How to Win at AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

**Dave Gerhardt** (0:00)
Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Optimizely is the AI platform built for modern marketing teams, helping you create content, run experiments, personalize experiences, and optimize your website, all powered by agentic AI. There's been a huge shift in marketing teams over the last year. AI agents are now part of the team, and this is what it takes to be successful in B2B marketing. They're in our meetings taking notes, and they're behind the scenes handling the work that used to eat up everyone's week. The teams doing this well are shipping higher quality output, running better campaigns and actually getting the most out of everyone on their team. But what are AI agents and how should you be using them? What use cases work for B2B marketers? Check this out if you're asking any of these questions. Optimizely is hosting a free virtual event on June 9th called Agents in the Mix. It's built for and by marketers who are experimenting with AI agents and want to see what best in class actually looks like. Every session comes with demos of real agents built by and for marketers with no development required and practitioners sharing what's working for them right now. You will learn how to go from AI output to something worth shipping without the endless revision cycle, how one team built 8,000 personalized landing pages. Holy cow, how to distribute one asset across channels and audiences without starting from scratch every time. And if you want to do all this, you can go and check it out right now.
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80% of the CMOs we've talked to this year say AEO is a top priority for them, and most of them don't actually know where to start because so much is changing in real time. So we brought in three people who are actually doing the work right now in B2B marketing. Matt, VP of Data at Muckrack, he just ran a full AEO-led product launch and has the results to prove it. Jess is an SEO and AEO consultant who's building the playbook for how B2B brands show up at AI Search, and Brett is director of PM at Webflow, one of the most forward-thinking teams on AI-ready web infrastructure. In this session, you'll get the full tactical breakdown, how Muckrack used their own AI visibility research to earn press coverage that actually moved the needle, why LLMs reward verifiable specific claims in exactly how to write content that wins citations, the AEO maturity model from zero to owning your category, how to think about tracking AI visibility, which tools to use and how to separate signal from noise, why comparison pages and listicles are a good place to start but won't be enough, and what Bing Webmaster Tools are doing right now that Google hasn't caught up to yet. This came from one of our world famous Exit Five live sessions. We do them twice a month. They're definitely not webinars. We bring in people doing the work and go deep on one topic in B2B marketing to help you get smarter and this session is all about AEO. Let's get into it.