Remember the early days of HubSpot? Our co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, and Brian Halligan practically invented inbound marketing, leveraging something new and exciting called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to put HubSpot on the map. Dharmesh, ever the hacker-builder, started a personal blog, OnStartups.com, and almost single-handedly out-ranked well-funded companies with big marketing budgets. His secret? Consistently creating high-quality, valuable content that Google loved.
Fast forward to today, and the marketing landscape is shifting dramatically again. If you've been noticing a dip in your organic search traffic, you're not alone. Many brands, even those with well-established SEO strategies, are seeing a significant decline in traffic, sometimes as much as 20% to 40%. The culprit? The meteoric rise of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
For years, the job-to-be-done for Google was to give you ten blue links. Your job as a marketer was to be one of those links, hopefully at the top. But now, your customers have a new way of finding answers: they're asking large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini.
Imagine this: instead of typing "best CRM for small business" into Google and sifting through articles, your customer now asks ChatGPT directly: "What's the best CRM for my small business?" And what does ChatGPT do? It gives them a direct answer, often synthesizing information from various sources and presenting just a few top recommendations.
This fundamentally changes the game. If your brand isn't directly mentioned or cited in that AI-generated answer, you might as well not exist. There's no "next page" on an AI answer, and the click-through rates from these answer engines are significantly lower because users are often satisfied with the immediate response. It’s a binary outcome: you’re either in the answer or you’re invisible.
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is the discipline of optimizing your content to be found and cited by AI models when customers ask questions relevant to your brand, products, or industry. It's the spiritual successor to SEO, but with a crucial difference: you're no longer just optimizing for a search engine to rank links; you're optimizing for an AI to understand and present your information as an answer.
This is critical for your brand because:
Your customers are already using AI: ChatGPT alone has over 800 million weekly active users. They're asking questions about everything, including your industry.
Declining SEO traffic: As more people turn to AI for answers, the traditional organic search traffic you've relied on is diminishing. You can't afford to ignore this trend.
The binary outcome: Unlike a Google search, where you might appear on page two, with AEO, if your brand isn't explicitly part of the AI's answer, you lose the opportunity entirely.
So, what can you do to ensure your brand shows up when it matters most? Here's how to adapt your strategy for AEO:
Welcome AI Bots to Your Website: Just like Google used to send its "Googlebot" to crawl your site, AI models have their own crawlers. OpenAI uses "OI searchbot" and "GPT bot." Many companies block unknown bots, but for AEO, you want these AI crawlers on your site.
Your Action: Explicitly allow "OI searchbot" and "GPT bot" to crawl your website. If they can't access your content, your brand won't even be in the game.
Structure Your Content for Direct Answers: AI models are looking for concise, factual answers to specific questions. Gone are the days of long, flowing narratives (unless they contain easily digestible answer blocks). Think like an AI: what's the clearest, most direct answer to a common customer question?
Your Action: Reframe your existing content and create new content in a structured question-and-answer format. Use clear headings, bullet points, and definitive statements. If a customer asks "What are the top features of [your product]?", your website should have a page titled exactly that, with a clear, numbered list of features.
Maintain Strong "White Hat" SEO Practices: Don't abandon your SEO efforts entirely! When an LLM like ChatGPT receives a query, it often converts that into traditional search engine queries (like Bing, which ChatGPT uses). These searches still return a list of web pages. Therefore, having a high-authority, fast-loading, and well-structured website is still crucial.
Your Action: Continue producing high-quality, relevant content, building authoritative backlinks, ensuring fast page load times, and optimizing your site's technical health. These foundational SEO elements will still influence whether your content makes it into the AI's initial pool of information.
Embrace Structured Data and Inventory Information: If you have products, AI models love structured product catalogs. Think about size, color, specifications, and crucially, inventory status and delivery times. This information helps AI provide complete and accurate answers to purchase-related queries.
Your Action: Implement structured data (like Schema Markup) for your products and services. Ensure your website clearly communicates inventory levels and shipping information.
Cultivate Online Reviews and Community Engagement: AI models, particularly for product-oriented queries, increasingly value human-based signals. Review sites (like G2 for B2B) and community forums (like Reddit) where real users discuss and recommend products or solutions carry significant weight. If a Reddit thread has a definitive answer to a question and that comment is highly upvoted, an AI is very likely to cite it.
Your Action: Encourage customers to leave reviews on relevant platforms. Monitor and engage in online communities where your target audience discusses industry topics.
Measure Your AI Traffic: You can't optimize what you don't measure. Many analytics tools (including HubSpot's) now report traffic from AI referrals. This allows you to track the effectiveness of your AEO efforts.
Your Action: Start monitoring your AI referral traffic in your analytics platform. Understand your baseline and track changes as you implement your AEO strategy.
At ContextProof, we understand that showing up in the age of AI isn't just about keywords anymore. It's about being the definitive, trusted answer when your customers turn to LLMs. Just as HubSpot built tools for the inbound marketing movement, ContextProof is building solutions to help your brand excel in the AEO era. We help you create and optimize the content that AI models love, ensuring your brand is always part of the conversation.
The world of marketing is always evolving. Just as Dharmesh Shah found a new way to market HubSpot 20 years ago, there's a new opportunity now with AEO. Don't let your brand disappear in the shift. Let's make sure your brand is not just found, but understood and recommended by the AI models shaping the future of information discovery.
Wondering how your brand currently shows up on ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs? The shift from SEO to AEO is happening now, and hoping for the best is not a strategy.
Let ContextProof show you exactly how your brand appears on major LLMs today. Schedule a free, no-obligation AEO analysis and get a clear roadmap to ensure you're the answer your customers are looking for.