- Traditional SEO is no longer enough as AI-driven search tools reshape how people find information.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) builds on SEO but focuses on visibility across AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude.
- HubSpot launched an AEO Grader to help businesses see how they appear across multiple AI platforms.
- Consistent, specific, brand-driven content is essential to teach AI engines the right narrative about your business.
Search used to be simple. You typed a few words into Google, pressed enter, and prayed you landed on a page that made sense. Businesses spent years chasing those blue links with SEO tricks: backlinks, keywords, titles stuffed like turkeys at Christmas. But the game is changing fast, and marketers who still think SEO is the only search alphabet they need may be in for a rude awakening.
Welcome to the age of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), a rising strategy built for a world where people don’t just “Google it” anymore. They’re asking questions directly to AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. And those bots don’t wait for your backlinks to load. They generate instant answers, pulling from multiple sources at lightning speed.
At this year’s HubSpot Inbound conference, Amanda Kopen, the company’s Manager of AI Search and Interactive Experiences, put it bluntly: “We’re moving from SEO to AEO, and the organizations that don’t adapt risk getting left behind.”
When Google’s Not Your Only Frenemy
For more than two decades, Google held a monopoly over search. Businesses treated it like the strict teacher whose rules everyone had to memorize. Want to rank? Write crawlable content, get credible backlinks, polish your metadata, and maybe sacrifice a goat to the algorithm gods.
But the monopoly is cracking. Ask a question today and Google doesn’t just serve ten links anymore. You might see AI overviews, citations you can expand, snippets, ads, and only then organic results buried halfway down the page.
Consumers, meanwhile, aren’t even sticking to Google. Millions are typing their queries straight into AI-powered tools. That means companies now have to fight for visibility on platforms that don’t even use the traditional SEO ranking system.
In Kopen’s words: “You can’t just think about Google rankings. You need to ask how ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude will surface your content, and whether they’ll even mention you at all.”
SEO Walked So AEO Could Run (and Steal Its Snacks)
Here’s the catch: AEO isn’t throwing out SEO entirely. Instead, it’s hijacking the best parts.
SEO cared about backlinks, authority, and keywords. AEO cares about all that too, but with an added twist: personalization. Search engines are no longer just matching a keyword to a link. AI engines explode one query into multiple questions. Ask “What’s the best laptop for designers?” and the AI might also answer, “Which laptops handle heavy graphics?” or “What laptops have the longest battery life?”
That means your content has to be hyper-specific. General advice and fluffy blog posts won’t cut it anymore. If your business doesn’t show up as a credible, consistent voice in AI training data, the bots will happily pull information from Reddit threads or Quora answers — and maybe mangle your reputation along the way.
Kopen offered a warning: “If you’re not telling your own story online, AI will tell it for you. And it might not be the story you want.”
How to Make Friends with the Robots Without Losing Your Soul
The obvious question is: How do businesses even begin to optimize for machines that think in tokens and embeddings rather than HTML tags?
The first step is still familiar: high quality, crawlable, indexable content. But AEO demands you also train the bots. That doesn’t mean building your own LLM (unless you have billions of dollars lying around). It means saturating the internet with consistent, detailed content that teaches AI to associate your brand with the right topics.
Tone matters too. Kopen stressed that while many companies are now using AI to generate their content, they should always train these models on their own brand voice. Otherwise, the internet’s generic soup of AI-generated writing will erase what makes your business unique.
“Repetition is key,” she said. “The more you reinforce the narrative you want to be known for, the more likely AI is to learn it.”
So yes, you still need a content team. But instead of just writing for search crawlers, they’ll now be writing for AI readers who never sleep.
HubSpot’s Shiny New Toy: The AEO Grader
If this all sounds overwhelming, HubSpot has come up with a tool to make the transition a little easier. The company’s new AEO Grader doesn’t just scan your website like traditional SEO checkers. Instead, it looks at your entire company and measures how you show up across different AI engines.
You plug in your name, industry, and location, and it spits out an analysis of your visibility, sentiment, and even who your competitors are in the AI answer space. In other words, it’s like a report card — except instead of your teacher, it’s grading how well ChatGPT and friends know you.
This shift underscores how search is no longer about tricking one algorithm. It’s about shaping how multiple AI systems understand your brand narrative.
Don’t Panic, Just Upgrade Your Playbook
Yes, AEO can feel intimidating. But experts like Kopen insist that it’s not about throwing out your SEO playbook. Think of it as adding an expansion pack. The core rules still matter — good writing, authority building, structured data — but now you need to apply them with AI in mind.
She advises marketers to keep reading SEO thought leaders while experimenting with AEO techniques. Learn how AI answers are generated. See how your competitors are showing up in those answers. And most importantly, figure out how to insert your brand into the AI conversation before it’s too late.
“High AI literacy is going to be the new competitive edge,” Kopen said. “Humans and AI will coexist, and they’ll superpower each other. Your human experience is the secret sauce, but AI is the blender that spreads it faster.”
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