Three years ago, every B2B buyer journey started with a Google search. Six blue links, a few ads, an SEO winner at the top. The discipline of getting found was well understood and the agency space optimised for it relentlessly.
Today a meaningful share of those same buyers start somewhere else. They ask ChatGPT. They paste a question into Claude. They use Perplexity for research. They watch Gemini summarise a category in their Google search itself. The buyer journey hasn't disappeared — it's been re-routed through a synthesised answer that may or may not name you.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is the discipline of being named in that synthesised answer. It overlaps with SEO but isn't SEO. LLMs don't surface ranked blue links; they surface entities, claims, and citations. The signals they weight are different: structured content, named-entity density, schema markup, author authority, and citation patterns from sources the model trusts (Reddit, niche industry forums, well-structured documentation sites).
The practical work splits into three layers. First, audit how often your company is currently cited across the major LLMs for high-intent buyer queries — most B2B companies score near zero on day one. Second, restructure existing content for citation: question-led H2s, definition-first paragraphs, FAQPage schema, BreadcrumbList schema, named-entity reinforcement. Third, build authority signals over time: author bios with expertise markup, Reddit and community presence (Reddit is one of the highest-weighted citation sources for ChatGPT and Perplexity), and continued production of citation-worthy content.
The measurement question matters most to CMOs. You can't see this in Google Search Console. Citation tracking is its own monitoring stack — querying the models monthly with a fixed buyer-question battery, recording who gets named, computing share-of-voice against competitors. Once you have a baseline, the lift compounds: companies that start AEO work in 2026 will have a meaningful citation moat over competitors who wait until 2027, the same way Stripe-era SEO compounded for the early movers.
The budget question is smaller than CMOs assume. A baseline AEO audit runs $5K–$10K. Ongoing retainers run $4K–$8K/mo and overlap 60% with SEO work, so most companies bundle the two. The upside is asymmetric — being the default answer for your category in ChatGPT meaningfully shortens sales cycles because buyers arrive with you already on their shortlist.
The short version: this is where SEO was in 2008. Early enough that a 12-month head start matters. Cheap enough that not starting is more expensive than starting. CMOs who skip it for another quarter will be looking at the same gap their predecessors looked at in 2009 when SEO became table stakes.
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