← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences and optimize your website. All powered by agentic AI. There's been a huge shift in marketing teams over the last year. AI agents are now part of the team and this is what it takes to be successful in B2B marketing. They're in our meetings, taking notes and they're behind the scenes handling the work that used to eat up everyone's week. The teams doing this well are shipping higher quality output, running better campaigns, and actually getting the most out of everyone on their team. But what are AI agents and how should you be using them? What use cases work for B2B marketers? Check this out if you're asking any of these questions. Optimizely is hosting a free virtual event on June 9th called Agents in the Mix. It's built for and by marketers who are experimenting with AI agents and want to see what Best in Class actually looks like. Every session comes with demos of real agents built, built by and for marketers with no development required and practitioners sharing what's working for them right now. You will learn how to go from AI output to something worth shipping without the endless Revision cycle. How one team built 8,000 personalized landing pages. Holy cow. How to distribute one asset across channels and audiences without starting from scratch every time. And if you want to do all this, you can go and check it out right now. Optimizely.com Exit 5 to register for the event. Look, I think it's a great time to go deep on AI and really become one of those AI native AI pilled marketers. And Optimizely, they have a great bunch of resources over there and really smart group of people to help you do this. So go and check it out. Optimizely.com Exit 5 They're going to help you get smarter about building with AI. Hey, it's Dave. I want to give a shout out to the team at Vector for sponsoring this episode. Vector is a contact level ads platform. Look, you probably have anonymous buyers lurking in your funnel, people that you can't identify or follow up with. People you can't target with any real precision. So you end up throwing ads at job titles and hoping that the right person sees them. Vector fixes that. Instead of targeting job titles and crossing your fingers, Vector lets you build audiences from actual people. The ones in your site clicking your ads and checking out your competitors and they just launched their MCP server that lets you connect AI like Claude and ChatGPT directly to their platform. It connects to your LinkedIn ads and site visitor data. So instead of clicking through dashboards, you just ask your AI a question and get an answer. Which ad creatives are fatiguing right now? Which companies are engaging but not converting? Which actually driving pipeline right now? What new ideas should we be running? This is an amazing way to use AI and vector together. It turns your data into something you can use in the moment. Head to Vector Co to learn more. That's V E C T O R co and if they ask you how you heard about them, tell them Exit 5 please see you. You're listening to the Dave Gehart Show Exit. 512-212-34 exit 80% of the CMOs we've talked to this year say AEO is a top priority for them and most of them don't actually know where to start because so much is changing in real time. So we brought in three people who are actually doing the work right now in B2B marketing. Matt, VP of Data at Muckrack. He just ran a full AEO led product launch and has the results to prove it. Jess is an SEO and AEO consultant who's building the playbook for how B2B brands show up at AI Search and Brett is Director of PM at webflow, one of the most forward thinking teams on AI ready web infrastructure. And in this session you'll get the full tactical breakdown how Muckrack used their own AI visibility research to earn press coverage that actually move the needle. Why LLMs reward verifiable specific claims and exactly how to write content that wins citations. The AEO Maturity model from zero to owning your category, how to think about tracking AI visibility, which tools to use and how to separate signal from noise. Why Comparison pages and listicles are a good place to start but but won't be enough. And what Bing Webmaster Tools are doing right now that Google hasn't caught up to yet. This came from one of our world famous Exit 5 live sessions. We do them twice a month. They're definitely not webinars. We bring in people doing the work and go deep on one topic in B2B marketing to help you get smarter. And this session is all about aeo. Let's get into it.
- [04:27]
B
What's up everyone? Happy Friday. Thank God it's Friday. I'm looking forward to the weekend. It's finally summertime here in Toronto, so I'm looking Forward to getting outside. And, you know, I've been in this office all week. I haven't really got outside too, too much, so. Looking forward to it. If you were expecting Dave today, it's not Dave. It's me. I'm the host today. Matt. The second best host at exit 5. Sorry, Dan. Yeah, second best. It goes Dave, then me, then Dan, right under. But no, my name is Matt. I'm the head of community here at exit 5, and we run the top community in the world for B2B marketers. And I'm going to be your host for today's live session. Yes, I said live session. Did not say webinar. Just because Dave's here doesn't mean the rules change. It's still a live session. So if I catch anyone saying webinar, Allison, if you could just go fuck them out. Remove them from the webinar, ban them from everything in the future. No, I'm kidding. For those of you who are newer here, we do these live sessions twice a month, and our goal is to take an hour on Friday to go into the weeds on a topic that is hot right now in B2B marketing. And today's topic is AEO, which I know a lot of you are thinking about. But before I get into it, I want to hear from you guys, what is the official term? Because, like, we're calling it ao, but is that what you guys are calling it? So I don't know if you're calling it aeo. Geo, lmao, E E I O. Allison, you want to run the poll? Let's get a vote going in the chat. Let us know what you call it. It looks like AEO is pulling ahead here. No one. Really. No one's guessed. All right, we'll give another 20 seconds here until we crown. We're going to crown the winner today. What is the name? What are we calling it now? All right, everyone's going. Yeah. AO is still pulling away by a long shot. There you go. We just crowned a new winner. It's officially called ao. So also, if you call a geo, that's also another reason that Allison's going to remove you out of the webinar. So you can't say webinar, you can't say gao. All right, cool. So to set the stage for today, I have personally spoken to hundreds of B2B CMOs in the last since the beginning of the year. And when I asked them what their top priorities are right now, what they're thinking about, AEO always comes up as a top three for at least 80% of people, which is no surprise. Like, I feel like this reminds me of like the early SEO days where the people who really took advantage of that in the beginning were the ones who saw the long term compounding results. Right? If you tried to get into the SEO game too late, it was kind of like you were already super behind some of the companies that started early. So it makes sense why all the smartest B2B marketers are thinking about it right now and trying to make a move there. And that's why you all are here too, is because you're trying to get ahead and trying to beat the curve and use it as an advantage in your marketing. And really our goal today is to separate from the LinkedIn hype, right? So we're going to bring three B2B marketers on stage and they're going to talk about what's actually working. And more specifically, like those small tactical wins that you can go implement in the company Monday, because I think that's really how you just make momentum on this kind of stuff is those small wins versus like treating like this big monster of a plan. Before we get into today's session super quick, I want to give a quick shout out to webflow, who's our sponsor for today. A lot of us are dealing with the same reality right now, right? Team sizes are smaller or staying the same, budgets are getting scrutinized, and the pressure to grow is ever increasing, right? The life of a B2B marketer and the website is a massive part of that equation, right? That's where everyone's driven back to in your marketing. And that's what webflow is built for. Webflow lets your team build, manage and optimize your site without waiting on the development team or duct taping your own tools together. You stay in control, move faster, and the sites are built to rank on Both traditional and AI search. We at Exit 5 personally use Webflow. I'm always in there, tweak and copy, you know, testing different layouts and pages. And I just like that it gives me the flexibility to go in and do that without waiting on a developer. One more thing, if this is a topic you want to go deeper on, I know Webflow is doing a conference September 1st to the 3rd in Boston, or you can go online. They're bringing together some of the sharpest minds in this space. So if that's something that you want to take advantage of as well, you can grab your seat. It's linked in the top right of the Screen. So go put that up there and go check that out. Cool. I think we're ready to get started. Alison, why don't we bring the first guest on stage? Matt.
- [08:59]
C
Hey, everybody. Great to be here at this knot webinar, this live session, even though I
- [09:04]
B
said it, apparently I've already said it twice. So I should just cancel right now. But I'm not going to do that. But cool, we got the second best Matt in the chat here. Matt, why don't you give us 60 seconds just like who you are introduction, what you're going to be showing, and then we can get into it.
- [09:19]
C
Absolutely, yeah. And I do like the proposal in the chat. Alive in R. I think that's good. We'll use that live in R. My name is Matt Dugan. Great to be here. Happy Friday. I am our VP of Data Intelligence at a company called Muckrack. Muckrack is a SaaS platform for folks in PR and communications. And we are, of course, increasingly focused on AEO or GEO or eieio. That is one of my primary areas of focus within the company. So I'm here to talk to you about a little success story that we've had in kind of doing our own optimizations for our brand.
- [09:54]
B
Cool. Awesome. Let's get into it.
- [09:57]
C
Cool. Well, a little bit of background. One of the things that we did in the last year or so is we had a major product launch that we were looking to promote, looking to drum up some publicity and drum up interest and of course, make sure that we were optimized by our AI overlords. And so one of the things that we wanted to do as part of this launch is, of course, we wanted to drum up earned media. Of course, Muckrack is a PR company, and so we do a lot of PR ourselves. And so heading into this major product launch, our product is called Generative Pulse. It's actually, coincidentally, it is a product helping PR folks understand AI visibility in which journalists are important. So there's a bit of a meta angle to this, but what we did is we said, okay, before we launch this product, we're going to do a big research report and we're going to do a ton of findings. We're going to find out which journalists are most impactful to AI answers, which journalists are these AI systems always citing. So we did all this research and we got it pitched to the journalists that our own research found is one of the most influential journalists in our niche. And so what we did, you'll see here that is this Eleanor Hawkins. So in our niche in Muckrack's niche of, you know, PR and communications, we found that Eleanor Hawkins, by and large, gets more citations by AI systems than anyone else. So what we did is super quick.
- [11:19]
B
Now, how did you figure out that she was the right journalist to pitch? I don't know if you're going to get into that, but I will.
- [11:24]
C
Yeah, I do have a couple. I do have a couple slides on it, but, yeah, I'll give some best practices for that. So stay tuned. So we found that she was the one we pictured this story. You can see here. She covered the story. She links back to our report and our findings, which is all great. That's everything that we wanted. And what we then got is the result that we were ultimately after which this is 100% real. You go into ChatGPT and you say, hey, as a PR pro, right, that's our core audience for Muckrack, our core user base. I want to pitch stories that are influential to AI systems, often cited in their responses. What are the patterns that PR pros need to be aware of? Well, guess what? It gives an answer and it mentions us in the answer. And so basically, my premise is the reason I'm here to share all this with you guys. The success story is like, if we could do this, I believe that any of us can. You guys can all do this, too. And this is ultimately the goal that our brand had, was to make sure that we're showing up in the answer to this type of question. So back to your point, Matt. Great name, by the way. Like, how do we do this? Well, there's a couple ways to do this. I mean, in the spirit of full transparency, like, we are kind of building out our own tool that we sell just to be very transparent that helps people find out which journalists matter the most. And that is our tool, Generative Pulse. But I do encourage any of you can do this same pattern recognition, right? Just do some prompts like you see here. Here I have a little chatgpt example. Go in here. You can see the prompts. And then what you'll see is if you look at the citations, we can kind of drill into those citations and we could just start to do some pattern recognition of ourselves. Who are these journalists? In this case, we see one from Caroline. And so the more and more I do these prompts, I can start to build this pattern recognition. I can start to see who are those most influential journalists. The next step, of course, kind of if I'm sharing the playbook with you all is pitching those journalists. And Muckrack, of course, PR is our bread and butter. So we have all sorts of resources of how to write a good pitch, how to make a successful pitch to a journalist. I'll share this link in the chat when I'm done yapping. But, you know, we have tips about like, how do you make a pitch that is going to resonate with a journalist? And that's the exact sort of thing we did with Eleanor at Axios. We showed her data, we know who her audience is. We kind of specified the angle in a way that's going to be something that she wants to share to her audience. So if anything, the takeaway here is don't sleep on the role that earned media plays in kind of this AEO GEO E I E I O game. And hopefully you can see kind of my story here as a success story of how we were able to take advantage of this and get the result that we wanted.
- [14:11]
B
Love it. Love it. Okay, one question I have for you. This is great, by the way, like, perfect example of how to take advantage of this. And this is one where it's like, I'm sure everyone's going to be in a situation very soon where they have something new that they want to launch and they want to get it in the hands of journalists so it could show up in the search results. So very cool. I feel like also part of the equation with like getting your content picked up by journalists is like actually saying something interesting. Like, it looks like here you guys did some original research, like, tell us a bit about the content and like the influence that had on getting that into the hands of a journalist.
- [14:46]
C
Yeah, that's a great point. So 100%. A lot of the meta analysis going on right now in Geo is that original research is one of the most compelling ways to get cited. Because of course, we're living in a world where there's a lot of duplicate information and the more original research you can have, the better. So that's the exact strategy that we deployed here. The whole premise of this piece and the whole reason that Axios picked this up is because it's not necessarily Axios just picking up content about our product launch. Although of course they did mention it, which was good for us. That's what we wanted. But the way that we sort of got our foot in the door was by presenting compelling research and compelling findings. So to be very clear, the specific playbook that we followed was we sort of had this original research predate our product release. By about two or three weeks. And then we had this kind of like, nice period of tons of press, tons of publicity, and then of course, being in the AI answers right ahead of our product release.
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B
Very cool. Okay, got it. Was the original research, like, part of the launch plan? Like, is that something like a strategy that you guys have as well?
- [15:54]
C
No, it was the active plan, of course. Yes.
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B
Okay, cool, cool. So I like that, I like that. It's like, I think that's a really smart play and I like that point about there's a lot of duplicate content out there. And it seems like original research is something that these AI tools want to pick up and reference when people are searching for things. So I think that's a really, really good play. Okay, Matt, this was great. You know, I think some more questions will come up, but I think right now we'll move on to the next use case and then if there's any questions in the end, we'll come back to this one. But this was awesome. Perfect start.
- [16:24]
C
Yeah.
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B
All right, Matt, thanks. All right, let's bring up the next person. Brett, what's going on?
- [16:28]
D
Hi, Matt. Hey, everybody. Glad to be here today.
- [16:32]
B
Yes, nice to have you. Okay, cool. Why don't we start with just a, you know, quick 60 seconds, who you are, what you're going to be showing us today, and then we can get into it.
- [16:39]
D
Yeah, that sounds great. Hey, everybody, my name is Brett. I am a director of product at webflow and so been here with the company for about six years and I spent probably the decade before that as a marketer. All my background was in marketing. I came to product kind of a non traditional route. And so all of the how do we make sure that we are giving superpowers to marketers that we talk a lot about at webflow is near and dear to my heart, given that's exactly where I came from as a user first. So anyway, glad to be with you all today.
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B
Awesome. Awesome. Cool. Why don't we get into what you want to talk about, what you want to show.
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D
Yeah, that sounds great. So I've got some slides and I'll walk through those. But as a quick setup, obviously at webflow and what I do day to day is working with teams that we get to serve and that are running their digital experiences on webflow, understanding what problems they're solving, needing to solve what tools they need. And at the same time, we also have a marketing team at webflow that's marketing the brand. And as we've been building tools and making sure that as you build and deploy your experiences on webflow, we've been right at the edge of this big upheaval over the last year. Plus, as the move from just traditional search, like we're talking about to answer engine and AI search, we've been right at the heart of that and talking with our customers, just like you all today here, that's not automatically a like, oh, great, there's this new thing, I'm going to go do it. But you first start to see it in, wow, this is actually making impact. People are finding me differently. Wow, I'm seeing a dip to performance metrics and I need to figure out what's actually happening. And so while absolutely we want to focus on building tools, we first started really by evaluating and understanding what's actually happening. What's actually happening, what matters out there, what are we seeing from sites that are performing well and that are showing up well and what are not. And so what I want to walk through today is really what we've learned and what we've been learning along the way. Hopefully some helpful tips for folks here on the live in our of what you could take away. Because at the end of the day, our goal as marketers is we need to drive impact, we need to drive results. Making sure we're optimized for answer engines is just one way how so let me share my screen. I'm going to walk us through a few things and go from there.
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B
Awesome.
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D
Great. So we're going to start here and this is a bit of like a duh statement. But as we think about what's happening, obviously AI traffic is really our answer engine optimization or AI search is really this new top level. And you think about even before we get into what should I be doing to optimize for answer engines, what is the goal? What's actually changed here? Because a lot of the conversation that really started was like, wow, answer engines and still can happen today is like AI search, that's this brand new thing. But really as we started to break that down, it's just an evolution of what traditional search has been. And so when you think about what traditional search has been, the goal of traditional search was I want to get found, so then somebody comes to my site and I can deliver the answer. If you think about consumers are really looking to get answers to their questions, should I buy this? Where should I go for that? How do I solve this problem that traditional search was basically saying we want to get found. Your brand wants to be in those search engines so that you can Deliver the answer over on your site. And when we look at what AI traffic is doing, it sits above that now, because the idea is that you actually are getting the answer directly in AI search. And so the goal isn't just, yes, I eventually want people to make it to my site, but really the goal is I want to get included in the answer. So now if you're a vacation destination brand and a customer saying, where should I go for spring break with my family, you want to be included in the answer so that you can actually then get found that way versus just trying to get fine and deliver that answer on your site. So really it's this new layer that sits atop. And as we've been working with teams over the last year, what we consistently found, and this is actually some stats from a recent study we did, was that the vast majority of marketers were saying AEO is critical. I often say anytime I talk about this stat, I'd like to meet the 7% who are like, Ah, AEO is not a big deal. They say AEO is critical. But the reality is, is that the teams who are actually practitioners, the folks that are responsible for doing this every day, only about a quarter actually fully understand what they should be doing. And what does that actually mean? And how do I optimize for answer engines? And so obviously at webflow, we want to build tools and we want to help. Sure. And make you do that. But it really starts with a foundational what matters. And so one of the things that we really started doing over the last year was we first started by introducing this model. And there's nothing necessarily like rocket science about this model, but it takes something that can be abstract and it starts to make it much more clear, which is the idea that SEO and AEO are actually very related and very connected. There are many concepts that have always mattered for SEO that continue to matter for aeo. There's things that may have mattered that early signals or evolving signals with answer engines and various LLMs is that, wow, those matter even more and maybe there's some new disciplines. And so the idea is that as you really are moving to optimize for not only search engines, but answer engines, there's actually a set of things that matter and there's a set of areas that you should think about. The takeaway, and we'll talk a few more minutes on this for today is like that often teams and you may find yourself in the same situation is like, I know answer engines. I know AEO is important. Where do I even start? That Seems like this giant black box of things I should be doing what matters, what doesn't matter. And this is where we started to break it down, where there's really four key buckets that matter. Content. What's the content you're actually writing about and delivering on your site? Technical, which is how are you structuring your site and its pages authority? How are you being talked about externally off of your site and measurement, how are you actually understanding what's happening? And across all of these areas there's tactical things that you can be investing in and doing to move the needle forward. And what I would say for the sake of today is like a lot of the emphasis often goes to oh, should I go get a tracking tool? Or what are all the content things I should do? And there's key things that matter at both. But like a lot of is like where should I start? Quick win opportunity. Actually I would dial in on a few different places and so I'm happy to do that, Matt, unless there's any questions you want to surface up or things before I kind of go into
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B
that, I think you should definitely get into the where some of the quick wins and then if there's some questions after that, we'll get into them.
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D
Okay, that sounds great. So honestly, one of the biggest areas that many teams have, the quickest wins, lowest hanging fruit, if you will, is on the technical front. And why does that matter? What is the technical front? Well, the reality is that traditional search engines, and also whether they're part traditional search engines or new LLM based crawlers, is that in order to actually be able to understand what your site is about, to actually be able to understand what your brand is about, it needs to access it in a performant way, a semantically structured way, so we can actually understand. And so there's a lot of key opportunities on the actual technical management of your site that matter. And so things like structured data. Do you have clear and descriptive meta descriptions and meta titles and alt text descriptors? Are you using schema.org markup? All of those things are about how do you give a clear and semantic understanding of the pages and the site that you're building? Are you optimizing your, you know, your robots Txt those various pieces that traditionally that's sat in the technical SEO world and that stuff still really matters because if these LLMs and search engines can't quickly and access your site or understand what it's about, the content that you write may not even matter or you may be leaving a lot on the table. And so that's one key area is like start even with the basics. Yeah, please.
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B
Even on that, like, yeah, I think that's a great point. So essentially in a nutshell, it's like if the technical side is not set up properly, it doesn't matter how much content you're creating, like a big part of it's not going to get picked up anyway. What is like the action there? Is it like I should go hire a technical AEO person that's going to do an audit and recommend things? Or like what would you recommend on that front?
- [24:13]
D
Yeah, it's a great question. I think if your team has resources or it has those capabilities to like bring somebody in, maybe a fast route. There's actually a number of, you know, online free or nearly free tools that can help you with audits. There's also one of the things, I've got it in a separate tab and I'll bring it up in a second. Webflow, we actually have a free AEO maturity model assessment and so we'll actually do a comprehensive audit of your full site and tell you where are the key areas across all four of these dimensions you should invest in. And so on that point, doing an audit is a great first start. Within that, even if you don't do a holistic audit, you can do a spot check audit of going across your pages. And a clear way to start is like just literally start with the like look for the gaps. Are you missing meta descriptions and alt text and schema. And again, if you're not familiar with schema, go take a look@schema.org, it's something that we've seen early indications that LLMs actually really prioritize. And there's a lot of tools that can help you do that. But like look for gaps first before you even get into like how do I eke out a little bit more performance. But a lot of those things is really about gaps and there's a number of tools that you can do an audit. Again, webflow has a free solution. If you go to our AEO Solutions page, you can put in your URL, get a free assessment to look across your whole site. So that'd be on the technical side. And yeah, you're exactly right that like there's, there's a lot of things you can do on authority, on content, on measurement, but like the technical is like a lot of low hanging fruit that you don't want to leave discoverability on the table simply from just how you're structured or not structured.
- [25:38]
A
Hey, it's me, Dave. Our friends over at Customer I.O. are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft, because marketing is a craft. It takes creativity, thought and taste. Right now, everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI and the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bl. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically. But the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right, right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what Customer IO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters. The craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now. Not to replace thinking, but to support it. If this landed with you at all, this idea about the craft of marketing, I want you to go and check out Customer IO. It's Customer IO exit 5. Go and check them out. Customer IO exit 5.
- [26:51]
B
Cool. All right, next quick win that you have.
- [26:54]
D
Yeah, yeah. Next quick win is on the content side. And so what I'd say on the content side is this is where I think teams can often, you know, there's a lot of things you can do across a lot of dimensions. But let's think back. What actually matters and what are you actually trying to solve for with. With answer engine optimization? When we go back to the goal of answer engine optimization is I want to get included in the answer so that you can then eventually, yes, make it to my site, but I just want to be included in the answer. And so when you think about what are the questions people are asking and what is the answer, the reality is that oftentimes that represents a gap of what are your customers actually talking about? What are they actually asking about for your brand? And do you actually answer that? Not to say you have to be the only answer, but if you have a clear signal there, your customers are asking about very specific things, they're naturally going to be asking those questions and answer engines. And ultimately, if you aren't delivering an answer to those on your site, you are relying or hoping on Reddit, on your customers, on some other blog to be answering those on your behalf or for An LLM to just get it right. And so a quick win opportunity here that we often talk with teams about is, I'll use the word audit again, but like, go look through some of the places where your customers already are and understand what questions they're asking and look at does your site answer those questions? So a couple of good examples. If you use like a customer service platform where you're in emailing and messaging with your customers, go do a raw export, throw in an LLM, say what are the top questions that are being asked here? And go look at your site. Do I have a page? Do I have an faq? Do I clearly answer this on my site? If not, let's go do that. Go look at social forums, go look at your own social pages. What are people asking about your brand and are you actually answering it? Because so often as brands and as brand marketers can be very focused on this is the brand narrative I want to say, this is the campaign I want to influence. And your customers are asking you very nitty gritty questions or very specific long tail questions. And a quick win opportunity is like, just make sure that you have an answer for those. And that's not going to guarantee you're always going to be cited, but it's going to up your chance of actually being included in the answer and at minimum helping influence that the answer is actually the answer that you want to actually be the case.
- [29:00]
B
Yeah, I love that one. That's a great point. I remember at a previous company, like, I was trying to make the case to my manager to invest in SEO and it was really as simple. Sure, there are tools that could track it, but it was really as simple as like the top five search results that we thought people would ask and our brand should show up. We are in none of them, not even on the first page at the time. And I just screenshot those and put them into a slide and it was like, whoa, okay, like, let's fix this tomorrow. And I think this is kind of like the same idea where it's like just really simply, like, just like it was with SEO, it's like, go audit. Whether you're showing up in the most basic of places that your brand should be, or at least the places you'd want them to be.
- [29:39]
D
Yeah, totally. And I think that's where it can feel daunting often when you're looking at, oh my gosh, I now need to do a thing that like SEO. Depending on your org, depending on the complexity of your org, like SEO may have been an area already where it's like, ah, we're not investing as much as we need to. And now aeo. So to your point to like where in the past marketers had been having to try to push the hey, we should invest in SEO now, the implication with AEO is like top of mind for, you know, almost all marketing leaders, executives, and they're now asking for what are we doing about this thing? And there's like, okay, wow, this can feel overwhelming of where do I start? And a lot of times, especially if you're earlier on in the journey or you already don't have a defined program, starting with those core basics actually makes a really big impact. That's the last thing I'd say on authority and measurement is like, authority is really, it's honestly getting back to a lot of the things that traditional search engines wanted to prioritize are, you know, expert sources and confident places talking positively about you. One of the quickest win opportunities there is, go into places like Reddit, find conversations where your brand's being talked about, help answer questions on behalf of your brand and help influence that. And on the measurement side, this is a fast moving space and evolving space. And so there's a lot of tools that can solve these things, Webflow included. We just launched a tool around AEO analytics, but one of the big pieces is that while the data is not perfect, again we're trying to get directional understanding of how our brand's showing up. At LLMs, having visibility is important because at the end of the day, when you start making investments in technical and content, you want to be able to know for yourself, but also share with your stakeholders to say, hey, we've been doing a lot of things and we've been fixing schema across all these pages and we've been starting to answer questions and you can see for the questions that we want to show up and we're tracking, we are directionally heading up and to the right and we've improved by 10 percentage points in visibility. We're now showing up in 70% of answers where previously we were showing up in 50% of answers. So you at least have something to benchmark that back against. And so I think from a measurement side, like what I'd recommend most folks folks get is like find a tracking tool. There's lots of them where you can actually be tracking the questions you want to show up for. So you have a way to kind of close the loop. And obviously with webflow, we're building solutions that can do all of that. Integrated in the platform. So as you build, we're doing all those things connected, because we know that, like, the connectedness and like, the scale and the ease of use is important, but there's lots of ways that you can get that done as well.
- [31:53]
B
Love that. Okay, these are all really great points. Some questions did pop up in the chat, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring Jess up, let me do her part, and then when we come back for Q and A in the end, I'm going to direct some of these questions your way, Brett.
- [32:04]
D
Okay, great.
- [32:05]
B
Okay. This is awesome. Thanks so much. All right, let's bring up the next contestant. All right, Jess, my fellow Torontonian, why don't you give us the 60 seconds, who you are, what you're going to show, and then let's get into the goods.
- [32:18]
E
All right, my TLDR is. My name is Jess Joyce. I've been an SEO. A E O G E O. Sorry, I'm ruining it already. Llemo E I O for. For about 15 years now. I started as a web dev, moved into the marketing side, but still love to get my hands dirty and play around with sites. So, like, I have client and now I do freelance. So I'm a freelance consultant and I run my own business. We work with clients mostly in B2B SaaS. So we work with wonderful clients who are on webflow. Thanks, Brett, for teeing that all up perfectly, too, and do all kinds of wonderful stuff as we shift into this aeo. LLM stuff. I'm shifting, as per necessary.
- [32:55]
B
Cool. What are you going to show us today?
- [32:58]
E
Okay, so I am going to show you some results from a lovely little thing that I've been running thanks to you guys, which is all under wraps. So I'm going to share some data from a lovely thing that I've been running. So I've been running some AI.
- [33:14]
B
Yeah, give some context, too. Like, we have this private community with a bunch of B2B CMOs. And I asked Jess to come in and I said, hey, if our members send you their website, can you take a look at their site and tell them how they can improve their aeo, what they can do, give us some actionable things? So, Jess, you're going to show some of that right now. So sorry for cutting you off. We'll get into it.
- [33:33]
E
No, please. I actually haven't even been calling them audits because they're not full audits. They're more like a snapshot. Right. So they just kind of give you Kind of top level, because we're speaking to the audience that's in this. What are we calling it? Live and R. That's in this liver.
- [33:46]
D
Yep.
- [33:47]
B
Yeah.
- [33:49]
E
So these are just like three top level things that actually pair to what Brett and Matt were both saying. I'm glad I'm going third because I can tie it all together and then we can answer questions. So the biggest things that I found is one in three sites actually have technical blockers, which I'm going to go into, and as the first slide. So as Brett said, you know, all this AEO stuff is built off of SEO. So I think you need to understand how your site's being indexed, ranked, whatever we're calling these terms, moving into this new space, but having your site being found by these AIs and these LLMs is stage one. Right. And then number two is what Matt was talking about is the third party gap. So what people are actually saying about you on the other end. Right. So building up what we call like an entity, if I'm getting really nerdy about it, is really what we're talking about.
- [34:35]
C
Right.
- [34:36]
B
So the third party gap is pretty much saying that what the LLMs are saying about you is not what you want them to be saying. Right.
- [34:43]
E
Or that you don't show up at all.
- [34:44]
B
You don't show up at all. Okay, cool, cool.
- [34:46]
E
Right. That you're not there. So number one is to build off of what Brett said. And it is technical debt is your problem. And it's not just like schemas and stuff is the sites that I've been auditing don't even have technical SEO on a base level. So things that get super technical like canonicals and duplicate pages and JavaScript heavy pages as we move into this new space and all these AIs and LLMs people are doing a lot of what's called vibe coding. And with vibe coding comes a lot of code that doesn't end up being the most healthy code that goes into all these places. Right. So I think we just need to go back to the basics of, like, what's the kind of code and what's the kind of websites that need to be fed into these AIs and these LLMs is the same thing that Google wants. Just like Brett said, you want robots TXT files, you know, and we're going back and forth on whether we want LLMs, TXT files and all these things. And this whole space is moving very quickly, but basic technical hygiene is my number one finding.
- [35:45]
B
Got it. Okay. And I like that the fix this week it says, ask your dev team if the site content is in the rendered HTML or loaded via JavaScript. Which one of the two do you want it to be? Sorry, maybe if I missed that part.
- [35:58]
E
HTML all day, every day. Google actually spent a lot of their years on their indexing and crawling stuff layering in JavaScript. It comes in as a secondary crawl and stuff. So LLMs aren't quite there. Right. So we need to make sure everything is just plain old HTML. You're serving it up to the people. Okay, number two is again, what Brett was saying on content, but I have a little bit of a nuance to the content is we're finding that the top layer, the tofu content that everybody loves to write, is eaten by search. Right. And same with LLMs. LLMs will be and may be already able to answer what is queries better than you can, unfortunately. I hope this isn't news to anybody, but this is what's unfortunately happening throughout the web. But when you get down to middle of funnel and bottom of funnel queries of people doing consideration queries, which is basically the corner that I work in in the web, is you looking versus your competitor content, you want to be able to kind of own that narrative or at least surface up the differences between what you're doing. Right. So you should be sharing that kind of content as much as possible in whichever way that works. I know there's a ton of ways, and I don't want to inform a strategy on people out of this, but, like, however you can share that or have that presence on the web is definitely huge. And the fix from this week, like you pointed out last week, is search for your category on G2 or Capterra. Those are the big ones in B2B SaaS. But there's a ton. So, like, it doesn't have to be those two. There's a ton on the Internet. So find one that's like even Yellow Pages. If you're a local business, Yellow Pages exist throughout the whole world. We have clients that are in England and they're also on Yellow Pages, which I just learned a couple weeks ago.
- [37:39]
B
So there you go, I guess Yellow Pages making a comeback over good old Google question for you. So essentially the fix is like, go to these sites and search how your reviews compare to your competitors. Right. What if you're in a situation where I'm sure many of us are, it's like a, our competitors are light years ahead and then also two, maybe we're just smaller and probably can't Rack up the same amount of reviews so you think it's still viable in that situation?
- [38:10]
E
A hundred percent. Everyone starts somewhere so the gap can be closed a little bit. And then you can publish stuff on your own site as well. So this doesn't have to be external sites is you can actually start it by yourself and sharing that differentiator. And if you can get ahead of your competitors in that space. Comparison pages is always a good way to go. I force those down your clients everywhere we go. So always good to have it on both sides.
- [38:34]
B
Cool. Cool. I like the comparison page piece. That makes sense as a way to fill the gap in that content. Especially if like your reviews aren't necessarily there yet. That's a good way to like teach the LLMs the difference between you and the competitor. So very cool. Okay, let's look at the next finding.
- [38:49]
E
On to number three is my hottest of hot takes is your homepage is probably your worst performing page for AI discoverability. The homepage is where most of your traffic goes, right? But AI isn't citing your homepage as much because it gets the most fight in marketing divisions, right? Like brand comes in, the CEO comes in, your paid team comes in, everybody comes in. And that top section of your site is probably the most fought section section of every single website. I've been in those meetings. Everybody in this call has probably been in those meetings, right? But please, for the love of cheese and crackers, tell me what you do in the top of your website. Tell the rest of us what you do. Right? Tell everybody what you do even if you're in those super high like enterprise sites. I read so many enterprise sites now too and I have no idea what they do. So if I don't know what you do, then an AI is not going to know what you do. Then anybody's not going to know what you do. So just please, yeah, work on and then you can learn from again Brett said like testing with those prompt tools or those AI tracking tools, you can pull that stuff in and see where you're lacking and where you're lagging and if you even show up for any of the things that you care about.
- [39:58]
B
Okay, got it. I like this. So essentially it looks like the role the homepage is what helps you, what helps elements, like I said categorize your business. Whereas like the blog pages are more of the specific queries, the longer tail words are going to go there. But this tells LLMs like this is a company that does this thing so it knows which conversations to include you in Exactly.
- [40:20]
E
It's called entities if we really want to get nerdy about it. But yeah, exact same thing. That's the perfect wording for it.
- [40:26]
B
Okay, awesome. And then to fix this week, read your homepage title tag out loud. If it doesn't say what you do and for whom, change it immediately. Okay, I like that. I like that.
- [40:35]
E
How could you how much it changes if you say things out loud? Because I don't know how much time you spent at your computer all day, but I spent a lot of time at my computer not saying words and it changes the dynamic if you say things out loud. It might sound stupid if you say it out loud. Right?
- [40:49]
B
Yeah, totally, totally. I have a small niche question on. This is your last finding, by the way, right?
- [40:55]
E
This is. Yeah, my last one is just like, thank you guys.
- [40:59]
D
Awesome.
- [41:00]
B
Okay, I love that, I love that. I have a small niche question just based on your last slide. And it was, let's say I were to read our title tag and I'm like, yeah, this doesn't reflect what we do. So I go in and change it. When can I expect some kind of like, will it pick it up tomorrow and categorize my company? Or like, is it like traditional SEO where it's like six months down the road? I'm going to see the impact of that. I know it may not be a black and white answer, but give us your take on that.
- [41:25]
E
This is the it depends of 2026. Right? So SEOs have these catchphrases that we like to throw out. As far as I understand, in 2026 there's multiple ways that these guys end up crawling it or not even crawling it, pulling it in. So there's the models that get shipped at certain intervals. And then as long as whatever they've put in their model is your site gets pulled into that. That's one way that it gets pulled in. And then the other way is as you're doing a query in any of these models, they do fan out queries which do live searches to find the live data across the web. And we're learning right now where those do all the live fan out queries. Some of them go through Bing, some of them go through Google, some of them go through DuckDuckGo though, if you want to believe that in 2026.
- [42:10]
B
The comeback in the Stone Ages.
- [42:13]
E
Yeah,
- [42:15]
B
living under a cave here. Okay, one quick question before we bring everyone back. Katherine asked, because you're talking about the language of the homepage. She asked specifically the hero or I guess the entire homepage itself. I think that's the question, Katherine.
- [42:30]
E
I love both, honestly, as I fight for every single spot that I can get information on. But I just know that the hero is the most expensive real estate on every single site. So you might not win that battle. Catherine, I apologize. So if you can win a little bit further down the road and get in some FAQs that answer your ICP's questions off the hop, like Brett was saying as well, take the win.
- [42:53]
B
Cool. Allison, why don't we bring everybody back and then we'll cover some of the questions that were asked in the chat. Welcome back. Welcome back. That was great. Everyone gave really awesome examples. Super, super valuable content. The There's a couple things in the chat that I had glazed over a bit and I want to save to this part. So first off, if you're still here, still in the chat with us, feel free to ask your questions because I'll try and get to as many as I can right now. But the first one that I skipped over was Jill had asked if Q and A content is still effective.
- [43:25]
D
I can jump in here. I mean, short answer is yes. Obviously with any of these things there is an it depends. So the idea of just go stuff everything on your site with Q and A and will that automatically improve you is like not a guaranteed yes. But I think like, it is an effective way to implement the are you answering questions? So I'd still think about content hierarchy and your content strategy, but if you think about something where you want to answer a question and it has a bunch of sub questions on it of like, things you might also ask, like FAQs are a really great way of. Rather than saying, well, I got to go write a whole article about this. It's like, well, just include those. Again, the idea. And Jess was talking about this as well, but the idea basically being that when an LLM wants to understand what the answer is, it's just going to try to create a relationship by looking across data sets. And so what you want to say is like, the reality is, is that if your brand is not there already or if the answer, it's most likely that that's just not a very clear, definitive data set and you just want to contribute to that. And so it's like those additional FAQs or Q&As are really great ways of like, you know, to be able to give a clear answer. And then again, you're investing in the other signals for LLMs to pick it up, include it in their data set, include it in Live searches. So short answer, yes, But I think there's nuance always where it's like, great, and we're going to put Q&As on every single thing. And that should work for AEO, right? And it's like, well, there's a method and art and science and everything. So that'd be my answer there.
- [44:46]
B
Love it, Love it. Anything to add, Jess? Matt?
- [44:49]
E
No, Brett got it down. The only thing is the FAQ schema has been removed from Google. They don't really give a flying hoot about it anymore. But don't run to your devs and be like, remove the FAQ schema. Because that's not the move either. I think it might have value in the long term.
- [45:05]
B
Cool. Love it. All right, we got a question from Kevin on Reddit, which is a really good one because I think, Brett, you had mentioned just being active in the threads where your company is being mentioned. So what Kevin asked was like, do you jump into conversations and answer questions under the brand name or do you go stealth mode as if you're not a member of your company and answer that way?
- [45:28]
D
Sure, yeah, I mean, I can give a thought. But again, I don't want to hog the mic here. The thing I would reference is a great partner that we have at webflow and we work with a number of things is the graphite, which is an SEO and AEO consulting company as well. And they've done a bunch of evaluations on studies on what's happening, what's working. Because a big part of SEO and AEO often is try something and see what happens and how do you then codify the implications. And one of the things that they would talk through is like, actually the. Like either or. But basically like as a person going in and saying, hey, here's who I am, I'm with this organization often takes care of that versus the idea of like, oh, should it be the brand? Should it be the other? Is like the idea that, like, it's an authentic response. And so I think from. I don't feel like there is a clear and definitive it has to be this way or that way. But I'd say as a general rule, regardless of like, show up as a person, not as a brand, you know, trying to give brand speak, but like, because that's what those platforms are. They're intended to be authentic communication. So if it's the brand, hey, this is so and so from the brand or the other way around. So that'd be my quick two.
- [46:25]
C
I'll add. So big plus one. To that I'll also add that especially in B2B space, right. A lot of these kind of Reddit conversations happen in like dedicated like for those of you who aren't familiar with Reddit, they're kind of broken into these communities called subreddits. So you know, there will be a community for like finance apps. A community for any niche under the sun has its own Reddit community. Each of those communities usually have their own kind of like almost terms and policies when they have a panel of moderators. So I would also look to see for the kind of relevant community to your niche, your quote subreddit, see what the moderators are doing because some of them have really kind of cracked down on Geo AEO stuff and they've said, look, if there's anything that we suspect is like a brand promoting themselves, we're going to nuke it. And some of them, to Brett's point, are like, yep, just disclose yourself and it's all good. So I would also offer like, look in the sort of guidelines of the relevant communities to your Reddit.
- [47:27]
B
Love it. Okay, lots of questions coming up now. You know, it's a classic. Okay, Jasmine said. On the competitive front, I've heard mixed things about the efficacy of owned comparison content./listicles Takedown content doesn't align with our brand philosophy, but we still want to ensure we are visible when people evaluate our category on LLMs. Any suggestions for owned content there?
- [47:51]
E
I have a whole like, I could talk for an hour on this alone. Honestly is I have fought for comparison pages all the way up the chain to like enterprise organizations and they all take different flavors. Honestly, everyone seems to start out with I don't want to talk about my competitors. And then six months later they're like, maybe we can try it with a paid campaign. So it's not too bad. But I agree that the standard comparison pages as well as listicles, because you could dump all this into this, into the same kind of stuff, is very programmatically easy to write and easy to scale and is easy to ship. But I don't think it's going to be as valuable in the future. So layering in your key differentiators is really where I find the value. We do a lot more work on icps and finding out your ideal customer profile and like speaking to that instead of just giving people a chart of checks and X's. Yeah, really specific. And that doesn't have to be comparison content. That can just be like however you want to slice and dice that kind of information. Right?
- [48:54]
B
Yeah, I like that.
- [48:55]
C
Yeah, I was going to add to that. There's a similar question, too, that I saw from Grace about, like, it feels inauthentic when, you know, everybody says we're number one. Like, totally agree. And for the same reasons that Jess was talking about the alums. They're not super smart, but they're smart enough to know. They try to build consensus. Right. And so they can't build consensus when everybody says we're all number one. But what they will definitely pick up on is if you give very objective and verifiable claims about how one thing has something that another does it. So, you know, we have shoes with black soles. This company does not have shoes with black soles. Like, if you can give it a discrete thing that, again, keyword is verifiable, then that is the type of content that the AIs will eat up. So we're number one is not verifiable. Claiming that you have this feature and the competitor does not, that is verifiable. So that's how I would think of it.
- [49:50]
B
Nice. I love that. I agree. And thanks for getting to that question, because that was next on my list. Okay. Oh, by the way, super quick, if you are still here with us, we just ran a poll to rate today's session one through five. If you rate it below five, I will find you and hunt you down and kill you. But, yeah, if you could please give us. You rate the session for us today so we can know how we did. But next question I have here from Drew is, what about the importance of Q and A platforms like Quora for AEO visibility?
- [50:18]
D
I almost said Quora directly as I was saying Reddit, because I think the idea on the Authority, if you go back to that maturity model we were talking through, like, the Authority piece is really like, obviously you want to talk about yourself, you want to answer questions yourself. But, like, that's not the only signal. It's how are other people talking? And so a big bucket is like, where is or authentic conversation happening, and people contributing to that is a great place to help influence that authority side. So Quora is another great example of that. There's a number of other ones that kind of fit in the bill of, like, this is where people are talking. Social media platforms are another great place, like, as a general principle. So that'd be my quick 2 cents there.
- [50:54]
B
Nice. I love that mental model of just like, where are the authentic conversations happening? And how can we as a brand get in those. Cool. Okay. I think we have time for one more question. See one that there's lots here. So sorry I can't get to all of them guys, but I do like one here from Michael which is how are you identifying the most important terms to track inside of AEO tools? Traditional keywords as a launch point or high intent long tail phrases. So I'm taking this away. Yeah, yeah, I.
- [51:26]
D
So I think there's a few different ways. I think one of the just kind of mentioned this on the fan out idea or the fan out concept of queries. Like a great way to start from in terms of what questions you should track. One is take the keywords that are already important to your brand and run those even through an LLM and basically say what are the core questions that are likely connected to this? And so again keywords are traditionally again I'm a big golfer so the idea of like best golf clubs is like a way you may have used to search in search engines but in an answer engine you are like what is the best type of golf club for me? Who is this? Who lives here? And it's like there's a bunch of those kind of permutations, if you will, of those. So one is a great way is like take the keywords that already matter to you and determine what are the likely questions that connect. I would actually also bucket another area so I would think about what are the things you already think you should be showing up for. Well that's kind of your brand and then where the areas that you actually want to increase your visibility and maybe like the more like niche or long tail or customer specific. And that is a lot of where it's like I was mentioning like go look at your help desk tickets, go look at your customer transcripts, go look at your social platforms, but I think bucketing them differently, especially if you're going to upload in these tracking tools so that you can distinguish signal from noise. Because if all of a sudden you have a big drop in your brand visibility for the things that you should be slam dunking, that's a big deal. Something's happened because you already should be happening there versus the other, which is like, hey, we're going to make investments to start showing up here. You want to be able to separate those kind of points out. So those would kind of be the biggest two ways that I would suggest on how to get started on that front.
- [52:56]
C
There's also an emerging phenomenon like where many of the AEO and GEO visibility tools are starting to offer access to what they Call panel data, which is basically just like bazillions of people's ChatGPT and Google AI overviews conversations. So that data is starting to make its way out there. So be on the lookout for that as well.
- [53:19]
B
That's a good point, Jess.
- [53:20]
E
One point on top of all of it is I know I'm not supposed to say this as an SEO, but also lean on your paid friends. The data that they've been doing as campaigns is also very helpful because if you couldn't rank for it in Google in the OG days, you might be able to layer that into your AEO strategy. Right? And to that point, sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools because they are giving you first party AI data out of Copilot. They are the first ones to do this. Come on Google, where are you? But I knew another one who would have seen Bing for 2026. But sign up for Bing My master tools. They're giving you lots of good data.
- [53:54]
B
Cool. What was the tool you just said to sign up for, Jess?
- [53:57]
E
Bing Webmaster Tools. Same as Search Console, but like for Bing.
- [54:02]
B
Okay. Was there one before that or was Bing the only one?
- [54:04]
E
You said Bing one. Yeah, Bing one.
- [54:06]
B
Okay, cool. Awesome. Okay, cool. There's a lot more great questions. Can't get to them all. I'm going to give everyone a couple minutes to drop. Get ready for the next meeting. Jess, Matt, Brett, this has been incredible. You guys gave such amazing examples and content. Super engaging session. I learned a ton even as the host. Everyone, enjoy your weekend. Remember, it's aeo. We officially crowned it today. AEO is the word. And remember, next time, it's actually a live in our. That is the newest best. I think whoever said that I gotta send you a cup of coffee or lunch or something on me. But go bills. Everyone have a great weekend. Thanks so much everyone. Bye now.
- [54:44]
A
Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exit5.com. Our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day, asking questions about things like marketing, planning IT ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days, so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more. Exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community.