“I think AEO/GEO is a load of crap,” spouted a CMO from a $250mm SaaS company, adding, “if you follow SEO best practices, you’ll be fine.” After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I pondered this purposeful provocation and asked myself, could she be right? Stick with me as I share what I think I know about AEO.

The Value of Showing Up in LLMs

Showing up in LLMs has significant business value.

Members of the CMO Huddles community report that LLM-generated site traffic converts at 4-6x the rate of traditional Google traffic. These visitors are not your proverbial tire kickers. They’re ready to put you on their short list. So if you haven’t figured out how to track + respond to these visitors appropriately, stop reading this and get on that!

What We’re Getting Wrong About AEO

Brands that ranked high in Google searches are more likely to show up in LLMs

This makes sense, since these brands tend to have broader digital footprints. But I’ve also read that this only applies to about 50% of LLM searches. So that means that in the other 50% of searches, lesser-ranked brands are finding a way into LLM synopses. And if that is the case, then they must be doing something other than SEO-like activities. [If this logic is faulty, don’t blame an LLM, I’m on my own here.]

Yext research agrees with our provocateur CMO

This brilliantly timed bombshell dropped into my email this week: “Yext just analyzed 6.8 million citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and found that 86% actually come from sources brands already control, like websites and listings. Reddit and forums? Just 2% once location and query intent are factored in.” I’ll give you a second to re-read this.

Is Yext’s research relevant to AEO + B2B brands?

Not sure. Perhaps their CEO, Michael Walrath, will weigh in here. If Yext's research includes B2B brands and complex queries, those of you investing heavily in AEO may want to reconsider. Another reason to hedge on AEO is that it is so damn hard to measure cause and effect right now. Every LLM search delivers unique results. The game is to measure the percentage of times you show up in an LLM query of 23 words on average. Now imagine one word is different each time. My head hurts thinking about the mathematical permutations.

Hedging Your AEO Bet

Many of the AEO “best practices” are things you should be doing anyway. Having extensive Q&As on your website is simply being user-friendly. Taking it a step further and having an answer bot like Webless that pulls from your website content is also being customer-centric.

Another example is having competitive information (including pricing) on your website. Prospects need that info, and if you don’t provide it, the LLM will source it from somewhere else.

Like most humans, I hate gated content. Turns out, so do LLMs. So that's another example of doing the right thing that also may help with AEO.

Conclusion

There's more to cover, but I'm out of space + am counting on my AEO-expert friends to fill in the vast gaps, including the technical stuff (like schema).

Written by Drew Neisser