How to evolve your SEO strategy into an AEO engine

In this featured play, Guy Yalif gives practical steps for companies to strengthen AI visibility and turn answer engines into a meaningful source of traffic, brand influence and revenue.

Watch and listen to Guy Yalif on Get It, Together, powered by PartnerStack.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how Yalif approaches answer engine optimization (AEO) to strengthen brand visibility, increase qualified traffic and turn AI answers into revenue — and how you can rally your partners to help do the same.

Shift from keyword optimization to answering buyer questions through third-party content

The first step in any AEO strategy is moving beyond baskets of keywords and focusing on the actual questions prospects ask throughout the funnel. The benefits of having partners is the ability to multiply through these channels at scale.

That does not mean abandoning SEO. In fact, Yalif argues that strong SEO is one of the best starting points for AEO.

“Great SEO is a fantastic head start for AEO. Your SEO agency is your AEO agency because the core skills for this, are the ones for that,” says Yalif. “I’ve heard some say, ‘Well, how do you create content now for both?’ There’s not some huge divergence in content, I don’t think. You fundamentally are sharing the same thing in an engaging way, in a clear and structured way.”

Yalif recommends using an LLM to analyze sales calls and emails, alongside Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) results, to identify the questions buyers are already asking. From there, the goal is to create genuinely valuable content that answers those needs clearly and is tailored to different stages of the buyer journey. This makes for great onboarding when it comes to your partners and how you want them to be selling your product.

Implement a technical foundation of structured schema‍

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To help LLMs understand the structure and meaning of a site, brands need to implement schema metadata. While users don’t see this code, it plays an important role in helping machines interpret and index content accurately.

“73 per cent of first page results from Google have schema, but it’s early days and there’s huge opportunity because 88 per cent of sites do not have schema,” says Yalif.

That includes applying the right schema to different page types, such as product pages, persona pages and other high-value content. Yalif points to Webflow’s own experience: after adding stronger page structure — including FAQs, bullets, author bios and schema — to six top product pages, those pages drove more than half of the company’s incremental mentions and saw a 24 per cent increase in traffic within two weeks.

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Build authority by leveraging affiliate and creator partners

In AEO, authority is shaped not just by what brands publish on their own channels, but by how often and how well they are mentioned elsewhere. That makes earned brand mentions especially valuable, since widespread positive references on authoritative sites help LLMs build a stronger understanding of a brand.

“The value of plain text mentions — links optional — is higher than it was in search because it’s like teaching your kids something. Every one of those mentions is another repetition for the LLM to go see,” explains Yalif. “Having widespread positive mentions of your content on other sites is really valuable and can impact authority quickly.”

This creates a meaningful opportunity for affiliate and creator partners. By featuring brands in educational content, newsletters, review sites or YouTube channels, these partners can help strengthen authority and improve AI visibility far beyond owned properties.

As Yalif notes, LLMs are sending traffic to a wider range of websites than traditional search. That gives brands more opportunities to work with affiliate and creator partners whose audiences may be smaller, but still highly credible and influential in their niche.

Keep content fresh and clearly updated

Freshness matters in AEO. Yalif explains that 95 per cent of ChatGPT’s citations come from content that has been updated within the last ten months.

“Content with a freshness signal like ‘last updated’ gets 1.8x more citations. At Webflow, Vivian [Hoang], who runs our SEO/AEO team, 5x’ed the speed of refreshing content. That resulted, for that content, in 42 per cent more traffic — and that traffic converted 14 per cent better than unbranded SEO.”

The takeaway is not to publish more for the sake of it. It is to keep high-value content accurate, relevant and clearly maintained.

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Yalif also warns against using AI to mass-produce low-value content. “Based on data from our friends at Graphite, 85 per cent of AI content in Google is either entirely human — that’s 69 per cent — or human plus a little bit of AI — that’s another 16 per cent. And as a marketer, I am happy that we will hopefully skip that stage, both because the LLMs are iterating very quickly and because they have more signal about what's good content than search does.”

Establish an AEO-specific measurement framework

Traditional keyword rankings are less useful in AEO because LLMs do not just link to your content. They reinterpret it. That means brands need new ways to measure whether they are showing up in AI answers and how those answers are shaping brand perception.

“At the highest level, you’re measuring share of voice, sentiment and accuracy,” says Yalif, but “[referral traffic] should be the very first thing you’re measuring.”

That is because LLM-referred visitors are often further down the buying funnel. According to Yalif, tools like Semrush and Ahrefs show that this traffic can convert four to 23 times better than traditional search.

From there, the measurement model becomes more sophisticated. Yalif says marketers often start by asking simple questions: Is our brand showing up in LLMs at all? How many total mentions are we getting?

“Then they mature to, ‘what’s my share of voice relative to my competitors?’ And then to ‘what’s the sentiment?’ ‘Am I being mentioned positively?’ Which is a whole concept that just didn’t exist in search because our words were being used,” explains Yalif. “And finally, ‘is it accurate?’ Again, a concept that didn’t exist before because our stuff wasn't being reformulated.”

AEO is still evolving, but the opportunity is already clear. Brands that combine strong content, technical structure, off-site authority, content freshness and the right measurement framework will be better positioned to shape how they appear in AI answers — and turn that visibility into real business results.

Meet Get It, Together expert guest Guy Yalif:
This former CMO and CEO has worked across adtech, martech and SaaS, and is now Chief Evangelist at Webflow.