Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): Will Your B2B Customers Find You in AI Search?

If you've talked to me lately, you know that my husband and I sold our home in Atlanta and are currently looking for 20ish acres to build on in East Tennessee. Because I apparently don't know how to do anything casually, “looking for land” has turned into researching everything from elevation and flood zones to deed restrictions, road grades and easements, availability of utilities, and whether we can actually get our 45-foot fifth wheel onto the property without regretting every decision that led us there.

I'm spending plenty of time on Zillow and Landwatch. Last week, I officially earned my Tennessee real estate license so I can perform my own due diligence as new opportunities arise and represent myself in the buying transaction. I use Google sometimes, but when the question gets complicated, I use an LLM.

I'm not searching “land for sale East Tennessee.” I'm asking something more like:

“What areas around Tellico Plains have higher elevations, usable acreage and mountain views, but aren't up terrifying mountain roads and would still allow us to get a 45-foot fifth wheel to the homesite while we are building?”

That's a lot to ask of a search bar, but it's a pretty natural conversation to have with Claude or ChatGPT.

At some point while doing this, my marketing brain kicked in: If this is how I'm researching one of the biggest purchases we'll make, how many of our customers are doing exactly the same thing when they're researching products, services and business problems?

That question sent me pretty far down the Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) rabbit hole this year.

I've spent a lot of time learning what makes companies and content show up in AI search, experimenting with it in the work I'm doing, and paying attention to how my own search behavior is changing. I've also been asking clients and other small and midsized businesses what they're doing about AEO. More often than I expected, the answer is basically: nothing yet.

So I wanted to share what I've learned so far. Specifically, I'll cover five things:

1. why AEO matters now,
2. what seems to make a company more visible in AI search,
3. why I think small and midsized businesses have a real opportunity here,
4. how to see what LLMs currently “know” about your company,
5. and what I'd start doing about it.

And no, this is not one of those “SEO is Dead!” articles. Google is doing just fine.

1. Your Customers Are Already Using AI to Research

For most of my career, we had a pretty good understanding of how search worked. Someone had a problem, they went to Google, typed in a few keywords, got a list of results and started clicking. Our job was to figure out which searches mattered to our buyers and get our content as close to the top of those results as possible.

That's obviously still happening. But now we also have another option. Instead of figuring out the perfect search phrase, opening five tabs and piecing together an answer myself, I can explain exactly what I'm trying to figure out and ask an LLM to help me make sense of it.

G2 surveyed 1,100 B2B software decision-makers for its 2025 Buyer Behavior Report and found that 79% said AI search had changed how they conduct research. The stat that really got my attention, though, was that GenAI chatbots (LLM-powered assistants like ChatGPT and Claude) were the #1 source influencing vendor shortlists, ahead of software review sites, vendor websites, market research firms, colleagues and salespeople.

Responsive's 2025 research found that while 90% of B2B buyers conduct research before contacting a vendor, nearly two-thirds were already using GenAI as much as or more than traditional search.

As a marketer, put those things together and it gets interesting pretty quickly. Your prospective customer could be asking Claude or another LLM to explain their problem, identify possible solutions, compare approaches and even suggest companies to investigate before they've ever visited your website or raised their hand.

That's why I've started asking a new question alongside all of the usual SEO questions:

When someone's problem is something my company or my client's company is uniquely qualified to solve, what happens when they ask an LLM about it? Do we show up?

2. AEO Isn't About Gaming ChatGPT

When I first started digging into Answer Engine Optimization, I expected there to be a lot of technical tricks involved. And, of course, there are technical considerations. There's also an entirely new cottage industry forming around Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), LLM optimization and every other acronym we marketers can possibly invent.

But one of my biggest takeaways has actually been much simpler: you have to be useful.

If you want AI engines to recognize your company as an authority on something, you need to give them a lot of good reasons to reach that conclusion. That means creating clear, substantive content around the questions your ideal customers are actually asking, not simply publishing another 1,500-word article because a keyword tool told you the phrase gets 2,400 searches a month.

And those questions are often much more interesting than traditional keywords anyway.

• What should I consider before doing this?

• Which approach is better in my situation?

• What usually goes wrong?

• How much should this cost?

• What questions should I ask a vendor?

• When does the conventional wisdom not apply?

Those are also exactly the kinds of questions people naturally ask an LLM.

The goal of AEO is not to figure out how to convince Claude that you're an expert. The goal is to actually demonstrate expertise so consistently and clearly that being recognized as one becomes the logical outcome.

3. This Is Where I Think Smaller Companies Have a Huge Opportunity

Most of the small and midsized companies I talk to have an enormous amount of expertise trapped inside people's heads. They may not have a giant content team or a six-figure SEO budget, but their people know their industry incredibly well.

The salesperson who's been doing this for 15 years knows which questions separate a serious buyer from someone who's just kicking tires. The product person knows which “best practice” everyone repeats even though it doesn't actually work in half the situations where it's recommended. The founder can explain in five minutes why the market works the way it does. Customer success knows what customers inevitably wish they'd understood sooner.

That's incredibly valuable material for an AEO strategy!

I've also had the chance to see this work in practice. I helped one of my clients go from essentially no visibility in LLM-generated answers around the topics they should be known for to now being regularly cited by LLMs as an authoritative source on those subjects. Even more encouraging, we're now seeing potential customers inbound after discovering and researching the company through LLMs.

I don't share that as some magic AEO formula or overnight success story. It's been the result of deliberately building useful, interconnected content around the company's real expertise and the questions its customers are actually asking.

Seeing that shift has been one of the things that's made me pay much closer attention to AEO. When you watch a company begin to be recognized as a source on the exact subjects it has worked for years to become an expert in, this stops feeling theoretical pretty quickly.

Instead of starting with “We need four blogs this month,” we ask “What do we want to be known for?”

That starts with being really clear about who you're trying to reach in the first place. I've written before about why speaking directly to the right customer beats adding more noise to an already noisy market. 

Then work backward.

• What does someone need to understand about that subject?

• What questions will they have along the way?

• Where does your company have a genuinely useful point of view?

• What proprietary data or experience can you bring to the conversation?

• What are your people explaining over and over that has never actually made it onto your website?

Now your content calendar isn't a random collection of keywords. It's building something.

4. Your Website Can't Be the Only Place Saying You're an Expert

This was another important realization for me.

We marketers have historically put SEO, PR, thought leadership, social, podcasts, customer stories and brand positioning into their own little buckets. AEO makes the relationship between all of them much more obvious.

If your website says you're an expert on a subject, that's one signal. If your executives also publish thoughtful perspectives on it, customers talk about you in relation to it, industry publications quote you about it, your podcast consistently explores it, other credible websites reference your research and your content thoroughly answers the questions surrounding it, that's a much stronger picture.

In other words, you can't just walk around telling everyone you're an authority. Other people eventually need to agree.

This is one of the reasons AEO isn't simply a new version of SEO. It's closer to an authority strategy. You're creating enough consistent evidence across your digital footprint that humans, search engines and AI systems can understand what your organization actually knows.

And that's a much more interesting marketing challenge than figuring out where to put another keyword.

5. Here's What I'd Do First

Before buying an AEO platform (I've tried them and have thoughts), creating a 47-tab spreadsheet or scheduling a six-hour strategy meeting, I'd do something much simpler.

Go ask the LLMs.

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and pretend you're your ideal customer. Don't search for your company's name. Ask about the problem you solve.

Ask the questions prospects ask your sales team. Ask for comparisons. Ask which approaches make sense under different circumstances. Ask what someone should consider before purchasing. Ask which companies specialize in solving the problem. Then keep asking follow-up questions the way an actual buyer would.

Pay attention to what comes back.

• Does your company appear?

• Which competitors do?

• Which sources are being cited?

• Are there certain companies that repeatedly show up as authorities?

• What are they doing differently?

I've found this exercise incredibly useful because it forces you to look at your content from the outside instead of through the lens of everything you already know about your company.

If an LLM doesn't associate you with a subject you believe you own, that's worth investigating. Maybe you have the expertise but haven't published enough of it. Maybe your content is too generic. Maybe you have ten great resources that aren't connected in a way that makes your topical authority clear. Maybe everyone inside the company knows what you're great at, but the internet doesn't.

That's a marketing problem worth solving.

AEO Isn't Replacing SEO. Search Is Just Getting Bigger.

I don't think people are going to stop Googling things. I certainly haven't. And many of the things that make content valuable for traditional SEO: clear structure, topical depth, useful answers, credible sources, strong internal linking and genuine expertise, also matter when you're thinking about AI search optimization.

What's changing is the journey. I might ask Claude about an area in Tennessee, Google a place it mentions, look at the property on Zillow, pull up a county GIS map, come back to Claude with what I found and then ask another question. There isn't a clean little “awareness → consideration → conversion” funnel for that. I'm bouncing all over the place.

Your buyers probably are too.

That's why I'm becoming less interested in debating whether something is technically SEO, AEO, GEO or whatever acronym we come up with next. The bigger question is whether your company is present and credible when your ideal customer is trying to understand a problem you're qualified to solve.

What I've Learned So Far

One of the things I pride myself on professionally is continuing to learn. Marketing has changed dramatically during my career, and I don't think we get to decide at some point that we've learned enough and just keep doing what worked five years ago.

AEO has been one of my bigger learning projects this year. I'm still learning, testing and paying attention to what changes, because this entire space is moving incredibly quickly. But one thing I'm already convinced of is that small and midsized companies shouldn't wait until AI search becomes a line item in everyone's marketing plan before thinking about it.

There's an opportunity right now to take the expertise your company already has and make it much easier to discover.

And strangely enough, I like what that asks of marketers. It isn't just “create more content.” It's figure out what your company genuinely knows, find the questions your customers genuinely care about, and become exceptionally good at answering them.

In other words, become worth citing. Because your customers are already asking AI about the problems you solve. It would be nice if AI knew you could solve them.

Do Your Ideal Customers Find You?

If you're not sure what happens when your ideal customers ask AI about the problems you solve, let's find out. I work with founders and growing businesses to turn what they already know into clear positioning, useful content and a digital presence that makes them easier to find, whether their customers are searching on Google, ChatGPT, Claude or whatever comes next.

Author Bio: Kimberly Cockrell Corley is an award-winning Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. She helps founders and growing businesses reach their ideal customers through sharp positioning and consistent content execution. Schedule a fit call here.

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