👋 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:

Answer engines are actively recommending products (and newsletters 😉). Similar to SEO, you need to decide which prompts are most critical for your brand based on two factors: the volume of queries and the relevance to your product and its core differentiators. It’s worth mentioning that tools like Profound’s Conversational Explorer can be helpful here.

In my case, this might be queries like best newsletters for startup founders or best newsletters for startup pricing. For a shoe brand, it might be best running shoes or most comfortable shoes or whatever is most important for them to dominate.

Josh recommends including three types of prompts in your target list:

Josh compared 100,000 prompts across ChatGPT and Perplexity to see how much they overlap. Turns out, not by much. Only 11% of domain citations were shared between the platforms.

It is possible to be dominant in ChatGPT, but invisible in Perplexity. Start your answer engine optimization (AEO) with the most important platform for your audience (likely ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews) and build strategies specifically for that platform. Then expand your surface area over time.

To get mentioned in these prompts, you’ll need to build out new content. Your goal: isolate a topic that everyone’s talking about, then write the most definitive and specific content around it.

If you’re operating a shoe brand, you’d want to write hyper-specific content like why cushioned running shoes are better for your knee health. And then you’d want to cover 20 different options for cushioned running shoes along with a hyper-specific comparison for each.

“It’s a race to granularity,” Josh said. “Hyper-specificity is key. You want to own your product niches and differentiators.”