Why AEO Could be the Next Marketing Gold Rush

With every major shift in distribution (how you reach your market), there's always huge opportunity for growth.

If you were early to Facebook ads, you built massive businesses. If you were early to blogging and SEO (like I was), you captured organic traffic that competitors are still fighting for today.

The next major channel for growth is AI Chat Applications (and Agents). ChatGPT alone has 800 million weekly users. Perplexity, Claude and others are growing too. And with that comes a new opportunity for growth: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

I went on the My First Million podcast to talk about my experience with AEO, and the response has been incredible. People are hungry to understand this shift.

So today, I want to break down:

• What AEO is and why it matters right now

• How you can optimize for AEO and start ranking in ChatGPT

• How I'm putting this into practice

—@dharmesh

What is AEO (And Why SEO Traffic is Declining)

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It's the practice of optimizing your content to show up in AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

But to fill you in about what’s been happening as a result of AI answer-engines, organic traffic that used to come through SEO has gone down literally by about 20 to 40% across industries. This includes companies like HubSpot, which has played the SEO game exceptionally well for years.

The reason is simple -- people's search behavior has fundamentally changed.

Historically, we'd go to Google, type something in, and get 10 blue links. We'd click through, read articles, and piece together our own answers.

Now, with ChatGPT people are going directly to AI systems and asking questions. They get an answer immediately -- no clicking required.

This creates what I call a "binary outcome" problem. Either you show up in the AI's answer, or you might as well not exist. There's no "page 2" to fall back on.

For example, if someone asks "What's the best CRM for small businesses?" and ChatGPT mentions four options, those four companies get all the visibility. Everyone else gets zero -- no matter how good their SEO used to be.

The click-through rate is also lower because if people get the answer they need directly, there's no reason to visit your website. But when they do click through, the intent is often higher because they're specifically seeking more detailed information.

How to Optimize for AEO and Rank in ChatGPT

The discipline of AEO is still emerging, but I've been experimenting and have identified several key tactics that work:

1. Enable AI Crawling

First, make sure AI bots can actually access your content. Check that you're not blocking OpenAI SearchBot and GPT bots from crawling your website. If you're blocking unknown crawlers, explicitly whitelist these bots.

This sounds basic, but many companies block unknown crawlers by default. If you're not getting indexed, you can't win because you’re not even in the race.

2. Track Your AI Traffic

Start measuring what you can manage. Google Analytics and HubSpot now show traffic from AI referrals as a separate source. Look at your baseline today and track improvements over time.

Based on conversations I've had, many companies are already getting meaningful traffic from AI referrals without realizing it. And, many companies, it’s growing.

3. Reframe Your Content Structure

This is the most important change: shift from narrative blog posts to structured question-answer formats.

Instead of narrative blog posts with hooks designed for human readers, focus on making it easy for AI to extract clear answers. If someone asks "What are the best CRMs for small business?" your content should have a page that clearly states the primary factors and provides definitive recommendations.

4. Apply the "Deserve to Rank" Test

Back in my SEO days, the question I posed was: Is your web page “rank-worthy"? What I meant is that you should type in your top keywords into Google, look at the top 10 results and ask yourself: Do I deserve to rank more than these links that Google is showing? If not, that’s the first thing to work on. Create content that is rank-worthy.

Now in the age of AEO, you can do something similar. For any topic you want to rank for, ask ChatGPT that exact question right now. Look at the results it gives you.

Do you have a webpage that honestly deserves to rank higher than what's currently showing up as a citation? If not, create that content first. AI systems, like Google, reward genuinely better answers.

5. Leverage Classic SEO Best Practices

Everything you used to do for SEO still matters because of how ChatGPT works behind the scenes. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it converts that into search queries, processes those results, then generates an answer using an LLM (Large Language Model).

This means page authority, quality backlinks, and technical optimization still help you get into that initial result set that ChatGPT analyzes.

6. Invest in Reddit and other Social Discussions

AI systems heavily index Reddit threads where someone asks a question similar to what users are asking, and there's a definitive answer with upvotes.

This is particularly valuable for software and service recommendations. If there's a relevant discussion in your industry, providing thoughtful answers can pay dividends when AI systems reference that thread.

How I'm Putting AEO Into Practice

I'm currently testing AEO optimization in a couple ways:

1. Cross-posting Strategy: I'm cross-posting these newsletters to LinkedIn to test whether high-engagement LinkedIn newsletter articles get picked up by ChatGPT and Perplexity. LinkedIn has strong domain authority and good engagement, so this could be a tactical advantage.

2. Content Format Testing: I'm restructuring content to be more question-answer oriented rather than purely narrative. This means leading with clear takeaways and organizing information in ways that AI can easily parse and cite.

3. Measurement and Iteration: I'm tracking AI referral traffic across my properties and correlating it with content changes to identify what works.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress through my LinkedIn and this newsletter.

We're still early in the AEO game. There's no keyword research tool for ChatGPT yet (unlike the Google Keyword Planner we've had for years). The competitive landscape is wide open.

Just like the early days of SEO, the businesses that move quickly and establish authority in AEO will have significant advantages. The difference is that AEO might have even higher barriers to entry once it matures, given the binary nature of AI results.

My prediction: by the end of this year, we'll see thousands of consultants and agencies offering AEO services, just like we saw with SEO. The question is whether you'll be ahead of that curve or catching up to it.

If you're not experimenting with AEO yet, now is the time to start.

—Dharmesh (@dharmesh)