but not every website can. Frankly, our Wild Apricot website for CMO Huddles can't support schema. So you may need a website engineer to help you get the schema up. But it's key that you have it. So you may not know what the word means, but add it, and you'll watch the number of citations show up.

Drew: Okay. Can we just step back and talk about why we should care about AEO search and that kind of traffic when it's not that much for most webpages right now?

Drew: Fair enough. Good question. We are ahead of the curve here. But an important part of this is: you may not get that much traffic from LLMs right now, but what's interesting is that for most websites, most companies are seeing a far higher level of conversion — four to six times higher. And again, companies measure conversion differently. Are we talking about converting them to a mailing list or are we talking about actually selling all the way through? But these folks have actually qualified themselves to a much higher degree. So it doesn't surprise me, even if they're just signing up for your newsletter, that they are doing so at a much higher rate than your average visitor.

Drew: Okay, so what about the CMOs in the room? What were they saying about their AEO experiments and the results that they're seeing?

Drew: Okay. So the question you asked is: what are some of the CMOs in the room, in the Strategy Lab, sharing? Well, many of them understand they need FAQs, but a lot of them didn't have them yet. Very few had thought about it, and only half of them had schema on their website — but still, that's ahead of the curve. One of the things I thought was so interesting: one CMO just added a glossary to their website — just key terms and the acronyms that everybody uses in their industry — and this resulted in a huge increase in performance on LLMs. I thought, oh, that's so interesting. So I had a moment during this thing where I challenged Guy — I said, well, couldn't we just take our top 20 performing SEO pages and run those through an LLM to develop the Q&As right from the content, so we're not creating anything new, and very quickly update our websites? And that felt like, yes, that's an easy way of adding Q&As and enhancing things. There was a lot of debate about whether or not — because Guy also talked about the notion of recency with LLMs. Most of the specific data he had — I'll get that later — but he talked about how most of the LLM content that gets cited is six months old or less. So that's important in the scheme of things. And so it is worth updating content. We don't yet know what counts as a real update. Is it just adding a new quote or two? Is it adding a whole Q&A? Or is it actually adding new data? We're not sure. It does say to me that you should know what your top 20 to top 50 performing SEO pages are and look to update those. Conversely, old content could actually hurt you, so be careful about that — particularly content on your website that may not be part of the story you want to tell anymore.

Drew: Okay. That's pretty interesting. These are meaty suggestions so far. Before we talk — I mean, we've already talked a lot about things you can do in AEO, but like, are we just ignoring SEO altogether? Can we just move on? I think Guy mentioned that some CEO fired his entire SEO team and then said, "Boy, that was dumb."

Drew: Yeah, that was dumb. Here's the thing: if your SEO sucks, your AEO is gonna suck too, and why? Well, because 52% of AI citations come from pages already ranking in search. So if you have no SEO visibility, then you're unlikely to suddenly have AI visibility. And there's other things that go along with SEO that are best practices. Generally, it's a bad idea to have broken links. It's a bad idea to have missing metadata. It's a bad idea to have poor site structure that an LLM can't search. And those things are standard SEO practices. So if you haven't done an SEO audit in a while, get that done. Fix those broken links, add that missing metadata, look at your site architecture. You better have a sitemap on the website. All those things that we did 20 years ago are really important and are foundational. That's the key thing to think about. If your SEO is bad, you can't just jump to AEO.

Drew: Alright, that's all very good and instructive. Thank you, Drew. Let's talk about content. Does AI-generated content actually help with AEO or hurt?

Drew: Here we're getting into iffy territory. Guy cited some research that suggested that LLMs kind of ignore content and can tell when it's AI slop. And I think it's a very important point to say: if it was bad content and slop, it's not gonna perform whether it was made by a human or by a computer. So bad content is bad content, period. What Guy really felt, and I think this is true for all content, is that originality and insights still matter most. If your content is mediocre, if your editors are mediocre, it doesn't matter whether you use AI for 70% or 20%. But if you have original content and quotes and research data, and a human overseeing it who is an expert — if you use the AI to pull together the content and then massage it — it's not a problem. I also want to emphasize that, at least at the moment, any of the tools that say they can tell whether content is AI-generated or not are incredibly inaccurate. So I don't think you would necessarily be able to say, "This piece is 20% LLM-written, and therefore it's okay." It's about your standards and your originality and your insights. If it is smart, if it reads well, if it has content that is of value to your customer, then the LLMs will appreciate it.

Drew: So Guy did talk about that quite a bit. Yes. So thank you for that. Did he talk about spammy AI?

Drew: We're gonna hit that one hard. More content is not the goal here. Better content is the goal, and better content faster with LLMs is probably great. But here's an important point that we'll talk about: if you don't have all the FAQs in there, if you don't have comparison pages, if you don't have tutorials, even pricing pages — they're gonna find that information from somewhere else. Because searches like "compare the price," "compare features," "compare the functionality," "compare the reviews" — all of those things are gonna be in a long LLM search query. And so if you don't provide that answer, somebody else will. So educational content that is clear and easy for the LLMs to read is key. We did talk about gated content and why that's so problematic.

Drew: Why is gated content so problematic?

Drew: It's problematic because if it's gated, the LLMs can't find it. Now, you could try to play games and do some black-hat things and create white code that shows the content for the LLMs to read. Guy's not a fan of that — that's black-hat stuff that will probably get caught and you'll be banned or punished for it. So I guess the question that I ask all the time is: if your content is worth paying for, then gate it. If it's not, don't bother. The chances are, if you do a good enough job providing highly informative content with a unique and distinct point of view that adds value consistently, your prospects are gonna come to you and say, "I'm ready. Let's talk."

Drew: So how did the conversation go? And were there some surprises in the source of data — where LLMs are actually pulling their answers from today?

Drew: Okay, this was really interesting and there's some controversy in it. Company websites are still the primary source. You still need a great website with really great content that the LLMs can crawl. Other sources do matter: YouTube and YouTube's transcripts. Right now the LLMs can't actually watch the videos, but if you put the transcripts on YouTube, they're gonna cite and find those. Blogs, forums — this is a big moment. PR is back, because if you're cited in other places and you get coverage in something that the LLM considers important or authoritative, that counts. But websites first. Now this is a moment where we move to a whole other area of conversation.

Drew: Okay, you've got me on the edge now. What are we talking about, Drew? Is it Reddit?

Drew: Wow, you Reddit my mind. Yes, Reddit. And I'm gonna veer off a little bit because in two of our conversations, we had Eric Eden join us, and Eric has become a Reddit god. If you're not following him, definitely do. He talked about Reddit and a couple of important things to know: one, they do have an influence on some of the answer engines. Both Google and OpenAI have done deals with Reddit to pull their data. There's a joke in the industry that Reddit is where marketing goes to die, because — and I know many CMOs who've been banned from Reddit for acting like a brand instead of a human, which is a funny thing to say. Reddit has a role here. Eric is now literally a king — he's in the top 1%. He mentioned some important data: Reddit has something like 120 million daily users and billions of monthly visits, around 4 billion. And the LLMs are citing Reddit content quite frequently right now. Again, it depends on the product, the category, and so forth, because if people aren't talking about your product or service or category on Reddit, it's not gonna come from there.

Drew: Alright, interesting. But what else you got on Reddit? What's the real insight here?

Drew: The humans on Reddit tend to be considered authentic. Things get voted up and down. You develop karma, you earn your points. So the search engines kind of feel like if you get a positive statement or mention on Reddit, that's a credible source of information. Similarly, TrustRadius, G2, and Trustpilot also play a part. We don't know exactly how much, but they do play a part.

Drew: What's the opportunity for marketers if Reddit conversations are influencing AI answers?

Drew: Okay, you're really veering into an area that I know little about. I have not personally played on Reddit, but Eric Eden, who has done this quite successfully, talked about getting in there gently, stepping into the pool, participating thoughtfully and with your name — telling people who you are. But then he said, as you get there, build communities that you can control, and obviously you want to monitor conversations about your category. It's hard to say today that it is worth dedicating one or two employees to Reddit, but I think it's fairly certain that Reddit will grow in importance in the coming years. So don't ignore it. I don't know if you're gonna get a return on investment today, but there's a learning curve, so you probably need to start.

Drew: Alright, so CMOs are listening. They want to start tomorrow and really get going on proving their AEO performance. What are three first things they should do?

Drew: One: identify the top buyer questions. Now, you could probably do this with your SEO team, and you can also start playing on the LLMs. You could also use some tools that are out there that are starting to do this — there are a lot of them. I'm not sure of the exact names, but I think both SEMrush and Ahrefs are offering tools, and I think there's another one perhaps called Posture, though I may have that wrong. So that's one thing you can do: identify your top buyer questions. Two: create structured content that answers them. By structured content we're talking about Q&As that literally go long-tail question, long-tail answer, with as much honesty and straightforwardness as possible — and if you've got facts, even better. And then the third thing: add schema markup language to your website. Those are three pretty simple things.

Drew: Alright. What kind of questions should marketing teams start answering on their websites right away? That's a good question — yeah, I know, I thought of it.

Drew: So yeah, thank you for that question. Nice softball. One: think about it — when you do your own searches, you typically ask comparison questions. For example: "I am looking for an LLM monitoring tool. Compare Ahrefs and SEMrush's new tools relative to the leading standalone AEO tool." Comparison questions. If you don't help answer that question, you're gonna be ignored. Number two: "What's the best tool for X?" And again, this means you understand the problems that people are trying to solve. A version of that might be, "How does this product work?" Because a lot of times you don't actually know — like, I'm not entirely sure how SEMrush or Ahrefs actually work when it comes to LLM monitoring and helping you figure out what are the right questions to ask. So that's what people are searching.

Drew: Are the CMOs behind? Are we still in the early days? Is the window closing?

Drew: Super early days. Similar to the early days of SEO. There's a lot of testing going on. I strongly encourage you to benchmark where you are today. It's easy to do, by the way — Webflow has a tool. Go to webflow.com/aeo, put your domain in there, have it run a report, and you'll get a general sense of where your website stands. The nice thing about having some benchmarks is you can then start to see whether you can make some headway, whether or not you invest in specific tools. So we're still early, but some first movers, if you do this right, can dominate AI citations — so don't dilly-dally on this one.

Drew: What questions were CMOs really struggling with at the strategy lab?

Drew: I'm not sure "struggling" is the right word, but they wanted to make sure that their SEO team could be their AEO team. And the answer to that is absolutely yes, because good SEO also translates to good AEO. So that was one thing — what kind of team do they need and how do they educate it and what does it look like right now? I think the important part, my takeaway, is this isn't that hard. There's some low-hanging fruit that you just gotta cover and you can see some results. So this is one of those things where with a little bit of energy, you can get high yield really quickly. And then you can start to get smart about it — okay, we're gonna put in more energy. Do we go back and now update our top 100 performing pages and put all the Q&As and maybe some new points of view, so it wins on recency and has the Q&As and the schemas? Other questions people were asking were about measurement frameworks and organizational ownership, and I've talked about that a little bit. Yes, there are tools. If you have SEO tools already in place, chances are they can sell you an AEO version of that. But right now the standalones seem to be really expensive, so be careful before you invest in those.

Drew: So were the questions about who owns AEO and where does it fit in the organization?

Drew: Yeah, a little bit. But it's clear — it's an easy one. SEO team equals AEO team. If you're good at SEO, you'll be good at AEO. Just let them rip, help them organize. And again, early days, lots of speculation. You can test your way to success.

Drew: Okay, so is it true you're speaking at an AEO conference in San Francisco on April 2nd?

Drew: Yes, funny enough, with the folks at Pepper and then AJ Gandhi, where CMO Huddles is participating. Fortunately, I'm a moderator — I'm not the expert. But good friend Amanda Klo from One Mind will also be there, as AEO and SEO have implications for what she's doing. So I'm excited about that. Also, while we're here plugging away, don't forget that we also in April — starting on the seventh — will be in San Francisco for the strategy lab. And then we have one on the eighth in Palo Alto and one on the ninth in Seattle. Super exciting. And I'm gonna be at Human X, so lots of places for you to see me. I can't promise that I will be wearing the penguin hat.

Drew: So it's time to wrap up. You've been talking a long time. If you had to leave CMOs with one piece of advice about AEO right now, what would it be?

Drew: Start answering buyer questions today. If you are not answering those questions, guess what? The AI will cite someone else.

Drew: Well, Drew, that was pretty darn clear. It's: get going. Don't sit around, don't wait for anybody to tell you. It's low-hanging fruit. You CMOs out there — you got this. I think that's all I've got, so thanks for listening, and until next time, keep those renegade thinking caps on and strong.

 

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Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!