GTM 166: SEO → AEO: The Next Big Shift in How People Discover Your Product

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Guy Yalif is Chief Evangelist at Webflow and a veteran B2B marketing leader with 20+ years across Twitter, Yahoo, BrightRoll, and as co-founder/CEO of Intellimize (acquired by Webflow). He champions AI-driven optimization for sites and content, bringing a rare blend of aerospace-engineer rigor and operator experience from four successful exits to help teams win the shift from SEO to AEO.

Discussed in this episode

Why AEO is an evolution of SEO (and what truly changes)
The shift from keywords to “clusters of questions” as the new topic model
Webflow’s four-part AEO framework: content, technical, authority, measurement
Tactics that moved the needle: adding FAQs + schema; prioritizing freshness
Why PR/brand and plain-text mentions matter more to AI engines
How to measure AEO: presence in questions, share of voice, and sentiment
Where to start: two moves any founder can ship this week
Risks of ignoring AEO and the early-adopter advantage

Episode highlights

00:21 — “Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. This is an evolution, not a reset.”
Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=21

01:15 — Webflow’s AEO promise: answer engines are a massive arbitrage—akin to early SEO/SEM/mobile.
Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=75

03:00 — Why “ranking for keywords” is obsolete; topics = clusters of questions across the funnel.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=180

07:49 — The 4-part AEO framework: content, technical (schema & structure), authority, measurement.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=469

10:11 — Case study: Add ~6 FAQs + inline schema to product pages → half of new citations came from 6 pages; +24% organic in 2 weeks.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=611

15:23 — If you only do two things: (1) answer questions comprehensively, (2) add schema metadata.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=923

21:46 — Webflow data: AI-search traffic converts ~6x better than non-branded organic; unbranded share grew from 0%→42% in a year.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1306

24:02 — How buyers actually use LLMs in-flow; why your website still matters (to humans and machines).
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1442

29:58 — The learning curve is back: why AEO is resetting the playing field and rewarding curiosity.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBbYSDDPnnI&t=1798

Key takeaways

1. Focus on questions, not keywords.
LLMs parse full queries and conversations, so win by clustering buyer questions and answering them comprehensively instead of stuffing terms. It’s the new “topic model” for AI search.

2. Ship schema everywhere.
Inline FAQs + JSON-LD help engines understand meaning and structure. Webflow saw outsized citations and traffic lift after adding schema to a handful of pages.

3. Freshness is a ranking primitive again.
Recently updated pages earn more LLM citations. Treat “last updated” as a product surface, then operationalize refreshes with editorial QA instead of naïve bulk rewrites.

4. Brand and PR are back in the loop.
Backlinks still matter, but repeated positive, plain-text mentions and strong brand signals increasingly influence AI output. Earn the mentions; don’t chase gimmicks.

5. Measure what LLMs actually show.
Stop obsessing over keyword rank. Track whether you appear for target questions, your share of voice vs. competitors, and the sentiment of summaries that agents generate.

6. Optimize for humans and machines.
Your site must tell a visually compelling story to people while exposing structure to machines. Design, accessibility, and metadata now co-drive AI visibility.

7. Start narrow, then scale.
Pilot on 5–6 high-intent pages to validate impact (FAQs + schema + refresh). Once you see lift in citations and conversions, templatize and roll out across the library.

8. Treat AEO as resourcing, not reorg.
Don’t “fire SEO” to “hire AEO.” Redeploy the same skills and partners toward AI-aware strategy. It’s a shift in emphasis, not a brand-new department.

9. Expect faster feedback cycles.
Unlike classic SEO, AI engines crawl continuously, so changes can influence outputs the same day. Use the short loop to test, learn, and iterate quickly.

10. Qualify > volume.
AI-search visits may be fewer, but they’re further down-funnel. Teams are seeing materially higher touch-to-signup rates when traffic comes from answer engines.

This episode is brought to you by our sponsor:

ZoomInfo is the GTM Intelligence Platform built for sales, marketing, and RevOps.
By unifying data, workflows, and insights into a single system, ZoomInfo helps revenue teams find and engage the right buyers, launch go-to-market plays faster, and drive predictable growth.
With industry-leading accuracy and depth of data, it gives your team the intelligence advantage to win in competitive markets.

It’s trusted by the fastest-growing companies and has become the category leader in GTM Intelligence.

Learn more at zoominfo.com.

Recommended books

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson — Short, punchy chapters on building products and running lean teams; perfect for rapid iteration mindsets.
Atomic Habits by James Clear — The compounding power of small, consistent improvements applied to growth programs.

GTM 166 Episode Transcript

Sophie: 0:00

AI is advancing at such a rapid rate.

Guy: 0:02

What if you mean? With LLMs crawling the web almost every query, you can have an impact this afternoon. You can use it to outsource your thinking. You can use it to think more deeply. And door number two seems to be ranking a whole lot better.

Sophie: 0:17

And what else do people need to really think about at the macro scale of AEO?

Guy: 0:21

Somebody was like, hey, if this Fortune 500 CMO fired his or her entire SEO team, we’re doing a huge mistake. Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because this is an evolution.

Sophie: 1:15

And for founders and operators, this is one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities since the early days of SEO. Guy Yalif, chief evangelist at Webflow, has seen this movie before. And because he has, he’s taking action and has the data to show. In this conversation, you’ll learn Webflow’s four-part AEO framework why answering questions, not keywords, is the new growth edge, and how early adopters can turn this uncertainty into leverage. Or, as Guy puts it, in other words, the kind of upside we haven’t seen since the early days of search, SEM, and mobile. All right, let’s get into it. Guy, welcome to the podcast.

Guy: 1:50

Thanks, Sophie. Thanks for having me. Excited to talk with you again.

Sophie: 1:54

It is great to have you here. And nobody better to learn about AEO from right now at this inflection point. And you’ve lived through the big SEO boom, you’ve felt it. What does this inflection point feel like compared to that?

Guy: 2:11

Very similar, actually. Um, like the early days of search, there are a bunch of different players. Things are changing all the time, like they did back then. I mean, it makes the news now that Google updated their algorithm because it happens a few times a year, because it’s a settled space. And here, you know, things are changing very rapidly. The rules of what matter are updating frequently enough that everybody feels behind, and there’s real opportunity. Like any new medium, those that take action early, they’ll find bargains, basically effective bargains, you know, return relative to the effort they put in.

Sophie: 2:50

Mm-hmm. That’s really interesting. And if you were explaining this kind of new world, even though it feels a little bit more similar, but to a founder, what are the key differences?

Guy: 3:00

I think there are some that are saying, look, SEO is dead, and this is a whole new world, respectfully. I 180 degrees, black and white could not disagree more. I think AEO is an evolution of what good SEO always should have been. You know, genuinely valuable original content, it’s getting rewarded. The the LLMs, they get to see more context about what’s good. When we all learn to speak Google, our average query was four words long. The average query in an LLM is 23 words long. So they get more context, they have a conversation. So if I were explaining it to a founder, I would say, look, take SEO, minus one thing plus a couple. The thing that’s minus is the concept of ranking for keywords doesn’t exist anymore. Because you got paragraphs now. What’s the plus? Plus is topics used to be a basket of keywords, a cluster of keywords, and you try to make sure you have them in your content. Now a topic is a group of questions that your prospects may be asking in the funnel clustered together. So shift from counting keywords to answering questions, that’d be one, to help the LLM understand the structure and meaning of your content. We’ve been doing that with SEO forever, right? We have the metadata. There’s a bit more. Do this thing called schema. And the last would be we focused on backlakes for years. They still matter. They don’t not matter, but incrementally more important than an SEO is repeated mentions in plain text on other sites saying, oh, GTM Now is awesome. Oh, this is one of the top podcasts that matters more than it did with search.

Sophie: 4:38

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The pendulum is almost shifting back to that third party. It’s bringing PR and all these different things back. But, you know, had had the moment of not not adding less by any means, but maybe less emphasis on them. And now we’re getting highlighted more, which is really interesting.

Guy: 4:53

PR is back, brand is back. Those things matter more than they did before, yes.

Sophie: 4:58

Yeah. And those things matter. So we know definitively what’s important. But what what about overall just knowing? Like, how do you know? Does anyone actually know what’s working with AEO? Or are these best guesses? How are we thinking about a single source of truth around AEO?

Guy: 5:17

So you said definitively no, and I’m glad you asked the question because anyone who says they definitively know is lying. Like no one knows. But in the same thing that no one knows for SEO, right? We all we all try a bunch of things, we observe the results of an experiment. Oh, I added more keywords, fewer keywords, longer metadata, shorter metadata, and they saw what works. But no one actually knows what’s happening in the Google algorithm. Now with LL Lens, not even the LLM providers themselves know what’s actually happening in there. So when we talk about these rules of thumb, they are very well educated, very well researched, data-driven guesses. They’re the current best thinking about what one should do to go manage the risk and opportunity of LLMs, which is really to take back control of our brand narrative and drive more traffic to our websites to go generate revenue.

Sophie: 6:10

Absolutely. And AI is advancing at such a rapid rate.

Guy: 6:15

What do you mean?

Sophie: 6:16

Yeah, yeah. Never heard of it. What what do you think that changes about the SEO adoption to AEO? So when you think say they’re all educated best guesses, are those guesses changing at a pace that is faster than SEO? Or would you say they’re evolving at the same pace as they did?

Guy: 6:35

My humble opinion is faster, exactly for the reason you described. The LLMs are improving their ability to understand meaning and structure and content, what on like a monthly basis every couple of months? Had to hit to Google and Yahoo and Bing and everyone, but like it didn’t go that fast. I don’t recall from back in the day that it did. Um mercifully, we have skipped over a whole generation of spam where if you look at the stuff that ranks top in Google, 85% of it is either entirely human generated, that’s about 65%, and another 20% is like a little bit of AI. So the notion that I can create an infinite content within LLM and I’m just gonna go spam out zillions of pages, it’s not working. Thankfully.

Sophie: 7:20

Thankfully. Less noise. Yes. Less noise is always good. And when you’re thinking about overall frameworks or advice to people that are leaning into AEO, do you have any kind of recommendations? I know at Webflow, you’re doing a ton of work in the space and know those best practices and have implemented them yourself. And we’d love to hear a little bit more around that work. And I guess your best educated guess, not in necessarily what is technically working, but what are your best educated guesses right now?

Guy: 7:49

Um Vivian, who leads our SEO and AEO team, has done some amazing work. And uh, we went and looked for examples, case studies, spent lots of time, many hours looking. There aren’t any. My best guess about why is that people are doing the work. They aren’t yet, it’s not yet repeatable enough that they’re sharing it externally. So we’re sharing a lot of what we’re doing externally. All the research we’ve done, talking with other experts in the space, looking at the data, humbly, we would suggest thinking about the transition from SEO to AEO in four categories. The first is content, where you go from counting keywords to answering clusters of questions to making content super relevant with personalization. So this is all about like the content you own. The second is technical, where you go from on-page SEO to helping LLMs understand the structure and meaning of your content by giving them more metadata. Like we all did it with Facebook’s Open Graph. Yeah. Now there’s this thing that many know about, but I many also don’t call schema, that is just another form of metadata that Google, being Yahoo, Yandex, and others came up with. And it’s like, oh, here’s how you specify an events page, a product page, a bio page. 88% of sites don’t have schema, but 73% of Google’s top results do. So, like, tons of opportunity there. Coming back to technical, and you want that on a super fast cycle. Third area is authority, where we went from backlinks that still matter, they don’t not matter, to repeated positive, plain text mentions about your brand, pointing to a visually stunning, emotionally evocative experience, because that’s a signal about authority too. And the last is measurement, where we go from keyword ranking, which no longer exists, to did I show up in the questions I care about? To what’s my share of voice relative to my competitors and what’s the sentiment? Because over here in search, the Google was using our words. Here at the LLMs are reformulating everything. So the notion of sentiment being important exists. So those four buckets uh content, technical, authority, and measurement.

Sophie: 10:05

Incredible. And from implementing, though, as you said, the team’s been doing a great job. What kind of results did we see?

Guy: 10:11

Vivian and team have done a bunch. They partnered with our SEO and AEO for Graphite, and a couple of things come to mind. Um, she recently took our top half dozen product pages and tried to put some structure on them so the LLMs could understand the meaning and structure of them. What did she do? She put FAQs at the bottom of the page, so about half a dozen FAQs. She then put schema, that metadata, there in line with those FAQs. In two weeks, half of the incremental citations Webflow got were from those six pages. Six pages out of thousands that we have.

Sophie: 10:47

Yeah.

Guy: 10:48

And organic traffic to those pages is up 24% in two weeks. So that was one thing she did, and it’s great, and that’s the beginning. We’re gonna do more. The second is that freshness matters. So the content machine is as hungry as ever for good original content. Um 85, maybe 95% of the content GP Chat GPT sites was updated in the last 10 months. So she worked with another part of ours, AirOps, to increase the speed with which we refreshed content. She did that and uh found 20%, 20, 40, 40 more traffic coming from AI search because we were updating the content more regularly. Uh, and and we see that content with freshness indicator, like last updated date, gets 1.8x more citations. So giving structure and updating more regularly. Two experiments that have worked really well for us.

Sophie: 11:47

Wow. That’s a huge difference just from updating content.

Guy: 11:51

Yeah.

Sophie: 11:52

What and maybe this is getting into the tactics, I need to give her a call, but what constitutes updating? How much work would you say? There’s there’s a lot of companies essentially that have a ton of content, but it’s not necessarily optimized for AI engines and they want to refresh them. How much work is it to refresh existing content?

Guy: 12:12

The direct answer is I don’t know.

Sophie: 12:14

Yeah.

Guy: 12:15

Exactly. And I haven’t survived her a ring. Totally. I do believe it first, it’s worth running the experiment. Somebody said, hey, wait a minute. If you need fresh content, what if you just change the last outdated? Is that enough? I hope it’s not.

Sophie: 12:29

It’s not. At least from the SEO side, I know it’s not. I I don’t know if AI engines differ, but from the SEO side, you need something in the main body. You need like a little bit of a main point and the date. So I would imagine it’s the same, but I don’t know. I got a call by viewing.

Guy: 12:44

I that’s not one I would bet without data. Only those stuff was data driven. This is hypothesis. And the other hypothesis would be that um AirOps, the tool we partner with, makes it easy to do that in a workflow and with LLMs, but that can’t be it. Right? If you just pump out an LLM updated page, you need human review, you need human editorial. I’ve got friends who started companies, I don’t know, maybe GTM Fund invested in one, where it’s like, I can detect if this was entirely LLM created using statistical pattern matching on the content. And so uh we touch with the human every piece of content in a material way before it goes out the door.

Sophie: 13:25

Interesting.

Guy: 13:26

So both hypotheses rather than data driven, but you’ve got the SEO data there.

Sophie: 13:31

Yeah. And it sounds like the common theme of you can’t rely on AI to get from zero to a hundred. It’ll take you part of the way there, but you do need that process for actually implementing the human touch.

Guy: 13:42

Totally. And I feel like one of the one of the underspoken but foundational things in LLMs as like kindergartners through to CEOs learn about them and how they change everything, is you can use it to outsource your thinking. You can use it to think more deeply. And door number two seems to be ranking a whole lot better with answer engines than door number one. And by the way, it helps to make all of us more employable. So I feel like it’s something we aren’t talking about enough, but it’s it looks the same on the surface you used in LLM.

Sophie: 14:19

Yeah.

Guy: 14:19

But what’s going on inside your head could be completely different.

Sophie: 14:21

A quick pause to tell you about a company you need to know. ZoomInfo is the go-to-market intelligence platform built for sales, marketing, and revops. By unifying data, workflows, and insights into a single system, ZoomInfo helps revenue teams find and engage the right buyers, launch go-to-marketplace faster, and drive predictable growth. With industry leading accuracy and depth of data, it gives your team the intelligence advantage to win in competitive markets. It’s trusted by the fastest growing companies and has become the category leader in go-to-market intelligence. Learn more at zoominfo.com. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And it’s tempting to go the quick route, but always play the long game and actually invest in the depth. And you at least you mentioned two points that you did that had a huge impact. And one of them was updating and refreshing pages for, let’s say, founders or early stage companies that are really looking in to implement AEO tactics, but there’s a lot out there. You listed off a lot of different really interesting points that people could dive into. What are the two big ones that you’d recommend? Are those the two, or would you recommend two others?

Guy: 15:23

If you only did two things, I would suggest you shift, you answer questions. So shift from keywords to questions and answer them comprehensively. And the second is add schema metadata to your site so that you can help the LLMs understand the meaning of your site more effectively. Those are the easily the top two things I would suggest doing. They’re the right place to start.

Sophie: 15:44

Keywords, metadata, answers and answers. Sorry. No, no. This is how much is ingrained in my brain.

Guy: 15:53

You too have many years of search.

Sophie: 15:55

I I do, yeah. It’s a bit of a rewiring. So it is a process. Okay. Super helpful.

Guy: 16:01

But to your point about the rewiring, it’s not like throw it all out. It’s adjustments. It’s an evolution rather than a wholesale revolution.

Sophie: 16:09

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. And what else do people need to really think about at the macro scale of AEO?

Guy: 16:17

I heard, I hope it’s not true. It’s not validated at all, but at one of these conferences, somebody was like, hey, if this Fortune 500 CMO fired his or her entire SEO team, it’s like, we’re doing AEO. I think it’s a huge mistake. Your SEO resources are your AEO resources. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because this is an evolution. So SEO is dead and this is a complete revolution, I think, is one of the easiest ones to see some great articles about. And uh I I don’t think the data supports it. Um and the second is just like we did with SEO, you can start small and grow. In the example we talked about with Webflow, Vivian chose half a dozen pages, saw real results. Obviously, she’s then gonna go continue, but she didn’t do everything all at once, day one.

Sophie: 17:04

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that makes sense. Okay. Super helpful advice. I love it. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out now over time.

Guy: 17:14

To your point, we are all learning together. Right? This this mental model we have of these four categories. We also made up a rubric of five different levels of them. That’ll keep adjusting as we all learn more.

Sophie: 17:27

And how do you learn? How do you learn about AEL and then AI overall?

Guy: 17:35

A bunch of time. Really? It’s it is it is a bunch of time experimenting, focusing on data, because it’s there are uh a lot of things being said. Uh and when like I’ll read an article about something and I’ll dig into the source for that and the source and the source and the source. And sometimes I’m like, wait, that article, it contradicts the original underlying data, but it was like a telephone game of referencing each other, uh and then staying close to the work we’re doing, experimenting directly uh with both. I happen to like two podcasts. One is this one, which I listen to religiously, and the other one is um marketing AI Institutes uh podcasts, which Paul and Mike, they produce great content too.

Sophie: 18:24

Okay. I love it. I think that’s where with the fast evolution, people are learning the most on the fly. Our individuals, our networks like podcasts and channels and so forth, where it’s just a little bit more live and and flexible. I know that’s personally I learned the most too, is to podcast from people individually how they’re learning. We’re seeing a lot more content out there that is dynamic, that’s actually tactical, actionable advice on AEI. And I know you’re produced with a lot of content around that too, actually. So for anyone kind of curious about their own AEO strategy, what kind of resources are out there? Because I know that you are are working on a ton.

Guy: 19:04

We wouldn’t I would invite people to go to webflow.com slash resources slash AEO. There, you will not find a pitch for Webflow. What you will find is a place to go enter your domain name, hit enter, a couple of minutes later, you will get an email saying, we ran in the background a 600-line prompt. It’s about to become 1700 in V2, that goes and looks at your site, goes and looks off your site, and suggests, hey, here’s what we see in those four categories: content, tech, authority, measurement. Here are the gaps we see. Here are suggestions for what you might do to level up. And it bottom lines that, like you were doing earlier, if you only did two things, go do these. And then below that is detail around these four categories and the things we’re seeing that can help people evolve.

Sophie: 19:55

Amazing. And no cost? No cost. No cost. Okay. Well, then we’ll drop it in the show notes. That’s amazing. Yeah, what a great resource, especially after you just broke down those four points. And they’re super, super important for people optimizing. And what about the people that aren’t optimizing? What do you think happens if people aren’t actually following an AEO strategy right now and into the future?

Guy:20:15

In my humble opinion, it is it’s it’s missed opportunity. I think AEO is truly threat and opportunity for us. Over time, we will lose control of our brand narrative because our carefully differentiated and crafted words are being reformulated. We’ll lose traffic. Um Bain found 15 to 25% decrease in traffic, which I think is closer to reality than the headline grabbing, oh, HubSpot lost 80% of their traffic. I don’t think that’s the norm and was cherry-picked for them as an example. And the third is we all sound the same. We’re all using the same LLM. So how many people are, you know, the leader, the best, the first, the fastest? Uh and I think um uh actually I lost the train thought entirely.

Sophie: 20:58

What was the Yeah, it’s okay. Um what happens if people Oh aren’t doing it, thank you. Don’t yeah.

Guy: 21:04

So that so so the risk is we all sound the same. If we then go invest some in AEO, which is with your existing resources, same hours, same people, shifting strategy a little bit, you will be earlier to market, and chances are you will find opportunity. Just like we did in the early days of search, in the early days of SCM, in the early days of mobile, in the early days of native, the people that went earlier, they found relative bargains. They got more return relative to the amount of effort they were putting in before everybody was there.

Sophie: 21:36

Early adopters advantage. Yes. And is there a certain percentage that you’d recommend teens think about of reallocating resources from SEO to AEO under the same team?

Guy: 21:46

I think it depends on how where they are seeing traffic coming from and how far along they are in their SEO journey. So I I I do suggest teams go look at traffic to their site. At Webflow, 8% of our self-serve signups come from Answer Engines today, AI search. Uh, by the way, it converts better too, because they’re further down the follow. It converts six times, not six percent, six times better than non-branded organic, which is eye-opening. But so I suggest those do you look at how much traffic you’re getting from answer engines, look if it’s increasing. For us, in unbranded, it went from zero a year ago to 42% today.

Sophie: 22:25

Okay. Yeah.

Guy: 22:26

It’s it’s like eight, and so that’s worth investing time in. That’s a clear signal to go invest in AEO strategies. Um, that having been said, 25% of the top pages out there don’t even have basic SEO metadata. They have broken links. That’s also worth tackling if you don’t have those fundamentals in place.

Sophie: 22:45

Very good call out. And perhaps they can be done in tandem, but maybe we’re skipping steps by jumping ahead when really there’s a lot of SEO leverage to be had too. But 6X, that’s a wild statistic. Like, talk to me about what you mean around that traffic is converting 6x better.

Guy: 23:04

I that the traffic that comes from answer engines, you look at touch to purchase, because you were talking about self-serve sign-off. Yeah, that is 24x 24% conversion rate. Non-branded organic search is 4% conversion rate for that metric. Two of the prominent SEO firms, HRFs and SEMrush, found in their own data 4x and 23x. So our 6x is in the range. That’s really interesting. It’s uh and why we think because folks are further down the funnel. So you have less traffic, but it’s more qualified because they have self-qualified.

Sophie: 23:43

So what do you think behaviorally they’re doing? Because I’m thinking to you know, my procurement processes and yours and the way everybody individually operates. Are they researching on their own and then turning to LLMs? Are we not starting with LLNs, or do you think people are starting with LLNs?

Guy: 24:02

Forced or surveyed B2B marketers, 95% of them said LLMs are going to be part of my buying process this year.

Sophie: 24:08

Yeah.

Guy: 24:09

And surges will be. So it’s clearly something that is important. Do they literally start there? Do they start with search? Do they start with friends? I don’t know. Anecdotally, I think word of mouth is easily continues to be the most trusted. That’s quantitative. It is the most trusted form of recommendation. By the way, your website’s number two. That was eye-opening. Um uh and so your website, so your website isn’t dead. Your website’s not dead at all. In fact, I firmly believe that people are going to want to hear your story told your way forever. That is not going away. To your point about how we’re engaging with LLMs, often the first look is there, and people are learning well, what matters in this category? Who are the players? Some of the tofu mofu things that we’ve all done, but then they are looking to see your story told your way. By the way, that website needs to then speak to humans in visually stunning, emotionally evocative, engaging ways, and to machines. And folks are talking about this like it’s new, but it’s not. We’ve had search metadata forever. Now we have a bit more metadata for the LLMs. And so we’ve been doing this for a while. I think folks are this is obviously more in the zeitgeist now. You need websites that speak to both.

Sophie: 25:27

And you’ve obviously built in this space and solved in this space before. You know it so intimately. One of the quotes that I just absolutely love and I think about all the time around the work that you’ve done, the work that I’ve done in the past, the work that a lot of people are doing right now is people impute the quality of your product or service from the quality of your website. So even if there are third parties like LLNs, it is your story. You’re still owning your story and design and visually appealing sites and emotionally invocative, like you said, are a huge, huge part of that.

Guy: 25:59

I am very, very much with you, both quantitatively and just subjectively as an individual. Uh and I think the LLNs are going to use it as a signal of quality. That’s belief. Why do I believe that? Because Google looks at bounce rate in search, right? Did somebody leave your site and come back immediately? It would be surprising if the uh answer engines weren’t doing that. And you see perplexity as a browser, ChatGPT is rumored to be creating one. Why might they do that? I I believe two reasons. One, to not pay the gajillion dollars Google’s paying Apple to be the default in Safari, fine. Perhaps more valuably, they get to see where you’re going. They get to see what’s actually valuable content. And so you having a compelling human-focused story on your website will continue to matter a lot. It may actually get you to appear in the answer engines more often because they can tell it’s valuable content.

Sophie: 26:55

So the quality metric matters a lot more now, it sounds like it is definitely a signal. Yeah. Someone told me a very tactical nugget around AEO. And it was that just as you said, your website matters so much. Yes. So that pairing it with the formats that are performing well is really impactful. So publishing a listicle from your own website of the top companies in your area actually performs really well. So for a venture firm, for example, that would be, you know, top early stage venture firms and listing out the top 15. And you could obviously position yourself first or wherever you want on a list. It feels a bit funny, but they were saying that this has been uh been a huge incremental topic and one of the many checkboxes on AEO. But it feels a little funny. I know we personally haven’t done it, but there’s a lot of uh a lot of interesting things around that.

Guy: 27:49

Without a doubt, it feels weird to name your competitors and compliment them on your site.

Sophie: 27:53

Or just have yourself looked in first on your own listicle, even that also feels weird.

Guy: 27:58

And I think the underlying principle is that in the content separate from the metadata we’ve been talking about, you can also signal structure LLMs, a listical bullets to use like in summary, to put FAQs at the bottom, to use one H1 on the page, and then logically structured H2, H3s, H4s. I can tell you how many sites you’re like H1, then H3, then H2, and you’re like, hold on, there you’re you’re signaling structure to have accessibility info. They use that. They use that actively, and so listical is a great one. The other underlying principle that we see is in search, it took a while to have an impact because you needed to create authority, and that was based on backlinks, and that took time. With LLMs crawling the web almost every query, you can have an impact this afternoon. You can go see the impact so much more quickly, and it’s even multiplied when you and your competitors all do that listicle, which feels super weird, but you can collectively go do that and have an impact this afternoon. By the way, the flip side, the painful side of that coin is you change your positioning, you’ve changed it on your website today. It may or may not have an impact because lots of other people still have your old positioning there, and that can have an impact. Or I’m sure none of the listeners here have this problem. But if you have some outdated content on your site, again, nobody listening to this has any of that. Of course not. But if they did, that also will have an impact. And so the notion of taking down content, which is anathema in search, is a thing in AEO.

Sophie: 29:36

Mm-hmm. Fascinating. Well, guy, thank you for the expertise around AEO. It’s been fantastic. I think you said it well around nobody really has the answers. But you yourself are somebody that’s been in search for 17 years, you’re at one of the companies leading in the space. So we appreciate your thought leadership on it and better informing the insider scoop.

Guy: 29:58

Thanks for the chance to talk. About it, and I’m curious. It was great to learn from you here, and I’m eager to continue the conversation and learn from the listeners as we all run different experiments and learn in this rapid evolving space.

Sophie: 30:09

Yeah. I think that you just hit on a really interesting point there, too, is it almost resets the playing field. AI resets the playing field where suddenly everyone is learning something at the same time. And so it really democratizes experience in a way. How does that feel as somebody that has, you know, built and successfully sold a company and operated at the highest level? Like, what does that feel like to suddenly have something that is so new?

Guy: 30:43

Joyful. If you deep deep down are curious and have the prototypical growth mindset, it’s awesome to have a learning curve like this again.

Sophie: 30:55

Right?

Guy: 30:58

That’s part of what I enjoyed about the founder CEO journey is the heterogeneity, the diversity of what you needed to focus on regularly. So you were constantly learning new things. Now the whole world has a learning curve like this. That’s cool. What was the last time we had it? Like it’s awesome. Or when we tried a new position, or it doesn’t happen all the time. This one’s gonna last for years.

Sophie: 31:20

I think the last one was the internet. Do you think there was a different?

Guy: 31:25

I I don’t believe there’s ever been one at this speed. I think mobile was a huge one, social media was a huge one. None of them went this fast.

Sophie: 31:33

No, not that’s amazing.

Guy: 31:38

Exactly to that point. 15, 20 years ago, SEO was an issue. Every CMO and every practitioner would want to talk about. Today, it’s mature. What CMOs will generally want to talk about it? Those who are in traffic arbitrage businesses, or those for whom that channel is not performing. AEO is now where SEO was before, where every CMO I talk to and every practitioner I talk to, I wonder if you have the same experience, absolutely wants to talk about this because we’ve all got this learning curve again. It’s fun.

Sophie: 32:08

Oh, 100%. It’s the conversation of every single room, and that’s the beautiful thing, is it’s the best conversation point. I wonder when we’ll hit that threshold of people not wanting to talk about AI as much, but right now it is just absolutely captivating any conversation in the room. And you yourself, you talked about how you learn about AI. What about overall? There being any impactful books on your career.

Guy: 32:41

It’s by 37 Signals. Do you know it?

Sophie: 32:43

I don’t. Yeah.

Guy: 32:44

It is about building products, but I think it’s about how to run teams. And it is a lot about rapid iteration, quick learning, lots of communication on small teams. And so the team that created Backpack and a few other products created this. And it’s not like a long book, it’s a bunch of a paragraph on a page. And then the next thought and the next thought and the next thought. And I thought it was very actionable. I also happen to be a fan of Atomic Habits. Classic.

Sophie: 33:12

Oh, so good.

Guy:33:14

Yes.

Sophie: 33:14

Yeah, I love it. You cannot go wrong with that book. James Claire just did an incredible, incredible job.

Guy: 33:18

Absolutely incredible job. Yeah. And comparing us with peers, like what we do at your annual general meeting. It’s great to simply talk with folks dealing with similar issues.

Sophie: 33:28

There’s no better learning than just that in-depth conversation. And that’s actually part of what we’re trying to replicate here with the podcast is how do you democratize access to a lot of the insight and kind of the best mind in tech and the conversations that go on and the knowledge. So appreciate you sharing that. And you’ve had some wild stories lately. I know you were just at F1, then you had, you know, a phone incident. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.

Guy: 33:55

I fell way down the F1 rabbit hole five, six years ago as a former aerospace engineer, because you know, aerospace engineer’s CMO is like this super popular career. Flipper linear linear.

Sophie: 34:06

Yeah.

Guy: 34:06

Um was at a race this weekend. And at the end of the race, they generously let you uh go around the track in this flatbed truck, and you’re like, this is holy ground. Oh my god, they were just racing on this. And the guy next to me, almost at the end, was like this. And I was holding my phone tightly, it went flying onto the ground. And an hour and change later, with lots of help from many great people, my wife in the US included, doing find my phone and all of that. Thank you, Monica. Uh Monica? The phone looked demolished. Uh, and took it to a repair shop. They said just the screen is okay. And then I got to watch the video 17 minutes after it got hit the ground, it got run over five times. Here it is. This is two days later, and it’s just fine with a new screen. Like very impressive.

Sophie: 34:54

We might need a an Apple ad here. This rate. Yeah. Incredible. You can see where it was run over right here.

Guy: 35:00

Yes.

Sophie: 35:01

But that’s right. You never know.

Guy: 35:03

It looked like the surface of the moon. It was all like craters everywhere, but new screen, and the rest of it was fine. And I got the videos from the day off of it.

Sophie: 35:10

That’s hilarious. What a memory.

Guy: 35:12

It was a great memory and more story.

Sophie: 35:14

Yeah, I’m sure. Well, I’m glad uh I’m glad you got that experience. LF1. Thank you. And we appreciate the time and conversation guide. It’s been fantastic.

Guy: 35:23

Always awesome to catch up with you, Sophie. Looking forward to the next one. Like Christ. Thank you. Thanks.

Sophie Buonassisi

Sophie Buonassisi is the SVP of Marketing at media company GTMnow and its venture firm, GTMfund. She oversees all aspects of media, marketing, and community engagement. Sophie leads the GTMnow editorial team, producing content exploring the behind the scenes on the go-to-market strategies responsible for companies’ growth. GTMnow highlights the strategies, along with the stories from the top 1% of GTM executives, VCs, and founders behind the strategies and companies.