How To Do AI SEO The Right Way in 2026 for 10x Revenue

I'm going to show you how you can do AEO the right way for this year and beyond. AEO is answer engine optimization. And you have a lot of different variations of this. You have LLMO, which is large language model optimization. You have search everywhere optimization is what we call it. And then you have just AI SEO in general. Now, AEO is optimizing for these answer engines, whatever answers you're getting from like a chat, for example, that's an example of an answer engine. And there are a handful of things that you need to consider to rank highly when it comes to these answer engines. Because if you're not first, you're last. And so the first one is listicle placements. And what I mean by that is when you think about like a ChatGPT, for example, when you ask about what are the top marketing podcasts, as an example. So I have a podcast called Marketing School. Usually we pop up as number 1 in ChatGPT. And that's not to brag, it's to say that I know for a fact that we've been listed in a lot of these listicles around marketing podcasts. That's one piece of it. And so how do you go about reaching out to people that have these listicles already and get yourself included. And so this has become such an effective strategy that we started doing it for our clients over at Single Grain, where we will actually reach out specifically to listicles only to get that link for them and to get them included in there so they get included in the LLMs. Number 2 is citations. When you think about the top sources that are getting listed in these answer engines, number 1 is actually Reddit. So Reddit gets listed about 43% of the time. Wikipedia is number 2, about 40% or so. And then you have YouTube, Which is number 3. And so these citations, YouTube for example, that means you creating YouTube content, you creating a YouTube channel. Ideally you should be creating one because that's going to help you compound for the next decade plus. I, I do believe that YouTube is one of the biggest opportunities for the next decade or so. Maybe you're doing interviews, maybe you're appearing on other people's channels, maybe you're doing collaborations. So being cited on YouTube is a huge trust signal, especially if you're optimizing for the answer engines of Google. Google is one of the top LLMs out there that you need to consider. So they're obviously going to give a lot of credit to one of their own properties, which is YouTube. Now you want to build community on Reddit. So on one end, what you can do for your company is you want to make sure that you have your own subreddit and you want to make sure that you have a community manager who's answering questions there. On the other piece, you can have people who are helping with customer support. So you maybe have customer support people helping on Reddit. That's another piece. But the third piece is also engaging in discourse. And so when people are talking about products or services that are relevant to whatever it is that you do, you want to be engage in the conversation when people are maybe clicking over from Google, for example, or clicking over from ChatGPT. And what ChatGPT will do, or what Gemini will do from Google, is they'll parse out what people are talking about, and then they might mention your product or service. And so ideally, you're also doing a good job. You're not just spamming Reddit, you're doing a good job with your product or service too, so people will reflect on it in a positive way. And the next piece when it comes to AEO is you want to create bofu content and guides. And what I mean by that is Bottom of the funnel content and transactional content, right? So fun things to do in Japan, fun things to do in Rome, that could be a guide, okay? But also that could lead to luxury hotels in Rome. And bottom of the funnel content tends to rank very well when it comes to, you know, an AEO result. And we found that with our clients, even with our own content, that we used to go much more for informational content, maybe 80% of the time informational content. Now, We've actually flipped that to go for 80% of the time we're going for bottom of the funnel transactional content, right? So an example of this might be versus content, Salesforce versus HubSpot, or you might have Salesforce alternatives. You might have guides that these LLMs can then pull from and then you'll get listed in these, in the, in the answers. Everyone's talking about AI right now, but people are struggling to prove the business ROI of AI. Now, at Single Grain, which is my ad agency, that is not an issue because we try to stay at the forefront of AI. We leverage AI not only to make our team more efficient and faster, but to make your business more efficient. And the things that we do around marketing, it's still our bread and butter, but when we combine that with our AI prowess, that's what allows our clients to grow a lot faster. So if you're interested in learning more, if you're interested in acquiring customers faster, go to singlegrain.com. Again, singlegrain.com, and we'll see you on the other side. You also don't want to forget FAQ. So with whatever content that you have already, could be existing content or new content that you're pumping out, You want to make sure that you have a complete answer when the LLM lands on your page. You have frequently asked questions. And what typically happens there is that these FAQs will often pop up in the AI overviews, or it might pop up for ChatGPT as an example. But you want to give yourself as many shots on goal as possible. If you're selling software, for example, you want to have that. And the next piece, let's just say that you want to make sure that you have as much custom human insights, or you want to have as much proprietary data that you can share. And so if you have interesting software and you have, you might say, Oh, 95% of the time ChatGPT is citing fresh content. That's interesting data that you can pull. So if you have interesting data that you can put in, what's going to happen is that gets cited. And what happens is when you're citing fresh, interesting data, obviously you're going to stand out more. And obviously that's why that gets more weight when it comes to these answer engines. You want to optimize your brand mentions across the web. And so there are a handful of different products that you can use. Google Alerts is free. There's Brand24 out there. You can use the Ahrefs Brand Radar to see how your brand's mentioning— being mentioned across the web on these different surfaces as well. The cool thing about Brand Radar is a look at AI overviews, they'll look at AI mode, they'll look at ChatGPT, they'll look at a handful of these different answer engines. And then you can figure out how you might want to optimize from there because what gets measured gets managed. You want to make sure that you're fixing crawlability and technical issues on your website. As I mentioned earlier, you want to make sure that your site is quick. You want to make sure that there aren't any crawlability issues where stuff is getting blocked. Maybe you're blocking answer engines completely. You don't want to do that, right? Whatever you can do to make it a good user experience for humans, you make it easier. That meant that usually unlocks more crawl budget for your website. And what that means is hopefully you get more shots on goal when it comes to be listed in these answer engines. You want to use AI workflows to execute at scale. And what I mean by that is when you think about content being created today, the majority of people who are creating content today, I've talked, by the way, we've been interviewing a lot of SEOs for, for work at Single Grain. And we talked to them now and they're like, yeah, if you're not using AI-assisted content to help you with your workflows for the content that you're creating, then what are you doing? And so we have a product internally called ClickFlow that does that. And when I asked my team about how much time it saves them, they say ClickFlow saves us 60 hours a month per person right now. And we're like, they want some new workflows being built right now. And I'm like, okay, if we build this workflow for you, how much more time is this going to save? Well, we're going to save 90 hours per month total. And that's huge. And so AI workflows are going to help you execute at scale. You can produce programmatic pages, you can delete, consolidate, update content at scale, you can add FAQs to your website at scale. All these things that we talked about earlier, you can do this at scale. Just make sure that you have a human in the loop. Because if you let AI go to its own devices, it can lead to a lot of pain for not just answer engine optimization, but your website as well. So look, that's it. That is a good way for you to start when it comes to optimizing for answer engine optimization. By the way, if you want to see my HubSpot talk at HubSpot's Inbound in terms of how we're using AI SEO to 100x our traffic and conversions, you can check it out over here and we'll see you in it.