Episode Description

AI is changing how customers discover, research, and choose brands. If your business isn't showing up in AI-generated answers, you may be missing the next major wave of organic visibility.

In this live session from Mentor Table Nashville, Julian Lopez from the Smart Marketer team breaks down AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, and what brands need to do now to become the recommended choice inside AI tools, AI overviews, and answer engines. From schema markup and indexability to brand authority and bottom-of-funnel search intent, Julian shares the early signals Smart Marketer is seeing after analyzing thousands of AI-driven commercial searches.

"Your brand is not what you say, it is what AI is able to pull out of the answer." – Julian Lopez

You Will Learn:

• What AEO is and why it matters for brands that want to stay visible in the AI era. • Why SEO isn't dead, but the game has changed. • How AI tools research, compare, and recommend brands behind the scenes. • Why your website is becoming less of a destination and more of a data source. • The difference between informational traffic and bottom-of-funnel commercial intent. • How schema markup helps AI understand your products, people, and brand. • Why third-party sources, reviews, Reddit, directories, and social proof impact AI recommendations. • How to structure your content so AI can retrieve, understand, and cite it faster. • Why brand authority now depends on what AI can verify across the web. • What agentic shopping may mean for the future of ecommerce.

Links & Resources:

Smart Marketer: smartmarketer.com
Smart Marketer Free Trainings & Resources: https://smartmarketer.com/free-resources/
Smart Marketer Agency: https://smartmarketeragency.com/
Mentor Table: https://smartmarketer.com/mentor-table/
OmniSend (Sponsor): https://smartmarketer.com/omnisend Use code SMART for 50% off your first three months.

Time Stamps:

00:00:20: Welcome: AI, Paid Traffic, Creative and Organic Visibility 00:01:11: Sponsor Message: Why Ezra Firestone Uses Omnisend 00:02:14: Molly Introduces Julian Lopez and the Importance of AEO 00:03:47: How to Get Your Brand Recommended by AI 00:05:00: Create Relevance, Not Awareness 00:06:03: Why AEO Is Still an Emerging Discipline 00:07:09: What Changed: AI Enters the Search Experience 00:08:16: Search Is Becoming Delegated Research 00:09:39: Is SEO Dead? What's Actually Changing 00:10:41: What Commercial Search Results Look Like Now 00:12:11: The Future of Walled Gardens, Wearables and AI Everywhere 00:14:11: GEO, LMO, AEO: What Should We Call It? 00:15:10: The Goal: Become the AI-Recommended Brand 00:16:19: What Smart Marketer Found After Thousands of AI Queries 00:17:22: Why Your Website Is Now a Data Source 00:18:28: The Challenge: AI Platforms Are Black Boxes 00:19:28: SEO Still Matters, But Rankings Aren't the Whole Story 00:21:29: How AI Answers Actually Work 00:22:38: Why Bottom-of-Funnel Questions Are the New Opportunity 00:23:21: The Site Is Not the Destination, It's the Data Source 00:24:29: The Answer Budget Theory: How AI Chooses Brands 00:26:43: Why AI Looks Beyond Your Website Before Recommending You 00:28:10: Your Brand Is Built on the Sources 00:29:10: The AEO Action Plan: Indexability, Content Readiness and Authority 00:32:11: Why You Need to Let the Right Bots Access Your Site 00:33:06: Schema Markup: Helping AI Understand Your Business 00:36:38: How to Make Product Pages More Specific for AI 00:38:44: IDs, Entities and Connecting Your Website's Information 00:39:45: Optimizing Product Data, Ratings and Rich Results 00:40:44: Content Structure: Make Your Pages Easier for AI to Retrieve 00:42:12: Cover Topics, Not Just Keywords 00:43:12: Brand Representation and Authority in the AI Era 00:44:23: Agentic Shopping: What's Coming Next 00:45:13: Wrap-Up and Final Applause

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