8 Easy AEO Actions CMOs Can Take Ahead of The Competition

Before racing for the worms, smart birds first scan the field. 

A good starting point is understanding how visible your brand currently is in LLM responses. Webflow and Hubspot offer free AEO assessment tools that analyze your website and identify opportunities to improve how easily AI systems can crawl and interpret your content. For many teams, these assessments surface simple structural fixes that can make an immediate difference.

One of the simplest AEO wins comes from content many companies overlook: A well-structured glossary. A Huddler recently added a glossary explaining key industry terms and acronyms used throughout their category. The impact was immediate, producing roughly a 40 percent increase in traffic originating from LLM citations.

This works because LLMs frequently answer questions that begin with “What is…” or “How does…” A glossary provides clean, authoritative definitions that AI systems can easily reference. In categories filled with technical language or emerging terminology, a glossary often becomes one of the most frequently cited sections of a website.

Help LLMs find the worms by structuring content around the questions buyers actually ask. This includes adding question-and-answer sections to old and new content. 

During the Strategy Labs, Webflow Chief Evangelist Guy Yalif shared that Webflow’s team added FAQ sections to six product pages along with schema markup. Within two weeks, 57 percent of Webflow’s incremental AI citations came from those six pages alone, demonstrating how small structural changes can produce outsized results.

When birds find a productive patch of ground, they return to it. The same principle applies to your best-performing content.

Improving AEO does not require rebuilding your entire website. In many cases, the fastest gains come from improving the pages that already perform well. Start with your top 25-50 pages based on traffic or pipeline influence. Update the content with new data points and/or other meaningful revisions and repost with a current date. While you’re at, add a concise TL;DR summary at the top and include a short Q&A section at the bottom that reinforces the questions your content answers. As Yalif noted in the Strategy Labs, recency matters a lot to the LLMs.

Finding food is easier when it is clearly marked. For LLMs, schema markup plays a similar role.

Schema is structured metadata that helps search engines and AI systems understand what a page represents. A page can be identified as an article, an FAQ page, a product page, a company profile, or another structured content type. 

During the Strategy Labs, Yalif emphasized that if teams focus on only a few improvements, answering questions and implementing schema are among the most important steps, as they dramatically reduce the effort required for LLMs to interpret your site. 

[Pro tip: Most LLMs can create schema for you; however, you will probably need a webdev engineer to help you add it to your web pages and test it before going live.]

Many companies already have FAQ pages, but they were often written years ago with short keyword-oriented questions designed primarily for search engines.

LLMs respond much better to longer, more conversational questions that reflect how buyers actually speak. Instead of “best CMO communities,” a CMO might ask an LLM, “What is the best community for a B2B CMO in Silicon Valley looking to stay up to date on the latest techniques without being a time suck?” [You’ll never guess what shows up with this query:) ] When your content reflects that natural language format, LLMs are more likely to identify it as a relevant source.

Even the earliest birds still rely on the basics. If the ground is frozen, there are no worms to find.

AEO may be the new acronym, but strong SEO fundamentals remain essential. During the Strategy Labs, Yalif pointed out that if a site lacks basic SEO hygiene, many AEO initiatives will have limited impact. LLMs often rely on traditional search engines as part of their retrieval process. If your site contains broken links, poor metadata, or structural issues, both search engines and AI systems will struggle to interpret it.

Finally, consider whether you are unintentionally hiding the worms.

For years, B2B marketers relied heavily on gated content to generate leads. That model becomes more complicated in an AI-driven discovery environment. If an LLM cannot access your content, it cannot cite it. If it cannot cite it, your brand will not appear in the answers your prospects see. Many companies are experimenting with ungating their best educational and category-defining thought leadership while keeping deeper assets gated later in the buying journey.

AEO is evolving quickly, and the playbooks are still emerging. What works today will undoubtedly change as models improve, measurement tools mature, and adoption accelerates.

If you want to explore these ideas further, join us at The GEO Growth Summit in San Francisco on April 2nd or in New York on May 13th, co-hosted by Pepper, CMO Huddles, and the GTM Leader Society. B2B CMOs can also participate in upcoming CMO Huddles Strategy Labs this spring in San Francisco on April 7, Palo Alto on April 8, Seattle on April 9, Chicago on May 6, Dallas on May 7, and Austin on May 8.

The discovery landscape is shifting again. The early penguin gets the fish.