For decades, SEO has shaped digital marketing strategy – and today, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is reshaping it again. According to the Wall Street Journal, AI chatbots now account for 5.6% of U.S. desktop search traffic – more than double what it was a year earlier. And experts like the folks at Semrush predict that for many topics, AI search visitors will surpass traditional search visitors by 2028.

Answer engines, powered by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, are shifting how people discover information and, in turn, how marketers need to think about visibility and customer acquisition.

To help our portfolio marketing leaders navigate this shift, we invited Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and a recognized authority on both SEO and the emerging field of AEO, to lead a workshop for our marketing community. Ethan talked the group through the fundamentals of AI-driven answer engines – sharing how the strategy both differs from and overlaps with traditional SEO.

The insights below are drawn directly from Ethan’s expertise: what AEO is, why it’s important for companies of all sizes, and how to begin incorporating it into your marketing strategy.

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

In simple terms, AEO is about making sure your company appears in AI-powered answer engine results – so if someone’s looking for a solution your product solves, or comparing competitors, you’re favorably mentioned. As with SEO, you can optimize your marketing for this purpose.

In fact, AEO is in some ways an extension of SEO – and relies on many of the same fundamental tactics. The difference is in the delivery system: where search engines serve up a list of results, answer engines summarize search results. They scan the web, find relevant content, and compose an answer. If someone asks “What’s the best [insert your product category here]?” in ChatGPT, the engine will search for that query, gather information from multiple web pages, and then present an answer citing those sources. If your product is mentioned frequently across those sources, you’re more likely to be included in the answer.

So while the goal of SEO is getting your webpage to rank #1, the goal of AEO is to be the most-cited or most-mentioned source for relevant questions. Your “rank” is earned through breadth of presence: being referenced on high-authority sites (more on those later), community forums, and other credible content that answer engines draw from.

Why AEO Matters Now

Answer engines are still outpaced by traditional search engines – as of mid-2025, Google Search had approximately 4.9 billion active users, compared to ChatGPT’s roughly 452 million. But as we all know, AI usage is growing, and a new channel’s “early days” are often the right time to invest. Ethan laid out four compelling reasons marketers should develop an AEO strategy now:

1. AI chatbots are driving real customer signups. AI-powered answer engines are becoming a meaningful source of traffic and customer acquisition. In one case study shared by Ethan, about 8% of a company’s total sign-ups came from LLMs in July of 2025 – up from 0% in July of 2024. And that traffic is converting at a mind-boggling 24%, compared to 4% from SEO traffic.

“Users who come to a website through an answer engine tend to be deep in research mode and ready to act,” said Ethan. “The quality of the traffic is very high.” By the time someone clicks through an AI-generated answer, they’ve essentially been “pre-sold” by the conversational context and are highly primed to engage or convert.

2. The playing field is evolving (and leveling). Where traditional SEO heavily favors websites with established authority – which can take months or years to achieve, especially for more valuable keywords – AEO pulls from a wide array of sources to answer very specific questions, including niche forums, Q&As, and documents that might not rank on page 1 of Google.

“The tail of questions in AEO is larger and less competitive than in traditional SEO,” Ethan explained. “Many highly specific or long-tail questions that people pose in ChatGPT have no equivalent search volume in Google, meaning less competition and a chance for new voices to be included in answers.”

Even relatively new websites can show up in LLM answers if they provide high-quality, relevant information. For growth-stage companies, this represents an opportunity to get in front of potential customers earlier, supplying content for gaps that AI engines need to fill.

3. Chat and search are converging. The distinction between a “search engine” and an “answer engine” is blurring. Ethan pointed out that chat-based engines are beginning to incorporate elements of search (for example, ChatGPT showing product recommendations with links and images, much like Google’s rich results). Likewise, Google is experimenting with more AI-driven answers. To that end, Ethan emphasized that everything you do for SEO (quality content, structured data, etc.) will help with AEO as well. AEO isn’t replacing SEO; it’s building on it.

“For now, organic search remains a huge channel and isn’t going away,” said Ethan. “But AEO is an additive channel and it’s growing fast.”

4. Search engines are dominated by ads and features. On a Google results page, the top organic listings often get squeezed by ads, maps, and other features. Ethan noted that in Google search, your above-the-fold real estate may contain little or no organic results. In contrast, answers from LLMs currently come from 100% organic citations, with no ads injected in the answer text. (Of course, this may change – but it’s also possible that paid subscribers will always get an ad-free experience.) Today, organic visibility through AEO could be even more valuable than a Google snippet, because users see it without the noise of ads.