👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
There’s no shortage of sketchy advice about how to hack ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini. But here’s what matters: these tools are becoming the most influential gatekeepers in the B2B buying journey, and they play by different rules than traditional search.
ChatGPT alone now has a billion active users and was the fifth most-visited website in the world in June 2025. Usage is up to 2.5 billion prompts per day, which is quickly catching up to Google’s 14 billion daily searches. Meanwhile, Google is steadily morphing into an AI-powered answer engine itself, with AI Overviews appearing in 13% of all searches (up 2x since January).
Increasingly, buyers aren’t researching products themselves. They’re asking AI what to buy, who to trust, and how to decide. That means if your product isn’t mentioned in these answers, it may not exist at all in the buyer’s mind. And if you are mentioned, AI search could become your fastest-growing source of pipeline. As my friend Sam Richard, CRO at ngrok, recently told me, “It’s driving a truly shocking amount of business for us.”
The goal is no longer getting clicks to your website, although that wouldn’t be such a bad thing! It’s about being mentioned by AI answer engines in a way that influences the right customers (and does eventually lead them to your website). And doing that requires an answer engine optimization (AEO) strategy. (Folks can’t seem to agree on the name of this, by the way. I’m calling it AEO, but have also seen it called AI SEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO… LMAO).
To learn how to get found in AI search, I turned to Josh Blyskal who leads AEO strategy and research for Profound, one of the emerging breakout players in AI search. I’ve summarized the conversation into nine practical takeaways that you could start applying now to improve your AI search visibility:
Decide which prompts you want to own
Be aware that answer engines behave differently
Write specialized, specific content
Create surround sound around your product
Get mentioned on Reddit
Use structured comparisons and lists
Make fewer images and more tables
Measure your influence, not just clicks
Stay on top of citation drift
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