AEO Blueprint for Startups (featuring Sean Ellis and Jonathan Martinez)

Win the Explanation Layer Before Your Competitors Do

Before we get into the blueprint, I need to say this.

Writing this alongside Sean Ellis and Jonathan Martinez is a real pinch me moment.

In 2017, I picked up Hacking Growth. At the time, I was leading global marketing operations and digital marketing for a large fintech. I was deep in marketing automation systems. Living inside relational databases. Building global workflows. Scaling teams across regions. Automating everything I possibly could.

Campaigns were launching. Dashboards were clean. Budgets were growing.

But I was optimizing machinery.

Sean’s work changed that.

He did not describe growth as a bigger budget or a clever channel mix. He described it as a disciplined system for discovering truth. Rapid experimentation. Cross functional teams. Testing velocity as advantage. Learning faster than competitors.

Growth was not about pushing more volume through the funnel. It was about systematically uncovering what actually drives activation, retention, and expansion.

That shift rewired how I think.

I stopped seeing marketing as distribution and started seeing growth as a compounding loop. I unified product and marketing around activation metrics. I prioritized experimentation over opinion. I became obsessed with measurable learning.

Nearly one million copies of Hacking Growth have since been sold.

I am not so sure I would be typing this without that book.

It did not just influence a tactic. It altered my trajectory.

Jonathan Martinez represents the next evolution of that mindset. Over the last year, we have worked closely as he has built GrowthPair into one of the most respected agencies for hiring global marketing talent. He operates where execution meets emerging behavior. He studies how buyers interact with large language models. He tracks visibility, share of voice, and citation frequency across AI systems. He experiments relentlessly. And he has become one of the clearest voices translating AEO from theory into practical advantage.

Sean once wrote that the rules of growth were changing.

We are at another inflection point.

Search no longer just retrieves links. AI systems synthesize answers. They frame the problem. They define the options. They influence perception before a buyer ever lands on your website.

The leverage layer has moved upstream.

We wrote this blueprint together because growth is shifting again. The teams who understand this early will shape how their categories are explained. The teams who hesitate will compete for downstream traffic instead of upstream influence.

Growth changed once before.

It is changing again.

And this time, inclusion shapes demand itself.

AEO Blueprint for Startups

Sean here!

In the early 2000s, I poured millions into paid search because it gave me a predictable ROI. We were not just buying traffic. We were optimizing funnels, strengthening referral loops, and scaling paid acquisition against improving lifetime value. It was clean, attributable, and immediate. I could model it. I could control it.

SEO was different. It had more upside, but it also had real downside. It felt messy and slow. It was hard to measure. And the space was full of hucksters promising results they could not possibly deliver. I chose the channel I could instrument and optimize.

Looking back, that avoidance is one of my biggest regrets in my growth career. The most successful and valuable growth leaders I know built deep expertise in SEO during that experimental phase. They captured compounding advantage while the rest of us stayed in the comfort of paid acquisition.

AEO feels similar today. It is early. It is imperfect. It is harder to attribute than paid channels. But it may be even more important than early SEO. Search engines helped you capture intent. Large language models increasingly shape how intent is formed in the first place. If your company is included in the answers, you influence perception before a prospect ever visits your site.

That is a powerful position to hold.

I do not want to miss this wave. And you should not either. That is why I teamed up with Josh Grant and Jonathan Martinez to break down the highest leverage ways to get started now, before advantage compounds for someone else.

The AEO Diagnostic

Jonathan here!

To get started, a quick directional test that anyone can run to see how they’re ranking on LLMs is to search your phrases on ChatGPT or your favorite LLM. For GrowthPair, I may search something like:

“What are the top agencies for hiring global marketing talent?”

This is simply to get your feet wet and see where you’re at. If you have multiple phrases and are doing this daily to see where you stack up, it’ll get very time consuming.

Before diving into tools, it’s worth understanding how people actually search on LLMs. AppSamurai’s marketing manager, Metehan Yeşilyurt, studied 1,827 real ChatGPT conversations and discovered the query median length was 11 words. This contrasts with the average Google search of just 3.4 words.

This change in consumer behavior requires a mindset shift for researching the phrases you’d like to go after.

To get a bit more advanced with your analyses, I suggest using a tool like Peec, AirOps or Ahrefs which will query LLMs daily for your phrases to see where you’re ranking.

To illustrate where most companies are today: at GrowthPair, a global marketing talent startup I founded, I’d rate us a 4/10 on the AEO scale. We have the basics in place (llms.txt, FAQ sections, etc) but we still have tons of work to do on researching and optimizing further.

If you’re early in your SEO journey, temper your AEO expectations accordingly since there’s a strong correlation between ranking on Google and LLMs. While AEO introduces new tactics and metrics, it builds on the same content authority principles as traditional SEO rather than replacing them entirely.

The 80/20 AEO Playbook

Josh here!

SEO captured explicit intent. AEO shapes synthesized understanding.

Search engines helped companies win when buyers typed a clear query. They retrieved relevant sources and ranked them. Large language models go further. They do not just retrieve. They synthesize. They summarize categories, compare options, and often frame the problem before a buyer has visited a single website.

In search, you competed for ranking. In AI systems, you compete for inclusion in the explanation.

If your company is not part of that explanation layer, you do not just lose traffic. You lose framing power. And framing power compounds over time.

So what should you actually do right now?

The answer is not to chase prompt hacks or overhaul your entire marketing strategy. It is to build AEO the same way you would build any durable growth engine. Intentionally. In layers. With discipline.

I think of this as the Inclusion Stack. It has four components:

1. Question Ownership

2. Onsite Encoding

3. Offsite Consensus

4. Citation Engineering

You do not need to perfect all four immediately. But you do need to begin strengthening each one deliberately. Here is what that looks like in practice.

1. Question Ownership: Start With Question Mining

If you do nothing else this quarter, start here.

The foundation of AEO is not content production. It is question discovery. I recently wrote an entire guide on how to mine questions at scale.

AI systems reflect real human language. If you optimize for what you hope buyers are asking instead of what they are actually asking, you are building on assumptions.

Instead of brainstorming topics, extract buyer language from places where intent already exists:

Sales call transcripts
Support tickets
Demo objections
Reddit threads and community Slack groups
Product reviews
Competitor comparison pages

Cluster those questions. Prioritize them by revenue proximity, authority fit, and competitive weakness. Search volume matters less than whether you can credibly own the answer.

This defines your Answer Surface Area. It is the set of questions your company should naturally appear in when AI systems explain your category.

A focused two week sprint that surfaces and prioritizes one hundred real buyer questions will do more for your AEO roadmap than months of unstructured publishing.

Start there.

2. Onsite Encoding: Make Your Expertise Easy to Understand

Once you know which questions you should own, encode them clearly on your site. LLMs reward clarity. Ambiguity reduces inclusion.

Begin with fundamentals.

Clean crawlability.
Remove thin or duplicative pages.
Add structured data where it reinforces meaning.

Then rewrite your homepage and core product pages so anyone can answer, in one sentence:

Who is this for?
What problem does it solve?
How is it different?

If your positioning requires explanation from your sales team, it will not translate well into AI generated summaries.

Then apply FAQ enrichment to your most commercially important pages. Add real buyer questions. Answer them directly in plain language. Define terms clearly. Surface tradeoffs honestly.

At Webflow, aligning core product and category pages with real buyer phrasing improved clarity first. Visibility followed. We were not adding content for volume. We were removing friction so models could extract meaning more easily.

This is work you can complete in weeks.

3. Offsite Consensus: Authority Is Broader Than Your Domain

AEO cannot be won solely on your own website.

Large language models synthesize from across the web. Reddit threads. Review platforms. Industry publications. Partner blogs. Podcast transcripts. Analyst commentary. Community conversations.

If your expertise only lives on your domain, your influence will eventually plateau.

This is not about chasing press mentions. It is about showing up where your category is already being discussed and contributing something meaningful.

Participate in high signal community threads with substance, not promotion. Publish structured insights in outlets that shape professional opinion. Ensure your positioning is accurate and differentiated on comparison platforms. Share original ideas that partners and peers reference.

Authority in the AI era is distributed. Models recognize patterns across independent surfaces. When your perspective appears consistently, credibility strengthens.

Your website makes you legible.
Your broader presence makes you credible.

Inclusion is rarely the result of a single page. It is often the result of visible consensus forming around your expertise.

4. Citation Engineering: Structure Ideas to Be Referenced

In SEO, ranking was often enough. In AEO, citation matters.

Models favor content that is clear, structured, and distinctive.

Name your frameworks.
Define terms precisely.
Use comparisons and decision trees.
Share data, even modest internal insight.

Instead of offering general advice, articulate defined systems.

A simple test helps. If an AI system had to summarize this page in one paragraph, what would it pull?

If the answer is unclear, tighten the structure.

LLMs do not reward volume. They reward clarity and extractable insight.

5. Measure Like an Investor, Not a Traffic Analyst

This is the mindset shift that ties it together.

If you treat AEO like SEO, you will default to clicks. But clicks are downstream.

Instead, measure like an investor managing exposure across an influence portfolio.

Track visibility across your core questions.
Monitor share of voice relative to competitors.
Assess citation frequency.
Review context and sentiment.

Review monthly. Allocate effort the way an investor allocates capital. Strengthen weak clusters. Expand into adjacent territory. Consolidate thin content. Double down where inclusion increases.

You are not optimizing a page. You are increasing exposure to upstream influence. That is portfolio management.

The Compounding Advantage

Twenty years ago, the biggest growth advantage went to teams who invested in SEO before it was clean and measurable.

A similar moment exists today.

The market does not just search anymore. It asks. And the companies that consistently answer shape how the category is understood.

SEO captured demand. AEO shapes demand. Traffic is downstream. Inclusion is upstream.

If you want to act now, the path is clear.

Mine the real questions.
Encode clarity onsite.
Build credibility offsite.
Structure ideas for citation.
Measure like an investor.

Do that consistently and you will not just appear in AI generated answers. You will help define them.

Measuring Early AEO Efforts

Hey, Jonathan back to tackle metrics!

As Josh mentioned, measuring clicks is now very inefficient since consumer behavior is changing. AEO introduces several new metrics worth tracking, and the best way to understand them is to compare old versus new. SEO focuses on driving traffic via clicks (rankings, CTR), whereas AEO emphasizes influence and trust by becoming the source of truth for LLMs.

• SEO: Organic traffic, keyword rankings, backlinks.

• AEO: Brand mentions, answer position, citation source, sentiment

The most important metric is Visibility: how often you’re mentioned in LLM responses across your tracked queries.

Share of Voice (SOV) measures how often a brand is mentioned in LLM responses relative to competitors for a specific set of queries, calculated as (Your Brand Mentions ÷ Total Brand Mentions) × 100.

The last metric I’d put in my top three is citation frequency, which is how often LLMs are citing your brand. Citation frequency is particularly powerful because citations (where LLMs link to your content as a source) signal authority. When LLMs cite your site, they’re essentially validating your expertise to users.

Here’s a quick example of how I’d track all metrics for the search phrase “What are the top agencies for hiring global marketing talent?”:

Visibility: GrowthPair appeared in 37 out of 100 tracked prompts = 37% visibility

Share of voice: GrowthPair appeared 30 times, competitors appeared 70 times = 30% SOV

Citation frequency: GrowthPair was cited 8 times out of 100 tracked prompts = 8% citation rate

Again, tools like Peec, AirOps, and Ahrefs can track this across multiple LLMs daily.

Conclusion: The Compounding Advantage

Sean back to wrap things up!

Twenty years ago, I chose the channel I could measure over the one that could compound. It felt disciplined at the time. In hindsight, it was cautious.

Today, large language models and AI are changing how people make buying decisions. Prospects are not just searching for links. They are asking for synthesized answers, recommendations, and summaries. And those answers increasingly shape perception before a company ever gets the chance to pitch itself.

That creates a new layer of leverage. The brands included in those answers influence how problems are framed, which options are considered, and what “best” even means. Over time, that influence compounds.

You do not need perfect attribution to start. You do not need a dedicated team. As Josh laid out, begin by mining the real buyer questions, encode your expertise clearly onsite, build credibility offsite, and structure your ideas so they can be cited. Measure progress directionally and iterate with discipline.

In growth, the biggest advantages rarely come from doing something perfectly. They come from doing something early. AEO is one of those moments. Your compounding advantage begins when you decide to participate.