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When I started writing about AI search last year, it felt like something that was coming soon yet hadn’t quite arrived. It wasn’t yet a meaningful channel for the average startup, and you could kinda wait and see before putting big dollars into it.
Well, that’s no longer the case. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the single biggest channel where B2B marketers are increasing investments this year. AI searches probably represent at least one-third of all searches these days when you combine AI Overviews (21% of Google keywords as of November 2025) and LLM queries (ChatGPT alone does about one-fifth of Google’s query volume).
The BFD: AI responses recommend products rather than simply provide a list of links. This means the buyer increasingly generates a shortlist of products (or even makes a buying decision) before ever visiting your website. And AI engines are becoming the main way that people interface with your product in general (see: Salesforce going ‘headless’).
With AEO maturing rapidly, I reached out to more than a dozen marketers about what they’re doing differently and what’s working right now in AI search. We covered AEO metrics, how to get AI to say the right things about your products, and why YouTube (not Reddit) is the latest AEO battleground.
1. Shift from AI visibility to influenced pipeline
AI engines don’t send much referral traffic, and instead keep users within their walled garden. Last year the goal was visibility: share-of-voice in AI queries became the dominant metric.
While visibility still matters (that’s the starting point), it’s not enough. Marketers are shifting to comprehension and pipeline influence. I think this reflects the maturity of the category and helps justify growing AEO budgets.
Comprehension: How well AI engines describe your products relative to competitors
Pipeline influence: How much pipeline can be attributed to AI engines whether directly (referral traffic) or indirectly (self-reported or manual attribution)
beehiiv, for example, shifted to measuring LLM-attributed signups according to CMO Darren Chait. With this shift came a greater focus on getting LLMs to better describe beehiiv and its differentiation.
“This year we have shifted from measuring LLM visibility to LLM-attributed sign ups. Last year we prioritized the typical AEO optimizations, and launched a successful Reddit strategy, which led to material growth in how often beehiiv was included or cited by the models. But in many cases, the LLMs were not doing a good job of describing beehiiv, its differentiation, and where it sits in the market. We started re-writing/re-structuring the pages that the models were citing, like our enterprise landing page, and we soon saw significant growth in leads and signups attributed to LLMs – with no real change in visibility metrics.”
2. Solve the consistency problem
Many marketers noticed that LLMs weren’t doing a good job of describing their products. While it’s easy to blame LLMs for this, the reality is that most brands were making it really difficult for AI. (“It’s me, hi 👋, I’m the problem. It’s me.”)
Reply realized that they had over 500 blog posts that described the product differently. Their solution was to align around a single idea and make sure that was reflected in all key pages.
“One of our biggest realizations at Reply was that we had 500+ blog posts and 1,000+ mentions all describing us differently. We aligned everything around one idea -- sales engagement and AI SDR -- and made that the consistent focus across key pages and mentions. That alone got us into the top 3 and helped us show up in ~25% of 300+ tracked prompts.”
PhantomBuster did this, too, and now treats AEO as a content alignment problem.
“The biggest AEO unlock was treating it as a content alignment problem: syncing blog, landing pages, and support content across every touchpoint, with AirOps' knowledge base making that scalable.”
These inconsistencies get magnified when you factor in off-site mentions. AI answers reflect your brand’s reputation in the market, which isn’t limited to your own website and needs to span review sites like G2, social media, and publications. PR is effectively the new AEO. Webflow’s focus for this year has been expanding their offsite authority signals according to AEO/SEO lead Vivian Hoang, which requires a marketing-wide effort.
“It's a cross-functional effort across our marketing team to build our presence in the external publications, review sites, community discussions, and partner content that AI actually pulls from. AEO is not just about optimizing your owned content, it's about creating and being a part of conversations about your brand across the web.”
3. Make it obvious for AI to find what it needs
Part of influencing AI comprehension is just making it dead simple for AI engines to find the information you want to highlight. Marketers are now adding these ‘must cite’ resources directly to their homepage navigation.
DoWhatWorks tracks millions of websites to find their winning A/B tests. CMO Casey Hill noticed this trend in their data and pointed out examples from brands like Replit, Clay, Sundial, and Ahrefs. Replit includes a prominent link to their Vibe Coding 101, which nudges AI engines to reference Replit in vibe coding related queries.
“Structural prominence or what you put in your headers, subheaders, top nav, and footer, matters for LLM citations. For brands like Clay and Sundial including top customer use cases linked directly in the footer seems to have increased the citation rate of those customers in conjunction with queries around Clay/Sundial. For Replit including “Vibe Coding 101” linked in their footer is a way to increase categorical citations between Replit and vibe coding.”
4. Tell AI engines your content is fresh
AI reshuffles answers constantly. Keeping content fresh can be the difference between staying cited or getting dropped. Content refreshes need to happen regularly and programmatically (AI tools and content engineering can certainly help).
And LLMs need to know your content has been updated. A quick win: just add a “last updated” date to your pages according to growth advisor Kevin Indig of the excellent Growth Memo newsletter.
“I see an average 15% uplift in citations from adding a "last updated" date to pages (editorial content, programmatic). The effect holds if the page regularly updates (with meaningful new content).”