✍️ the no-panic guide to AEO

It's 11/11—so if you're superstitious, make a wish. If you're just simply 'stitious,' happy Tuesday!

We're curious: What did you wish for? A self-cleaning inbox? That your next quarterly report writes itself?

The ‘arb has been busy collecting wishes from marketing leaders.
A popular one lately: “Please tell me I don't have to rebuild my entire content strategy because of AI search."

They’re calling it the SEO killer. The content grim reaper.
We call it a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Its name?
AEO. Answer Engine Optimization.

The good news: We can grant your wish. The same skills that got you ranking on Google will get you cited in AI. You just need a couple tactical tweaks.

Separating your SEO and your AEO is like trying to split the two sides of a coin with your bare hands.

1. Why would you ever try that?

and 

2. Impossible.

SEO and AEO don’t need to be ontologically separate from each other. If you've been doing your SEO right all this time—fast site, clean code, original content that actually helps people—your AEO is well on its way to being complete.

The missing piece is understanding that LLMs are content aggregators. After scanning and crawling content (by the way, every market should know LLMs have a “crawl budget”), they retrieve the most common denominator answer instead of just pinging for how often a keyword shows up. 

If your content is generic, LLMs are probably still crawling it—but they aren’t going to cite it, because it’s in line with everything else out there. They can spit out an answer based on what they already have in their knowledge base, because there's no new information to reshape their existing response.

When you have truly unique content, you basically force the LLM to cite it, because you offer a genuinely unique perspective that shifts the canned answer. 

That’s exactly why SME-driven content (interviewing actual experts ➡️ capturing unique perspectives ➡️ turning that into original pieces) holds up so well with this optimization evolution.

storyarb Content Strategist Emily Greffenius breaks down the four dials you need to tune for AEO:

1. Measurement — Track SEO metrics, LLM outputs, and referral traffic

2. Content — Add summaries + FAQs to long-form pieces

3. Infrastructure — Clean up site speed, HTML, schema markups, and robots.txt

4. Validation — Build credibility through reviews, Wikipedia, Reddit, and third-party mentions

All four dials need to be working for the system to fire. But you don't need to burn it all down and start over.

Check out the FAQ for the complete breakdown on how to show up in AI search without torching your content strategy.

(Also, there’s a downloadable LLM sentiment tracker in there for ya.)

Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Claude?

We want to know how you're using "AI language" in your marketing, how it's resonating with your audience, and what in the em-dash hell everyone's planning to do next. Take our Trade Secrets: AI in Marketing survey, and help marketers everywhere make the case for more effective storytelling and messaging in 2026.  

It takes five minutes, and you’ll get a sneak peek at the results.

Campaigns that got us talking: Crossbeam's CEO Bob Moore went full '90s sitcom nostalgia to promote their ELG Summit. We’re talking an AI speaker reel complete with Full House vibes and zero involvement from the marketing team (confirmed in the comments). Exec social done right.

AI Spotlight: Would you add an AI agent to your company's board? Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber says she's open to it. At the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she noted that AI agents already sit in on almost every meeting—summarizing, notetaking, generating ideas. Board member with perfect recall? Maybe not so crazy after all.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Our own Sarah Suzuki-Harvard called out AI-detection language as the new copywriting witch hunt—and a near-century-old business magazine took notice. The post racked up 420+ comments and 150+ reposts so far. Just goes to show: Your LinkedIn voice can cut through more noise than you think.

Our Content Strategist Emily Greffenius has been living and breathing AEO for B2B clients—from tracking what LLMs say about brands to updating storyarb’s own playbook templates. 

There's good content, great content, and then there's whatever fresh hell we witnessed this week. Consider this our public service announcement. This week's offenders:

• CTAs saying "unlock your potential" when they could say anything else

• Companies adding chatbots to 404 pages + calling it an "AI pivot"

• Content calendars marking "National Donut Day" as a brand opportunity for SaaS cos

Marketing leaders keep asking if they need to start over. 

The answer is no—but you do need to pay attention to where your brand shows up beyond your own domain. LLMs validate what they know by cross-referencing multiple sources. Which means your Wikipedia entry, your Reddit mentions, and your review site presence all matter just as much as your blog. 

Small adjustments, big implications. (Or would it be large language implications? …sorry, not our best work.)

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... The word "freelance" comes from medieval times when mercenary knights would literally lance for whoever paid them—they were "free lances" available to the highest bidder. So next time someone asks what you do, just say you're a modern mercenary with a laptop instead of a sword.