Your business does now need to also focus on AEO, not just SEO. Sorry, yes, I know, yet another thing! We’ve been working for a few weeks in beta with the Hubspot AEO system for one of our sites and it’s helping us increase our presence in agentic search. When someone uses Chat GPT or Gemini to find our product or service, we want them to find us first, right? And with agentic optimization, you can help make that happen. As always, it is through content (what you say is what you’re found for) but optimizing takes a little bit of work that this tool can help you with. This example is our Championship Regatta Graphics product brand.
The first thing are prompts, which in natural language, are questions people ask of their AI agents and the AI agent searches and returns an answer. For a business that is selling knowledge for services, this is becoming a not-awesome model of how search is migrating, since a search engine mostly just provides the answer (though they have added citations, or the source, it’s not great for those of us in those businesses). However, for those of us who offer products – AI can’t (yet) produce our products too – this is good. And we’re seeing some positive results after using the AEO tools (we use Hubspot, there are others).
A week ago, these numbers were trending down. We have always owned a lot of market share due to good search engine optimization (and as you can see, we are way ahead of all competitors here), but we didn’t see much for AI. I wrote a few blog posts centered around those AI prompts last week, and now things have turned around and we’re trending upward. We recently added e-commerce functions to this site (we’ve always sold with an “inquiry to invoice” model), so people can click and buy right online. Most still call us or email us though, so we like to have that consultative approach to products here too.
As you can see here we’re way above in the number of citations and our share of voice (how often we’re cited as a source). We’ve always had great SEO, and this mirrors it. But that line on the right? it’s gone UP in the last week since we optimized the site with more agentic-friendly blog posts (directly answering the prompt questions in a blog post.)
If you sell products online, agentic optimization or AEO should be part of your mix. And you should use tools (in our case we used Hubspot) that are optimized for this. It’s not just doing the foundational SEO stuff but also optimizing for agentic search (e.g. people using ChatGPT or their AI agent to find stuff for them.)
Onboard our website, we use AIO SEO (All in One SEO) for WordPress, but you can also use Yoast SEO, and flip on the AI features of both. They aren’t the same as the Hubspot tool which shows you what you’re being recommended for / cited by and your share of market, but it will allow you to at least switch on being friendly for AI agents finding your products and services.
And as always, I remind people that PART of why I have these product e-commerce sites is not only to hedge my bets that products will be more or less AI proof, but as a web developer, I know for sure that I can test out stuff on my sites before you’ll ask about it for yours, and that really helps me use my product brands as a test lab for what I’ll later recommend to clients. If you’ve got an e-commerce website, work with someone who actually is in the trenches with you too!