How to Win AI Search and Prove it Drives Pipeline (with AirOps, Compt, Muck Rack and more)

0:00Dasha, remember when McKeel from Optimizely won our Exit 5 live AI agent showcase? The 2000 custom landing pages? That was really impressive. So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizely's agent platform, one for every account in an ABM campaign. He built them from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM. That's why today's sponsor, Optimizely, is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing. Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers. Build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50 plus prebuilt ones.

0:35They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time, can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay, I need one of those. Same. Being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now, go check out Optimizely. Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like Mikheel did. Check them out at optimizely.com slash exit five. Hey, quick shout out to Webflow, who is also sponsoring today's episode. Their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at Drive this year, which is our big annual conference.

1:11People raved about that one. Guy, their chief evangelist, really knows AEO, and he shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver. And that matters a lot right now, right? AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore. I'm talking to my AI agents all day long. So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers, just like you and me, are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95 % of the time. Webflow, they're a great team to follow on this. More than 300 ,000 brands, can you believe that, build on their platform. It helps you get discovered in AI search, build fully custom sites without a developer, govern your content, and see how agents read it all in one place.

1:48And they just launched Webflow campaigns. Agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system, then generate on-brand landing pages and matching ads together. Check it out at webflow.com slash exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027. That's webflow.com slash exit-5. You're listening to the Exit 5 Podcast.

2:23we're live are we as it's true as it's true what's up dasha how are you doing i'm doing great i'm rocking my halloween shirt okay we're in october yeah how are you i'm good i'm wearing uh so today i my uh my team has outfitted me in the exit five staff polo these will soon be available at exit5.com slash merch. I also have the exit5 mic cap and I have the exit5 water bottle. I'm full on team brand because I feel like these are the things you can do. It's all about brand and visibility these days, Dasha. And I feel like more people will search for us in ChatGPT and Claude and AI search if just the exit5 brand is everywhere.

3:08And so someone actually backstage said, you should have these, I should have five of these. So I'd like to have five of these sent to my house. I just wear one every day. So we call it exit five maxing. That is also, yeah, I like that. And I heard that there's a, there's a little Halloween. We're doing this back to back. So next week, so we have right now we're talking about AEO next week is all about events. We're pivoting to do a webinar all about in-person events. So very different than this one. I think you should come next week. Spoiler alert. There may or may not be some costumes in different attire there.

3:41Is that safe to say? You didn't say there will be. You said there might be. Can you just clarify something? Is there Halloween in Canada? Yes, Dave. There's Halloween in Canada and people go trick-or-treating. All right. Okay, but one thing I did want to know. So when I was a kid and I trick-or-treated, I don't know if that's right, went trick-or-treating. Yeah. We would bring pillowcases. Is that a Canadian thing? Like you really want a pillowcase because it can fit a lot of candy. You got it. Americans, we definitely have more lust for sugar and awful things. So we have much bigger pillowcases.

4:17Okay. But the pillowcase thing is not a Canadian thing. Maria's yelling. Maria's literally yelling at us. Start the program. You know what, Maria? Once I get out here, I'm in charge. You're not in charge. I'm in charge. Well, hey, everybody, thanks for coming. We do these on Fridays. This is called Exit 5 Live. I'm Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit 5. This is my co-host, Dasha. She's VP of marketing at a company called Proton AI, just a good marketer who's good on camera, good to hang with us. Every two weeks we do these, although we're doing one back to back. Next week, we go deep on a topic that is really important to you all right now in marketing.

4:47And no surprise, this was the most, just real quick shout out, this is the most people, by the time we went live here, we probably broke 2000 registrants, but this is the most people we've ever had registered for one of these. And we've been doing them for four years. So amazing. And not surprising, Marketing 101, which is like The number one, it's not because we sent a bunch of emails, not because we had some promo trick up our sleeve. It is because this is the hottest topic in marketing. I was interviewing a CMO of a$700 million cybersecurity company last week in New York City. And he looked at 100 people in the room and he said, the number one thing that matters in marketing is winning AI search.

5:21And I think that is why so many people have turned out to this session. So real quick, can you just give people the rundown? What do we do in these? And then we'll get into the show today, please. Well, first, I think we should thank Aerofs. Oh, do I have to do that first? Okay. I'm just having a good time today. I'm on my sixth coffee. He's off script, you guys. That's okay. I'm better off script. All right, yeah, so fine. We'll do this now. But I want to give a quick shout out to the presenting sponsor of today's session. That is our friends at Aerofs. Speaking of AEO, AI search is the topic everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now.

5:54I see it constantly in the Exit 5 community and across our newsletter and podcast. Like I said, on stage with a top CMO last week who made me feel very inadequate about what I know about AI and SEO. Aerox helps you get there. Aerox is your partner in turning AI search into your next growth advantage. They help marketing leaders build the strategy, systems, and channel presence to win AI search, powering companies like Carta, Ramp, and Chime, those good logos right there. Rather than choosing between software or agencies, Aerox gives you the platform and expertise to figure out what works for your brand, executes your strategy across the channels that matter, and helps you execute one step ahead of the competition.

6:29Go check them out after today's session. It's arops.com. And by the way, even if you're not ready for Arops yet, they have a ton of free resources, smart marketers. On their site, you can check it out about AI search and creating content with AI. And they run live sessions like this a couple times a month. So go check that out. I'm sure there's a bunch of Arops customers in the chat. Feel free to holler at that. Dasha, back to you. Now you can tell us. Now I can deliver on your ask. Okay, so what the heck are we doing here today? We are going deep on AI search. And why does this matter? We surveyed a bunch of you.

7:00We surveyed close to 900 people about what's happening with AI search on their teams. And the alarming thing is that only 30 % of folks can prove that AI search is driving pipeline, which if you listen to Dave, if this is the number one thing we should be focused on as marketers, we better be able to talk about why it ties to pipeline and why this is helping our company grow. So the focus today, Dave, take it away. I think you have to say it. You want to say something? Go. I have some questions about this data. I mean, obviously we did this poll, so this is on us. But I think to me, this is like the same as asking like, do you know if SEO is working?

7:36And so I think there's like, it speaks to the deeper question inside of marketing teams, which is like, how do we prove? It's not that can we prove that we're showing up in AI search? I think that problem is solved. It's can we prove that showing up in AI search is actually driving leads, meetings, pipeline revenue? And that's kind of always going to be the million dollar question. And I don't think anyone has ever figured fully attribution out. But this is still telling. I think there's a lot of questions here. And I think that's why we got these eight experts to hopefully dive in and give you something new.

8:05I want you to take notes at this session, get a couple of new ideas you can bring back to your team for Monday and start to make some progress here with AEO at your company. The other thing we surveyed you guys on is what is your biggest AEO challenge? And I love this. Not sure what actually works. I mean, same. That's why I'm here too. I'm hosting, but I'm also learning. I'm taking the transcript from this and sending it back to Claude and distilling it down for insights for our team. I also forced my team to show up to this webinar. So Shelby and Brian, I hope you're in the chat. Reveal yourselves.

8:35All right, we are here to talk about what actually is working for eight marketers. This is how it's going to work. So we've got eight speakers. We're going to split everyone up into two groups. So group one is going to present. They're going to have two minutes to present their play. You're going to vote on who you want from group one to make it into the finals. This is important. Lots of people criticize us in the chat, but you don't listen to the instructions at the beginning of this, folks. It's a two minute teaser. So everyone's going to come on. They're going to tell you two minutes for why you should vote them into the next round.

9:06OK, then they're going to get longer if they win. There's going to be three people, two winners from each round in a wildcard. We have three people that will each get four minutes in the back half of this session to go deep and tell you more about that topic. So you're going to vote for the person who you want to see explain more, not who had the best presentation. Which of these eight people do you want to see get more time on the clock to explain their thing? Okay. Okay. And then questions as you go, you're going to have questions because that's what happens when someone presents only for two minutes.

9:35You're going to have questions, ask them in the chat. There's also a Q &A function and our speakers are going to be hanging out in the chat and answering your questions. Dave, what happens if someone wins? What's going to happen to the finalists? So if you win, we're adding a new thing where I'm going to go to your house. I will live at your house for seven days and I will give you access to my LinkedIn. No, we sent out this handmade. Dan has custom made this trophy. It goes out. This is real Jessica, Molly, Logan, Spud Rule. We actually send this trophy out in a world where we don't do anything in person or physically anymore.

10:07We're sending you this trophy. Who's it going to be? Which one of these eight folks is going to be the next to post this coveted exit five trophy on LinkedIn? And we will find out in about 40 minutes. Dan's getting so good at engraving too. Okay, let's talk about our lineup. We're going to bring everyone on the stage and everyone is going to give you a little spiel of who they are, where they work, and what they're going to talk about today. All right, here we go. Josh, take this off. Hey, everybody. I am Josh Spilker, head of search marketing here at Aerox. And I will be talking about our Aerox answer page and why it is one of our most cited pages.

10:43Vivek. Hey, everyone. My name is Vivek. I'm from Crossings, that's Crossings with a K. And I will be illustrating an example of why thinking in terms of brand is just as important as thinking in terms of SEO tactics for AEO disability. Love it. Valerie? Hi, Valerie Leary. Up until recently, I was head of marketing at Giftogram. Now I'm living that fractional life. And today I will be talking about how to answer your CEO when they ask why you didn't show up when he chat GPT'd you. Let's go. I love that. Sean, round us out for group one. My name is Sean Blanna from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I run a category creation agency called GateCheck Studios, and I am talking about why most AO advice is just SEO advice.

11:27So you should focus there. Love it. Okay. And then group two, Linda. Hey, everybody. I'm Linda. I'm VP of Communications at Muckrack and Generative Pulse. And today I'm going to be talking to you about why most of what the AI answers say about you is not in your control and why earned media and journalism drives your visibility. Spicy. I like it. Pedro? Hi, everyone. My name is Pedro da Silva. I lead the AOSCO strategy, Abil. And today I'm going to be talking about how Abil, we saw an increase of 30 % in marketing qualified leads quarter over quarter. Love it. Ross? hey everybody i'm ross uh ceo of siege media i just wrote a book on geo today i'm going to be talking about cero is geo and some power in credibility nuggets so what the heck is i rebranded it i rebranded it i apologize lauren around us group too yeah i'm lauren i lead brand communications and product marketing at comp today i'm going to tell you that your home page might be beautiful.

12:38It might even convert, but it might be still costing you AI recommendations. So I'll tell you how to fix that. If you vote for me, obviously. Obviously. Okay. That is great. Let's bring Josh on stage, kick off the timer and take it away. Let's go. So there's lots of stuff I can talk about with Aerofs today, but I wanted to focus on one particular play that I did recently, and it is an Aerofs answers page. And this is not a blog posts. It's not a homepage, but it's actually our most cited page. So for example, it has over 35 ,000 citations influencing LLMs and AI answers. This is over the past three months.

13:19And it also changed from my prompts here recently, and it was up to like 300 prompts, but it covers over 240 prompts. And then in Q3 of 2026, it touched over 10 closed one deals worth over 700K. And that is 10x what a medium, a median blog post would do. So this is a really great thing that lots of people can put in place this afternoon or even Monday and get going with that. And so if you vote me, oh wait, I forgot about this part, but don't even take my word for what you're about to see. J. H. Shirk, one of the most critical people in the SEO space. I probably have some people out here who could, who could vouch for that.

13:57He loved this play. Cassandra at Campfire Labs used to be animals. She also thought this was really interesting. And then I got lots of other comments about it when I have shared this in the past. So this is a really great, super actionable thing that everyone can literally do this afternoon. And so definitely vote me through and I will show you how you can get started and exactly what you need. Epic call to action. With 30 seconds left to leave the people wanting more. Yeah, Andrea also just put you in a body bag. She said, I can't trust anyone who can't remember there's a second slide. So just might as well see yourself out.

14:35Well, there was so much great stuff that I just had so much to say, but that slide speaks for itself. So many great people recommending this play. You'll have to check it out. So vote me on. All right. Kicking off the timer. Ready, set. All right. Hey, everyone. My name is Vivek. I'm from Crossings and I'm actually tuning in from Lisbon. I feel like I'm the only person here who is tuning in from Europe. But anyway, that's that's complete slander. There's some Europeans. in the chat. Okay, awesome. But if you're in Europe, go in the chat right now, please. All right. And my play is I'm going to show you how brand first thinking actually took one of our supply chain industry clients from zero to 44 % AI visibility in just eight weeks.

15:15In February, basically their visibility was zero, showing up for absolutely nothing. And even worse, as you can see from this little screenshot over here, if you zoom in, they were being mistaken for a marketing agency of the same name. Most AEO playbooks at this point would have probably gone in, fix the site, make some technical changes, build page clusters, what have you. We actually saw this as a brand problem because AI learns about you from basically the entire internet, not just your website. So this was a brand recognition problem, and you can't optimize your way to brand awareness. So essentially what we did is we built one asset, just one landing page, and these are the results that we got.

15:56Here's something I want to point out, which would go against SEO advice. Organic traffic actually decreased the whole time, but ICP traffic increased. And in terms of reporting, we didn't just stop at a visibility score. We actually used a bunch of metrics to tell a story that the CMO could take to the board. There were no page clusters, no major campaigns. We built it from two data sources that most companies already have but never seem to use. So my pitch is, vote me through. I'll show you what we did, where we sourced the data from, which tools we used, and how we measured success and told the story.

16:34So that's it. I think I'm still on time. Good job. After you're done, scroll back up in the chat. Look at how many people are from Europe. Good job. There's 521 people here right now, FYI. Okay, I'm kicking off the timer. Let's go. Hi. So kicking this off, raise your hand if your CEO, head of sales, or a board member ever asked you, I Googled it and why didn't we come up? You're going to want to keep your hand up for the second question because now in 2026, it's I asked chat GPT and we didn't come up. So I'm going to be talking about, and we all know as marketers, that's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

17:13And so we are going to talk about how to proactively disprove that question and got on top of it. So while I was at Giftogram, we really needed to build a lot of the foundation. So starting Q3 last year, we were doing things like schema updates, copy updates, FAQ builds, claims. There was just a lot going on. And so if you are doing a whole bunch of different things at once and not one specific play, you need to prove that it's making an impact, right? And then meanwhile, while I'm making all these foundational changes in the dashboard, we were seeing that paid inbound leads were going down. I'm sure we weren't the only ones.

17:48and that direct and organic traffic were going up and we didn't know where it was coming from because if someone's researching it in chat GPT or CLAW and they're arriving as direct and then the CRM is logging in as direct or organic, your AI influence is invisible. We have the data, the 70 % there, love a citation on the bottom to back that up. And so then we had a working hypothesis. The CEO was like, so is it AEO? And I was like, probably, but you can't say that you're going off vibes when you're answering a CEO. And so we needed to start tracking if our efforts were making impact. However, only 22 % of marketers were tracking AI visibility and we were on the 78 % side of that.

18:28So we needed to start building it out. And so we put together a three-part framework. This is part one. We implemented Cognizo. Big shout out for them. Love their tracking. And then we complemented it with AEO HubSpot, which is in beta, and tracked those tools. Vote for me to unlock the other two parts we started tracking in the framework. All right, we've got our last one in group four, group one, our fourth. Oh my God. Okay. Anyways, starting the timer. what's up guys so i'm here to tell you it's more of a mindset shift that uh a what works in ao is seo and it really comes down to this which is there are two stages to surfacing things in ai chats whether ai finds you and then whether it chooses to output you we can control whether it finds us but no one knows how it chooses to output us and do you want to spend your one precious life on this planet earth guessing what the magic machines want from you i say no focus on what you can control.

19:22Even the people who make these things don't know how they work. They don't know why they surface certain results. So how can you possibly guess that? I don't think you can. So let's focus on what we can control. Further, let's talk about some of the AEO advice you may hear today or elsewhere, which essentially boils down to SEO advice from 2017. In fact, you can replace the words in SEO advice and it holds for AEO. Like this one, you should build backlinks on sites that aren't yours. Great. Ahrefs told us that in 2021. How about create thoughtful content that gets to the intent of the user. Awesome.

19:53Moz told us that in 2017. Create information gain content. Great. Search engine land told us that in 2023. So later, if you vote for me, I'll share more data and what to do instead, including I did an analysis of 375 B2B blogs and the correlation between organic search traffic and AI citation is 0.93. That's pretty tight, which means if you get SEO right, you'll get AI right. Stop worrying about it. Go take a vacation instead. I need Sean's voice on my alarm in the morning. Hold on, hold on. I agree, but everyone's going to leave the freaking webinar right now. Great job. And also, what the heck?

20:28We love a contrarian. Thank you, Sean. Okay, we're going to vote. Who did you love? Who do you want to see in the finals? All right, so this is who was the best. Who do you need to hear more from, right? Based on what they just said, who do you need? We got five seconds. We're going to wrap this vote. wherever you are in the car, on the plane, Starlink on United, wherever you are, please pull over the side of the road. Five, four, three, two, one. Hands up. Put your hands up. Put your hands up. The voting is complete. Wow, this is a tight one. Is it? Yeah, yeah. Josh, the air ops guy, has juiced the numbers and Josh is going to the next round.

21:10However, this is going to be really interesting because we have Sean and Valerie could be the wild card. You never know. That's what's amazing about this format. Hashtag innovation. That's what the double M's, Maria and Marissa, that's what they'll do to you on these webinars. Quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world famous Exit 5 Live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against Exit 5 Live now. How good is that? So good. I want to print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge. In a world of AI slot, we just want to make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar.

21:44Especially a webinar, but don't you dare call it a webinar, even though I'd break my own rule and do that all the time. It's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these, choosing the topic, the prep calls, building to run a show and making it valuable and engaging. Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1500 plus registrants per session. Hundreds of people show up live and the chat goes off. Yeah, the last time we have a new high watermark, we had 527 people live for an hour with us. Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics, and it all lives in one place.

22:18So running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At Showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio. They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos, at least that anyone can see. Just please do not look at our internal Slack. Okay, all the caps lock in there. Don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out, zoom.com slash exit5. Learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there and come see it live. We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out. It's called Exit 5 Live and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com slash exit five.

22:53All right. If you're at a B2B tech company spending over$50 ,000 a month on paid media, Compound Growth Marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan. Free? Okay. I'm listening. What do you get? I know free is usually too good to be true, but check this out. In the first session, they're going to learn your business. And in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI and where you're reporting has gaps. And look, I trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing.

23:29Twice. Wow. I've hired plenty of agencies as a VP of marketing, and that is rare. I'm more than just a thought leader, Dashiell. You should know that. So CGM helps high growth cybersecurity and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel paid media, AEO, and a dedicated GTM engineering team. Ooh, and a former VP of marketing started it. So they actually get B2B. That's right. John was one of us back in the day. So check it out. You can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five. That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com slash exit five.

24:04Link in the show notes. All right, let's keep it rolling, Dash. What do we got? We got a timer. I can tell you that for free. All right, great. That's huge. Let's go. We're back. Okay, so I'm Linda, MVP of communications at Muckrack. And I'm going to tell you about why pages you control aren't the way to get into the answer. So for us, one article was cited 159 times and it was our single biggest driver of AI visibility. We didn't write it, we didn't own it, and we can't edit it. And it was published, guess, April 2023. And it is still our number one citation. So everything you own and everything you buy, your site, your campaigns, only adds up to 16 % of what AI cites.

24:49How do we know? We looked at 25 million links across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini three times. Our fourth report is coming out next week. So journalism alone is nearly a third. And paid is less than half a percent. So what I'm talking about for journalists, I'm talking about a reporter writing about you, not your blog, not a press release, not a paid placement, not your digital site, pure earned media on a journalistic site written by a journalist. So what AI says about you is all in essentially pages that you just can't control. So we stopped theorizing and we looked at it ourselves on our own earned media.

25:26I do comms for a comms tech platform. It is very meta, but we looked at it over nine months, 109 prompts and 77 ,000 answers. And we traced every single citation back to the exact piece of content that produced it. So earned content was cited seven times more than a press release. A press release is the paid distribution model. So that is paid seven times more. And 10 articles produce 70 % of our citations. So the right articles matter here. The citation rate did not decay, and that 2023 article gets cited as often as 2026. And if... All right. She gone. We going with our next speaker. Let me start my timer.

26:15Go. All right, everyone. So talking here about how to increase qualified leads with a high intent AO strategy, a bill we saw a 30 % increase quarter over quarter coming from organic search with combining with AI referral traffic as well, which also got some recognition within the profound index report for the summer as the second largest mover and visibility in AEO within the fintech and financial operations. What we did pretty much is we identified high intent prompt strategy by focusing on prompts that actually cite brand names and not just informational. Also, how we mined sales calls with our potential customers to identify some prompts to track.

26:55We also identify the top site sources within AEO and find the third-party sites represent 80%. And now we build a Tiger team led by the SEO team to execute the strategy, the divide and conquer, to actually drive qualified leads to the business. So if you choose me for the next round, I'll be talking more in detail what those strategies were, how we went about it, how we tracked it, and more metrics and their results as well. Wow. Was a minute left? What should we do? Should we donate it? Should we donate that to charity, that remaining 30, 45 seconds? That's high ROI right there. Let's go. Let's keep going because then we'll have more time to make dumb jokes.

27:35Yeah, if we keep going, then we have more time to banter. So, all right, I'm ready. You ready? Go. I'm ready. So we looked at 500 instances on our peak of different sites we're tracking visibility for. And we saw that the sites that have the most visibility in the mid-authority market have five plus trust symbols on their homepage compared to those that did not. So it's a linear path where the more trust symbols or credibility nuggets you have on your homepage, the more visibility you had in that mid-authority segment on average. So what do I mean by that? That's the awards, that's the reviews, essentially saying at the core, CRO is AO, not GEO, however you want to call it.

28:14And the homepage in particular is most important because has 15X more bot requests than any other page. It's valuable. So how do you do this fruitfully? Ideally, you have text that looks nice. A product team would love it. We don't know for sure that LLMs everywhere can render this. You can use alt text on those awards, the G2 callouts for your category. That can be helpful. The secondary thing beyond just the overall product reviews is what I would call a stats block. So you can pull out a stats block with core first-party or third-party proof about your company. Here's Zendesk, here's Gorgias, which I'm pronouncing incorrectly probably.

28:48And you can see the details about their product usage that differentiates them, that LLMs will pull out and reference. And this makes sense why they're used so frequently. So it's not simply just the data points, the logos, et cetera. It can be anything about your company, this near-shore dev company. It's simply the quality of their clients and logos that is referenced by the LLM specifically. You can use these nuggets and repurpose it across all the transactional content on your website. so that overcomes the core objection around first-party content in BestX format because you're now pulling in third-party data and first-party proof that will get you referenced and it won't matter if you're calling yourself number one because that's helpful.

29:27So here's some examples from that NearShore dev, the logos, clutch, client retention stats, how many clients you have. These are all confidence-inducing. Ahrefs has a ton of backlinks. That's specific to that landing page that matters and you see it get pulled into the core thing. We gotta do it. We've got to do it for the people. We've got to do it for the time. If you wanted to hear more, vote him through. We've got our final speaker, Lauren. Take it away. All right, two and a half times. Now, that is how much our homepage's AI citation rate increased from April to September. And also our main product page nearly tripled, too.

30:03And no, we did not turn our homepage into a giant FAQ. Here is what we started with. Lifestyle benefits that work that work. Cute. Super on brand. But imagine someone asking ChatGPT what is the best platform for what we do, managing employee stipends, reimbursements, taxes. Our homepage was great at selling the dream, happier employees, better culture, more flexibility. But where were the answers about all of the actual software? So that is the problem that I set out to solve. Now, as a brand and product marketer, I couldn't just like throw a thousand words of product documentation onto the homepage, though it was super tempting.

30:41But I also couldn't expect AI to recommend us based on just a great headline and some personality alone. So we rethought the page around three C's, clear, what do you sell? Compelling, what should buyers choose us? And citable, what specific information can AI reference? So we made our category explicit, ownable. We addressed the administrative work our buyers want to eliminate. We got specific about what our software actually does. Now, the hardest part wasn't figuring out what to add, but what not to add, because you can give AI every answer imaginable and end up with a homepage that is ugly and that no human wants to read.

31:21So if you vote for me, I will show you where we drew the line, plus like a five-minute homepage test that you can run on Monday for free with no new tools required, because the goal isn't to build a homepage that AI loves and humans hate. Come on, people. That was epic. Lauren, someone in the chat said, I love your voice. And I agree. You do the like human parentheses thing. It's awesome. Okay. We're doing a vote. Who do you want to see in round the final round? Which AEO idea deserves a deeper dive? Who was it? Who was it going to be? Is it going to be Linda, Petro, Ross, Lauren, who do you need to have?

31:57Who do you need to have? Who do you need to have back up here to teach you to see what matters? Holy cow. There's so many people here to sustain how quick these votes happen. Look at Lauren just running laps right now. Ripping, just totally ripping in the, yeah, this is awesome. More people want to hear Lauren's voice. And you know what? There's no offense, no offense, respectfully, none taken, but there can only be, there can only be three people that are going to advance. That's what makes this form, this format such a smash. Good thing we had Claude to come up with a webinar topic that works so well for us, right?

32:30Wink, wink. Okay. I think we can call it. So we got, who was our first one things have happened so fast who's our first winner josh josh shout out to josh we got lauren who's the wild card producers behind the scenes who's the wild card hold on give us a minute we got to tally the votes we got to sharpie them up real quick that's a tight i don't know who that is yeah okay valerie shout out to valerie okay so we got josh lauren and valerie moving on to the final round dasher let's keep this thing rolling no naps no naps. We're ripping right now. Let's keep this pace going because, you know, no one has a real attention span today.

33:04So we have to keep going. So let's keep going. Okay. Everyone in the final round has four minutes and we will continue to be ruthless. You can yell at us in the chat. All right, let's kick it off. Josh, take it away. I'll be honest here. I don't know how many slides I have coming up, but it'll be great for everyone involved. And I promise you, you will not have to get your marketing leaders to side off on a homepage redesign with this page, because what you're going to do is you are going to create one page that for every question that buyers ask about you. So what we did here was we went live with a very simple, what is Aerox page?

33:39It's always there, always present. The answer comes first in that paragraph. And then we have seven different sections that answer buyer questions directly in collapsible Q and A's. And then our proof is there in each and every answer. So here's an example of what it is. You can go to aeropps.com slash answers to check it out. And how do you set up a page like this? So it has 76 questions with six types of questions that buyers are asking. So 28 of them are, how does it work? 18 is comparing it against other tools. Nine of those questions are about use cases and fit. And then it's what it is, buying an evaluation, Like how does Aerox pricing actually work with the features and then proof and trust which companies are using Aerox today?

34:25What are some of the values they're getting out of it? And so another great thing, I don't even know if I have a slide on this, so I'm going to say it now, is this really improves your internal linking to all of your pages across it. So as you can see here, where I have use cases and fit, you can link over to your platform pages, link over to your solution pages, proof and trust, link out to those G2 pages, link out to your use cases, buying and valuation, link out to your pricing pages. This becomes a backbone for all of your internal linking across your site, especially for those branded search results.

34:55Okay. And so here's a great example. Ask chat GPT why teams are picking and the AI answers page comes up. Here's one example. Why do some teams adopt Aerox over traditional AI tools? You can see that page being cited right there. And yes, this is the Aerox interface. I just pulled that the other day. And so why this page matters, your own content shapes what AI says about you. Lots of stuff out there from our end and from others about third-party sources being an important source for how your brand is mentioned at LLMs. That is all true. But where do they pull from initially? It's coming from your own content.

35:29So your own content serves as an important function for LLMs and for other parties and other sites to pull from. And then second reason, it answers questions that lead directly to revenue. And so that includes pricing, comparisons, use cases. And to be perfectly honest, as we all know, we're not exactly sure of which pages are always going to be cited or pulled in an answer. And so this helps to shape that narrative. And then again, yes, this is the number one cited URL on aeropps.com beyond our docs pages, beyond our home pages. And again, this is something you can set up right away using all of your sales questions, customer calls, all of those types of things.

36:07And yes, this page influences revenue. Like I said before, it influenced several closed one deals. It contributed to pipeline with over 215 MQLs in Q3. And then maybe this could be the main reason. This is one page that is easy to refresh as your product changes. We have lots of workflows and air ops that helps you do that. Lots of playbooks and air ops to help you make those changes, stay up to date as your product, as your positioning changes as you add new product lines, this page is something easy that you can refresh right away. I do have some more slides here. It looks like, okay, so what are you going to do?

36:42You're going to track the questions. You're going to answer them in short, direct answers with proof. And again, this page indexed very quickly. And then we try to do a refresh on this every time our product or positioning changes, but you can also set like a monthly or quarterly schedule for that as well to refresh it. And then yes, start your page. I put Monday on here. You could start this afternoon. Here, go to aeroxanswers, aerox.com slash aeroxanswers. Find 20 questions that buyers ask about you. That's step one. The other steps are here. Please share and vote for me. See you later. All right, Josh, go in the chat.

37:18Go in the chat. There's a thousand questions for you to go in the chat and answer. I think one of the funny things is when the music comes on, people just start talking louder. Like it's going to go away. It's so great. Yeah. Yeah. All right. She's back. She's back. Might be the number one vote getter of all time. I don't know. I've never, I don't think anyone has ever had that many votes because there's never been that many people here, but she's putting it on my grave, Dave. Oh, your grave. You don't have to die. Put it in your freaking LinkedIn. Oh, good. It's okay. Well, sure. All right. We start the timer.

37:49Great. I promised you that I would show you what we actually changed. So here is our homepage at the beginning of the year. And I can hate on it because I wrote it and designed it. and here is our homepage now so this is our hero section obviously um the design's different throughout the page but what's more important is what the page communicates so before we talked a lot about employee happiness flexible benefits sadly that is all fluff now within seconds you know what comp does who it's for the problem it solves and really interesting decisions happen farther down the page i don't have screenshots for those that's me plugging our website go to comp.io.

38:27There were three things that I kept coming back to. Number one, do not make people guess what you sell. We moved away from leading with a clever headline and made our product category explicit. That's important for buyers, obviously, but it's also important when AI tools are trying to decide whether they're going to recommend you or whether you belong within a particular recommendation. Second is to show the problem and then explain how you solve it. sounds easy. For Compt, that meant talking about spreadsheets, talking about manual reimbursements, all the administrative work that comes with managing employee stipends.

39:06But we did not stop at saying that we make HR's life easier because that would be too simple. We added concrete explanations of how the software actually works, the nitty gritty. It's boring, but it gets the job done. Program rules, tax treatment, payroll, reimbursements, those are details that our buyer needs to evaluate us. And they're also specific information that an AI tool can reference when explaining our capabilities. Third, and this is probably the most important, you got to know when to stop, girl. You got to know when to stop because our homepage does not need to answer every possible question about employee benefits.

39:46There's a whole rest of a website for that. It needs to answer the important questions to help someone quickly understand and evaluate comp. So we made our products easier to identify. We separated what is included from optional add-ons. We brought common buyer questions onto the homepage. There's an FAQ section you can see. It's right above our footer CTA. And we linked to deeper pages for more detail. And we also secretly, but not so secretly, overhauled our navigation and our footer. So those pages were easier to find. And then also when we introduced some AI capabilities, when we were putting some more product features out there, we didn't just slap the words AI powered on the homepage.

40:27We actually showed what that means with some product screenshots. Now, the point is we weren't adding more content for the sake of doing so. We were giving every single section on this page a specific job results. I highlighted our citation growth earlier. We track those page level citations in a tool called Gauge. But as a product marketer, I also care about what happens when people reach our website. So we're looking at GA4 and HubSpot too. So across five priority pages that I'm measuring, our tracked conversion rate improved from Q1 to Q3, 34%. Even with slightly less traffic, we were down like 6%, honestly.

41:04SQLs grew 12 % year over year in Q3. Now, obviously, we're doing a lot more work than that, right? We're doing earned media. We're doing founder brand. We're doing content. But that's why we're looking at both, are we getting discovered and are we giving buyers a reason to take action? So here's the part you can steal. It costs absolutely nothing to get started. No AEO platform, no new software. First, name the thing. Is your product category explicit? Two, have you given AI a concrete reason to recommend you? Three, link it. Link it. If you're missing any of those things, you found your starting point.

41:38So don't make it easy for AI to just understand what you sell. Give it a reason to recommend you. That was great. Go read the chat. The people love you. I think I'm obsessed with you. Yeah. Like literally in the middle of that, she sends a message to Marissa and Maria was like, I need to book her on the podcast. And I'm like, not now. This is like asking the chef. Dave gave me so much. This is I was like, this is like going up to the chef in the middle of dinner and being like, when's the staff meal? Not right now. I deserve that. But Lauren, I think it speaks to how great your preso was. Yeah, I almost broke Maria's flow for that.

42:09For you, for you. Okay, we've got our wild card. Take it away. Love a wild card. So this is where I left off where I think the music started playing. So three-part attribution model. So this is my four-minute part. Glad I actually prepared it, guys. Where the AI influence goes, again, coming back to that 70 % are coming up as invisible. So we put together three parts for this framework. One, AI visibility tools. This tracks where AI cites you, but it's going to miss where anyone clicked. The next is web analytics. It will see visits direct growth, but it's going to miss what sent them. And then three, sales conversations.

42:50Who says AI sent them? And it's going to miss anyone who never said. So each of these alone are kind of weak. Directionally, you can kind of see things. Here, you're seeing traffic. Here, you're seeing live feedback. But to combine with our powers combined for any other 80s children, they will do the same direction. We'll give you that signal that you need. So to combine, they triangulate so that you can make sure that the work that you're doing is driving an impact. So the first layer of this is the AI visibility. This is our leading indicator. This is what's going to move first. So we implemented Cognizo.

43:26Great tool was one of early adopter there, and it's grown a lot over the last year. And we were tracking prompts that buyers were actually asking. Best gift card platform, really specific prompts. We were tracking over 200 of them. We watched the citation right there, share a voice against competitors, whether we're recommended or just listed and what that sentiment analysis is. And then we also cross-checked that with HubSpot AEO. And that was and still is in beta and had a much less number of prompts that you can do. So we actually ratioed out the prompts based on our ICP, our industries, our different topics so that we could kind of cross-reference the volume of citations in both platforms.

44:05That way we can cross-check them because we know that they're running at different times. Sometimes we would see maybe like a little bit of a disconnect. And so with those two reports, we would combine them, analyze them. If they generally agree or going in the same direction, we were trusting the trend when they do it, Burge is when we would start to investigate. Is there one ICP that's kind of dropping or one industry that's not being cited as much? was their one prompt that was getting a ton of visibility on Cognizzo, but isn't coming up on HubSpot AEO. While we felt that Cognizzo was really robust since HubSpot natively lived in our CRM, we wanted to be able to utilize it.

44:41And since it was in free and in beta, I thought that was a great way to, again, combine them and look for that directional accuracy. And then the next is traffic signals. I actually saw at the beginning of the webinar, a couple people were talking about GA4 and tracking in the AI assistant natively in Google. This was added in May, 2026. There are some shortcomings with it, which I think is kind of what people were chatting about in the chat. It's not retroactive. Sometimes it misses perplexity. It's not great on Gemini. We created a custom channel group to pull in the platforms that we really cared about the most.

45:12And that also echoed what we were tracking in Cognizzo, because you can pick which platforms and LLMs you wanted to track. And then in addition to that, we set that up one time and then watched monthly brand and search and direct. Again, citations move first. That's the leading. And then our lagging indicator was this layer number two. And then the third, this is something that you can do really quickly and easily. We set up a gong channel that listens to all calls, but flags specifically and listens for anytime a prospect says that they found us through AI. So constantly listening and manually updating a custom field in our HubSpot property that then gets pushed both from the contact level and then follows to the deal.

45:51And then we did really deep training for all of our client-facing teams, BDRs, AEs, AMs, CSMs to always ask that question so that we can follow it from the contact level all the way down. And this is an example of the report. And I got cut off. All right. Good job. That's it. So we got them all. So this is it. Now's the time to pick the winner. Who will be the next owner of the coveted Exit 5 Live handmade trophy? Is it going to be Josh? Is it going to be Valerie? Is it going to be Lauren? It's close right now. It's close. 73, 36, 92. Just set, just roasting out numbers. Okay. So, Hey, while we pick a winner right here, I have a question for all of you.

46:31If y 'all let me take a question. We're trying to just, we had some questions in the chat, but a higher level question right now. What advice would you give to someone who needs to go and talk about AEO back to the leadership team, right? Like today was very tactic focused. Here's how I did this that led to this thing. But if I need to go back and explain where we need to invest, how do we think about this? Any advice from the three of you? Like, where do you start? How do you have this conversation with leadership around the things that you need to be doing for from an AEO standpoint? Yeah, I mean, we're all thinking about this world of the like balancing the performance versus the brand awareness.

47:06And I would say it's multiple things like attributing to that. What we're seeing is a lot of increase from our direct and also organic search, I mean, branded organic search coming through. But then when we ask people like, and how did you hear about this type forms, they do mention AI search or AI referrals. GA4 has started tracking some more of those AI assistance and referrals. So the measurement there is still a work in progress, but a lot's coming along. Yeah, go ahead, Lauren and Val, you want to build on that? Yeah, same kind of thing happened for us because we use HubSpot. We were seeing a pretty sharp increase and the number of chat GPT referrals that were coming in specifically.

47:42And that was before we even got like an AI tool and decided to do that because we wanted a little bit more visibility into what we were doing. And we were able to get the funding in our marketing budget for an AI tool because we were able to prove like, there's something happening here. Like people are coming in through chat GPT. They're having conversations with our sales team and we've had a lot of closed one as a result. So because we've seen some revenue coming in And as a result, then we get more money for it. But to be fair, like our CEO is pretty down with the AI stuff. So that helps. I think it's just a matter of just streamlining it all.

48:18I think that was really like the big conversation, which is why I focused on reporting, right? Like you're doing a whole bunch of little things. And because you're all figuring out at the same time, I think just starting to document is really what started to make that shift. And once you kind of start the documentation, you can build upon it. And then to Lauren's point, once you can get a couple of documented wins and revenue on the board, then you know that you can start to really then invest with both just resources and not just free free efforts all right so we have the final we have the final results and our winner the latest trophy holder drum roll who was it do you know i forgot no that was lauren yeah it was lauren yeah right am i right yeah yeah you're right you're right Okay, there we go.

49:01Sorry, you just came in so confident. I was like, you've got this. It was Lauren. No time for a speech. Thank you for that. We'll hook you up with the trophy. You'll be the next person to hopefully post it on LinkedIn. Way to go. Josh, Lauren, Valerie, all the other folks behind the scenes right now. Thank you for coming on. The big value prop here is just getting out there and learning from other humans who actually have stakes and have something on the line when you just ask Claude a question about marketing. They don't have the same risk and stakes that you do. So thank you. There's also a poll up here.

49:30We measure all these sessions. Did you find this session valuable? I see a bunch of people voted for that. Thank you for that. And we're out. We're back here next week. We're going to try to get a bunch of our speakers in here to do more stuff like this in our community, the discussion board in there. Get a bunch of questions to your AEO questions, GEO questions, whatever you want to call it. We'll do an AMA in there. And we're back here. Maybe hypothetically a little Halloween themed episode next week. I would tune in. Absolutely. Dasha and I have a little, you know, we got a little something.

50:00The team's got a little something. Thank you. Marissa, Maria, everyone behind the scenes, Dan, Ben, Anna, Allison, Matt, shout out to you all. What an awesome time. Great job, everybody. We'll see you here next week for another world famous Exit 5 live session. Thank you. See ya. Bye.

50:21Hey, real quick, before we wrap up, I just want to give a quick shout out to all the stuff that we're doing at Exit5.com. You can get on our newsletter there. A couple times a week, we're going to send you some really useful stuff about B2B marketing. Our whole mission is to help you get smarter about B2B marketing and get better at your job. In a world where everyone is talking to AI and Claude about how to do marketing, our whole pitch with Exit 5 is real insights from real people. We've built our whole business around it. You hear it here on the podcast. You'll see it in our newsletter. And check out all of our stuff.

50:52We are creating the number one resource for you, B2B marketers. So go and check it out. Exit5.com. Get on our newsletter. You'll find all of our podcasts, links there, show notes, all of our webinars, articles, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus, you can also join our community over there. So check it out, exit5.com.

51:11The best marketing leaders have a strong agency or two backing them up. And Convertive is one I'd put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is. And a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. If you're shopping for a B2B agency, check out Convertive. They help enterprise marketing and ops leaders grow revenue across the business. Who do they work with? They work with legit companies like DocuSign, Databank, and Constructor, and they build on the search work that you're already doing, optimizing your site so more buyers find you and turn it into pipeline.

51:48And this month, Exit 5 listeners get a free AEO search snapshot. They'll run your buyers real questions through Google and AI tools, show how you stack up against competitors and tell you what's worth fixing. So if you're building your AEO strategy for 2027, start here. Go and check out Convertive.com slash exit five. That's Convertive.com slash exit five. And you can see the link in the show notes.