085: Answer Engine Optimization: Are You Prepared for AI Search?

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Main Gen Studio. As usual, I'm Miranda Jenkins, and today I'm joined not by Emilio Garcia, but by Gabby Garcia. How have you been this morning, Gabby?

Pretty good. Another Garcia. Yeah, pretty good, Amanda. How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. So for those listeners that don't know, Gabby is another one of our demand generation specialists here at Boundify. So every once in a while, we like to give our subject matter expert, Emilio, a break from recording and take over. So I'm excited about today's topic, though. Today, we're going to be talking about something that has pretty quickly moved from like a future prediction of what could happen to something that B2B marketers are now needing to pay attention to because it's reality. And that is AI search. So for years, we talked about search engines as the primary way that buyers discover information. If someone needed a solution, they would open up their Google browser, type in, you know, a query, get tagged for a few keywords. And then they'd compare a handful of the websites that came up as the answer and gradually start to build a shortlist of vendors. And because of that, that process has shaped the way that marketers have approached visibility. We invested in SEO, we optimized our web pages for SEO, we researched specific keywords, built backlinks in our content, and measured our website rankings because that's how buyers would find us. But today we're starting to see some— see that process change a little bit. So instead of opening up a search engine and clicking through 10 different results, buyers are increasingly asking AI tools to summarize information for them. So they're opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, they're reading through the Google AI overviews before they're ever even clicking a website. And all that to say, like traditional search certainly isn't disappearing anytime soon. But we do have to recognize that buyer behavior is beginning to evolve. And because of that, our marketing has to evolve with it. So today we're going to talk about what that means for B2B organizations. We'll talk through what answer engine optimization actually is, how AI search works, how marketers should be thinking differently about their content creation. And then finally, go through some questions that every team should be asking just to kind of evaluate if they're ready. for this shift. So again, Gabby, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks again, Miranda, for having me. I was really excited about this topic because I think that one of the conversations that— it is one of the conversations where people immediately jump into tactics, right? To ask questions like, how do I optimize my website right now for ChatGPT? Or what prompts should I be using or use? What tools should I try or buy? But I actually think that we are asking kind of, I wouldn't say the wrong questions, but not mainly the right ones, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because before we start thinking about optimization, we need to understand what's actually changing nowadays. And this isn't really a conversation about technology. We wanna make that my, you know, like, like disclaimer. It's a conversation about buyer behavior. And that's something that we have talked many, many times in this podcast and in the Spanish one. Demand generation has always started with understanding how buyers make decisions, right? So if that behavior changes even like slightly, it changes the way that marketing should be like supporting the buyer journey.

Mm-hmm.

So before we even define what AEO is, I think it's important to recognize that AI search is simply another reflection of how buyers right now are trying to reduce that effort during the research, right? So nowadays we know that people want to find answers like faster.

Yeah.

So they want context and a lot of context, they want recommendations and AI now happens to provide those things in a very convenient way. So I think that's really the lens that we should use throughout the conversation that we're having today.

Yeah, exactly. I completely agree. And it's so important because if buyers are changing how they research vendors, then visibility, especially visibility in these new AI platforms, it means something different. Historically, visibility would mean ranking well on Google, but now visibility also means actually making sure that you're part of the answers that AI generates in each platform. And I don't think enough marketers have realized that those are 2 completely different challenges. So let's start out by just defining what we mean when we say answer engine optimization. So before we get into tactics or recommending recommendations, Answer engine optimization is a term that's becoming increasingly popular, but I've also started to notice that it's one of those top concepts where people seem to mean different things when they're referencing it. Some people are describing it as like SEO for AI or optimizing for ChatGPT. And, you know, it makes sense why these different descriptions are popping up because it's a brand new thing. But I think it's a little bit oversimplified. So when we're talking about answer engine optimization, we're referencing the practice of increasing your brand's visibility within AI-generated answers. And that distinction matters because traditionally when we thought about search, the goal was to appear within the list of results, preferably higher up in the list of results. The search engine is presenting the options and the buyer decides on which one to click. AI works completely differently. Instead of presenting 10 links and then giving the user the option to click on them and do the research, AI attempts to synthesize all the information it can find about a topic from different areas and aggregate it into one answer. Sometimes it still references the individual sources. Sometimes it'll still recommend a specific vendor and link that specific vendor. Sometimes it'll summarize different perspectives from different sources and aggregate them into one. But regardless of the format, You have to like, we have to admit that the experience is fundamentally different from search engines. You're no longer competing to appear on the results page. You're competing to be a part of the answer itself. And I think that's why we're seeing this new conversation emerge around AEO.

Sure. And I'm, I think that's such an important distinction that you marked because it changes how we define visibility. And for years, I know that marketers have measured success by asking, you know, like the typical questions like, did we rank like on page 1? How many organic clicks did we receive? Or did people visit our website? And stuff like that. Those metrics are still valuable, but AI introduces another layer before someone even reaches your site, right? And now you can imagine a buyer asking, What's the best CRM for a growing B2B company, or which demand generation agency specializes in SaaS, right? So if an AI platform generates an answer that already includes 3 or 4 companies, that buyer has already started forming opinions before visiting a single website.

Yeah.

So visibility is no longer only about earning the click, right? It's now also about earning the recommendation. And I think that's a very different way of thinking about discoverability.

Yeah, exactly. And it also highlights the big comparison and distinction between SEO and AEO, whereas SEO traditionally focused on helping search engines understand like what pages should rank for what specific keywords, specific searches. Whereas AEO, because of how answer engines work, it focuses on helping AI understand content and understand which organizations have the expertise to answer a particular question. And that sounds like a subtle difference, but in reality, if you were wanting to do AEO for your content, then it changes the way you are— you approach content and how you're creating it. Historically, we spent a lot of time thinking about specific keywords, identifying what phrases buyers are searching, how often they're appearing, the search volume on our keywords. And all of that still matters, but AI seems to care a lot more about the context. Of your content. Is your content actually answering the question that buyers are searching? Is it structured clearly? Are you demonstrating expertise within the content? And does the content provide enough depth for AI to confidently reference it? So instead of asking, what keywords should we target for this piece of content? With AEO, we need to be asking what buyer question are we trying to answer or become known for answering? Sure.

I really like the way that you're framing it because it moves the conversation away from, you know, like the gaming algorithms and towards helping the buyers, right? If you think about the best content that you've ever read, like it probably wasn't memorable because it repeated a keyword 20 times, right?

Yeah.

It was memorable because it explained something, as you said, clearly. It gave you a framework, it challenged the way that you were thinking at the moment, or as you said, it answered that question that you even realized that you have at the time. So I think that's exactly the type of content that AI seems to value, right? And not because, again, it's optimized for AI specifically, but because it's generally useful for the buyer. And I think that's one of the reasons I'm actually optimistic about this shift. It rewards marketers who invest in expertise instead of just shortcuts.

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Luckily for us, the things that AI is ranking your content well for, thankfully, are all things that make your content better and more digestible for human readers as well. Another comparison that I think is important to think about is the difference between clicks in SEO versus answers for AEO. Traditional search was designed around the idea of sending users somewhat somewhere and having them land in a specific location. Google's job was to help you find the right web page, but AI's goal is to answer the question as directly as possible. And sometimes that answer includes the links to a website and encourages you to click it and explore further. But increasingly, we're seeing that buyers are getting the information directly in the answer before ever clicking anything. So if marketers continue measuring success that only through clicks and website visits, then they're missing an important part of what's happening earlier in the buyer's research process. Your content may still be influencing buying decisions, even if the buyer never enters your website during the first interaction. So I think that's where this conversation becomes relevant for demand generation, because demand gen has never been about optimizing for a single channel. It's about influencing the buyer, you know, buyer throughout their entire decision-making process. We've always said that buyers don't suddenly become interested in your product because they fill out a form. They arrive to the form, you know, at the bottom of the funnel with previous experiences, previous impressions of your brand, previous research done. And AI search is simply just another place where those impressions are being formed. And that's why I don't think AEO is really an SEO conversation. It's part of the larger demand gen conversation because we're not trying to influence our ranking. We're trying to influence our brand awareness and credibility. We're trying to influence whether our company becomes a part of the buyer's initial consideration set, and that's exactly what demand has always tried to accomplish.

That's such an important point as well, because I also want to address the question that comes up, I think, almost every time someone introduces AO, right? Does this replace SEO? Like, does it? Does it? Personally, I don't think so. I think that I see AO as an evolution, right? Not a replacement for SEO because people are still going to use Google. They're still going to visit websites and they're still going to compare, as you said, vendors. They're still going to consume that type of long-form content and, but now, now there's another layer in that journey. As I said, AI helps buyers to navigate information faster and because of that, marketers have another opportunity. to establish like trust before the buyer reaches our website. So rather than choosing between SEO or AO, I think organizations should be asking a different question right now would be, how do we create content that it's valuable enough for both people and AI and AI to understand, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because if you solve that problem, then you're not only optimizing for one platform, You're building a stronger digital presence overall.

Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, so I think we've pretty well established what AEO is. I think the next question that more marketers and listeners naturally will ask is, well, how does AI actually decide what to recommend? There's still assumptions that AI works just like Google. Or, you know, it's a new thing, so we're still figuring out how it works. People imagine that AI just has another ranking algorithm. Maybe there's another, you know, way of that the AI is scoring the keywords to determine whether your website appears. But that's really not how these systems work. AI isn't trying to rank your webpage the way a traditional search engine does. Instead, like we said, it's trying to answer a question, and that's a completely different objective. Think about what happens when someone asks in an AI search platform, what's the best CRM for a growing B2B SaaS company? The AI isn't looking for one web page that contains that exact phrase. Instead, it's doing the research for you to gather information from multiple places. Different sources. It's comparing different perspectives from different websites. It identifies recurring themes from different pieces of content. And then it takes all of that and builds a response that attempts to answer the user's questions as completely as possible in one response. So rather than acting like a directory of websites, AI is behaving a lot more like a researcher. It's reading, it's comparing, it's synthesizing, and then finally generating an answer. So that's incredibly important to keep in mind because it changes what we're optimizing for as marketers.

And I think that's probably the biggest misconception as well surrounding AI search today because Mm-hmm. People assume that, that if AI isn't like ranking pages, right, then SEO somehow becomes irrelevant. But I actually think the opposite is true. Good content still matters. Your website still matters. What's changing is that your website right now is no longer the only place that AI is learning about your business. Your company has a digital footprint, and that extends to beyond, like beyond your domain, right?

Right.

AI might read your website to understand how your services work, right? And then it might look at your blog to understand how you think. It might analyze your customer reviews to understand how people describe working with you, or even search for documentation or educational type of resources. That you have ever published. Every one of those pieces contributes another signal and together they begin forming a much more complete picture of who your company is and that's actually reflected in the way of AI, of how AI platforms answer or build answers today. They're not relying on a single type of, you know, like source of truth, They're looking across an ecosystem of information.

Mm-hmm.

Which means that your authority isn't defined only on one page, right? It's defined by the consistency of your expertise across many different environments. So I think that's a really interesting shift because marketers have spent years thinking about websites as the center of the, of their digital strategy. And websites are still incredibly important, but they're no longer the entire story. Today, your digital, uh, presence is, is more broader than other websites alone. And honestly, I think that it's much closer to how buyers nowadays make decisions because very few B2B buyers rely on a company's website alone. They're just not just going to see your website and, you know, like, I'm going to buy, buy to you today. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

That's not how it works. If they're evaluating a vendor, they usually visit the website, but they also look at LinkedIn, they search for customer experiences, they read case studies and, um, you know, like listen to podcasts, webinars, attend to, you know, the type of webinars and ask peers to, um, to make, you know, some recommendations. And they, they might even like search Reddit. or industry communities to see what practitioners are saying.

Yeah.

I know whenever I have time, I see what they're saying because in other words, they're actually buyers naturally trying to gather that information from multiple sources before they make a decision, right? And AI is doing something very similar to that. It's just simply doing the research much faster nowadays. So when we talk about preparing for AI search, We are really talking about strengthening the same digital ecosystem that already influences buyers today.

Yeah. And I think that also leads into another concept that marketers are probably going to have to evaluate and hear about much more often over the next few years, and that's brand authority. Because historically, when we talked about authority, we— it was more of a technical SEO discussion, things like backlinks, domain authority, search rankings. And while those are still useful indicators, like we've already discussed, AI seems to evaluate authority differently. It's assessing and evaluating questions like, does this company consistently demonstrate expertise? Do multiple trusted sources talk about this organization? And also, is the perspective of the organization consistent across multiple forms of content and also multiple platforms? Like you mentioned, it's not only just evaluating your website, evaluating your social media platforms and your thought leadership, employees, posts, and all of that. So authority becomes less about popularity and more about Have you built your credibility?

Yeah, I really like that distinction because credibility isn't something that you build overnight, right? It's the result of consistently sharing useful knowledge. And if your company publishes thoughtful, you know, like thoughtful content every month, if your experts participate in webinars or your leadership team shares perspective on LinkedIn, I know we do. Your customers talk, I know, like possibly about working with you. Those individual activities might feel disconnected by their own, but that's what really AI right now it's looking for, right?

Right.

Each of them, evidence that your organization understands its space and evidence that other people recognize that expertise that you are consistently contributing valuable information. So that's a much healthier definition of authority than simply saying, how many keywords do we rank for, right?

Yeah. And that's why marketers also should stop thinking about AI search as another channel to optimize and rather shift that thinking to think about it as a positive outcome of having a strong digital presence. If all of your expertise lives inside of your company, then AI can't learn from it. You know, everything is internal. If your subject matter experts are never publishing on social media, then AI has very little evidence that they know anything about the topic. Or if your website is only talking about your product, instead of helping buyers understand their problems, then there's very little information for AI to reference. And like we've said, all of those things are positive things to do for the way buyers interact with your content and your website, let alone the way AI is interacting with it. So the things you're optimizing for AI is a positive shift just for the way buyers interact with your content as well. Ultimately, AI search rewards organizations that already behave like educators, organizations that consistently explain and answer questions and contribute useful knowledge to the market.

And I think that's actually encouraging because none of those recommendations require marketers to learn an entire New discipline, right?

Yeah.

They're the same characteristics we're always associated with good demand generation, as we said, helping buyers to understand their problems, publishing educational content, as you said, publishing that content kind of build trust before someone enters a sales conversation or creating a recognizable point of view. AI simply raises the importance of those activities because now They're influencing not only people, but also the systems that buyers rely on to gather information.

Yeah, exactly. All right, so transitioning now, if AI is looking for organizations that consistently answer questions and demonstrate expertise, then the next logical question would be, what does creating AI-friendly content actually look like, because that's where marketing teams can begin to translate these ideas into actions. So thinking through what you actually can do differently. The good news is that creating content for AI search, like you said, doesn't require an entirely new content strategy. It just requires maybe a better one. So when we look at characteristics that AI tends to reward, they look very familiar to kind of what's always been recommended. The first and probably the most important one is answer your buyers' questions, not your product information, not questions about the product, but the questions that your buyers are asking and the problems that your product is solving. For your buyers. Think about the conversations that your sales team has every week, the objections they hear from buyers, the comparison the prospects are making, the challenges that they're trying to solve. These are the types of questions that your content should be built around answering. Because if your content is genuinely helpful to buyers, then there's a much greater chance that it'll also be useful for AI systems trying to answer the same questions. And then another thing is to make the answer within the content easy to understand. So having clear headings, logical sections throughout the content, bullet points can be helpful, a dedicated FAQ section at the bottom. All of those things make content easier to scan for people. But it also makes it easier for AI to interpret and include in answers. Luckily, like we've said, it really isn't about figuring out a new trick to write content for machines. If your audience can quickly understand your content, then AI is much more likely to understand it as well.

Exactly. Another recommendation would be is Demonstrating expertise instead of simply making claims, right? It's one thing to say that you're an expert. It's much valuable to show it, to actually show it, right? So you might want to share real examples, explain your frameworks, talk about the lessons that you've learned throughout the time, provide original insights based on your own experiences. So those are the things that differentiate your content from the hundreds of articles that are simply summarizing what everyone else has already written. So ultimately, what— that's why, you know, like, buyers and AI both are looking for content that actually contributes something useful to the conversation.

Yeah, that makes me think of the last topic that you and I talked about together, but the pillar content. Episode. But just remembering that the thing that makes your content useful and the thing that makes your content, you know, that buyers want to consume your content is the human aspect. Don't, you know, don't lose that in the age of AI. The humanity that you can bring to your content and the real-life stories that you can bring to your content is still going to, you know, be what makes your content perform well. I would say the last recommendation is probably the simplest, but one that teams might forget, and that's to keep your content updated. Marketing teams spend so much time creating new content that they rarely overlook, you know, they overlook and rarely revisit what they've already created, what already exists. But things within your industry can change, your statistics can become outdated, your products may have evolved, the questions your buyers are asking may have changed. So it's a good practice to go back and refresh your best performing content, and that's often just as valuable as publishing something brand new. And it's a great reminder that AI-friendly content is really just good content. It's clear, it's useful, it's current, and most importantly, it's written to help people first and answer their questions. So if creating AI-friendly content is really about building better resources and demonstrating expertise, then I'd say the final question becomes, How do you know if your marketing team is actually ready for AI search? So after everything we've discussed, I think the final thing we can discuss is whether AI search— isn't whether AI search is coming. It's whether your organization is prepared for it or not. So readiness starts with asking a few honest questions. For example, are we consistently creating content that answers the questions our buyers are actually asking? There's a big difference between explaining what you sell and helping buyers understand the problems than, you know, the problems that they're trying to solve. Another one is, is our content easy to consume? Are we organizing our information clearly? Are we regularly updating our best performing resources? Those are relatively simple improvements, but together and being done consistently, they make your content much more useful for both buyers and AI platforms. Yeah.

And I also think that teams should look like beyond their website. If someone wanted to understand what your company knows, where will they find that expertise, right? Will they find your subject matter experts sharing insights on LinkedIn?

Yeah.

Will they find webinars or podcasts or that educational resources or, you know, like those contributors, contributions to the industry communities, or does all that knowledge stays inside the company? Because the stronger and more consistent your digital presence is, the easier it becomes for both Again, buyers in AI to recognize your expertise, right?

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Another question that I think more marketing teams will start asking is, can we actually measure the impact of AI search? Do we know how much traffic is coming from AI-powered search engines? Do we know what topics we want our companies to become known for? Are we tracking whether our visibility is improving over time? Um, because just like SEO, there isn't something— it's not something you like optimize once and forget about it. It's also an ongoing process. And the answer to all of those is yes, there are, you know, emerging answer engine optimization platforms and resources that you can use to assess all of those things, similar to how Semrush is SEO. We are, as I'm sure listeners know, we're a HubSpot agency. HubSpot has an AEO feature. So if you're a HubSpot user, definitely check it out. If you're not a HubSpot user, there are emerging platforms that kind of assess all of those metrics for you. And then maybe the last question to ask is the most important one, and that would be who is actually owning AI search? Within the organization. Is it the content team? Is it the SEO team? Is it our demand gen team? RevOps? The reality when you're thinking through that is that AI search really touches all of them. It depends on content quality, brand authority, analytics, and subject matter expertise. So rather than thinking of it as just another initiative for marketing— yeah, for marketing, I think organizations should see it as part of just how they build and share knowledge.

And because, you know, at the end of the day, preparing for AI search isn't about chasing another, as you said, algorithm. Yeah. It's about becoming the kind of company that's consistently helpful, trustworthy, and easy to understand. So if you focus on answering buyer questions, demonstrating expertise and building that authority over time, then you're not just preparing for AI search, you're strengthening your entire demand generation strategy, which is the ultimate thing, right?

Mm-hmm.

I think that if there's one takeaway from today's conversation, I think it's this: AI search doesn't change the fundamentals of good marketing. It simply raises the standard and the companies that will benefit most won't necessarily be the ones using the newest AI tools like we are seeing. Like everyone wants to have 5 different AI tools that doesn't mean anything.

Yeah.

They will be the ones that consistently create value, valuable content, they share their expertise and build trust along before, you know, like the buyer's journey and even before the buyer is really, really ready to talk to sales.

Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. All right. Well, I hope today's conversation gave you a better understanding of how AI search is changing the way buyers discover information, and then more importantly, how you can begin preparing your own marketing strategy for it. So thank you so much for listening to another episode of Demand Gen Studio, and we will see you next time. Thanks, Gabby.

Thanks, Vienna. See you.