Your next enterprise buyer will meet you inside a chat window before they ever load your homepage. Every budget season, enterprise marketing directors ask me how to respond: hire an answer engine optimization (AEO) specialist and give them a line item, or let AEO strategy change how the whole marketing plan works? My answer is the second, with one condition: the website has to stay funded inside that plan, because it's still where an enterprise buyer confirms what an AI told them and decides to sign.

I asked Zane Coffin, Edgar Allan's Senior Manager in Edgar Allan’s Brand Strategy and Performance group that question on a recent episode of Building the Next Web, right after he got back from Profound's partner summit in New York. His take is that AEO should organize the plan, and he came back with evidence for it.

The shortlist is being written somewhere you don't control

Buyers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best options in your category, get back three or four names with a line of reasoning for each, and start their evaluation from that list. If you're on it, your site gets a visit from someone who already half-believes you’re a good choice for them. If you're missing from the list, you never find out you lost the deal.

That answer is the new first touch, and it's why AEO strategy has to graduate from a line item to the thing your marketing plan is organized around.

An AEO strategy is a marketing plan organized around one question: when a buyer asks an answer engine about your category, does the model describe you accurately, cite you, and give that buyer a reason to come find you? And then every brand, content, and web decision is prioritized by how much it moves that answer.

Conversion is following discovery into the answer engine

Most AEO plans still file answer engines under awareness, but comparison and even purchase are moving into the same interface where discovery happens.

Zane's read after the partners summit is that a growing share of the customer journey now happens inside the LLM, away from the brand's own website.

He points to ChatGPT's ability to build charts, graphs, and tables on the fly, which he calls an “ephemeral interface.” Those tables do the job your comparison pages and feature grids used to do, and for an enterprise buyer, that's a huge change: side-by-side evaluation now happens in a window a brand doesn’t control. Consumer checkout inside ChatGPT shows where this is heading, and Zane expects it to grow. That six-figure contract is still going to close elsewhere (more on that below), but the comparison that decides who gets the call starts here.

AEO is also the one part of the plan whose results depend on every other team's output, which is why it belongs at the center. That's the logic behind Zane's conclusion, "I think AEO has to be the tent pole for how we move forward," and I agree.

An AEO strategy depends on work owned by brand, content, and web teams

The usual first move is to hire an AEO specialist or add an AEO workstream to the SEO team. It stalls because the work that gets a brand cited sits with people the specialist doesn't manage.

Brands that get cited share three traits. The brand has a clear, differentiated position a model can restate in a sentence. It uses the same language on every page and in every third-party source. And its site is structured so a machine can pull a direct answer. Positioning lives with the brand team, language across pages lives with content, and structure lives with web. A specialist without authority over any of those can diagnose the gaps but can't close them, and the program becomes a monthly report about problems someone else owns.

Consistency carries more weight than most teams expect. Profound's team shared at the summit that even brands in the top quartile own only about 15% of the citations behind AI answers about them. That means the model is stitching your story together from everyone else's description of you. If your own homepage is vague (I regularly land on prospect sites and leave with no idea what the company sells), the model fills that gap with whatever the most recent listicle said. I'll go deeper on where the other 85% of citations come from in the next post in this series.

At Edgar Allan, organizing around that answer is how Visibility & Optimization works: brand, SEO, AEO, and CRO run as one loop, so the story you define, the signals models pick up, and the results you measure all trace back to the same plan.

The tent pole still needs a floor, and the floor is your website

If you follow the buyer journey all the way into the LLM, it's tempting to conclude the website matters less every quarter. For enterprise purchases, I see the opposite. A six-figure contract still gets confirmed somewhere the buyer can see the whole picture, share it with a procurement team, and check that the claims an AI repeated are real. That place is your site.

Zane describes it as a building with two kinds of doors. Some are robot-shaped, built so crawlers can find accurate, extractable answers. Others are human-shaped, for the person who arrives from an AI answer and wants to know what this company is about before they book a call. Both kinds of doors have to hold up, which is why we treat AEO and CRO as one body of work.

The site is also the only citation source you fully control, and the others move without warning. Reddit's share of ChatGPT Search citations fell from 3.83% to 0.52% in four days this August, according to Promptwatch data reported by Search Engine Land. Zane has watched Google's AI Mode shift recently too, toward naming far fewer brands per answer.

So the tent-pole plan has to fund the floor. A program that wins the shortlist and then sends buyers to a site with mismatched messaging hands the close to a competitor.

Funding the floor means budgeting the owned website as the place where an AI's answer gets confirmed: the messaging matches what models say about you, the claims survive a procurement team's scrutiny, and the page converts the buyer.

Reorganizing around AEO comes down to one backlog, one measurement model, and one owner

AEO citation share, organic traffic by topic cluster, and conversion experiments sit in one measurement model and one backlog, with a named owner and a 6-to-12-month roadmap reviewed monthly. A page that pulls AI referral traffic and fails to convert becomes one backlog item instead of a handoff between two teams.

The sequence matters as much as the structure: 

1. Prompt research. Map the topic clusters your buyers ask about, where you already appear, where competitors own the answer, and how much prompt volume each cluster carries. ‍
2. Positioning fixes. Tighten the claims a model will repeat about you. A first-draft homepage claim can come out of a single three-hour working session.‍
3. Content and structure. Rewrite and restructure the pages that matter for your priority clusters. A messaging rewrite across a page takes about a week.‍
4. Measurement. Set baselines at launch and measure at months three, six, and twelve.

Starting with content production skips the step that tells you how much content you need. Our AEO playbook walks through the tactical side of each step.

Island has worked with us for three years on brand and optimization, and its overall site conversion rate is up 457%, with organic search conversions up 15,361%. Welldoc saw conversion rate rise 13.7% year over year after a seven-month brand and Webflow engagement. Both are full engagements that don't isolate AEO, which is the point: the gains came from brand, site, and optimization moving together.

Three decisions to make before next year’s budget locks

Before you take a plan to your CMO, answer three questions that show whether AEO is organizing your strategy or decorating it.

1. Who owns the AEO roadmap, and can they change what's on the homepage?
   If the owner can't touch positioning, page copy, or site structure, they're running a reporting function. Give the roadmap to someone with reach across brand, content, and web.‍
2. Which commercial prompts define your category?
   Pick the "best," "compare," and "top for [your industry]" prompts where shortlists form, and track them across personas. Many leadership teams find they show up for founder stories and awards and barely register for the terms that drive revenue.‍
3. Does the site’s CRO report into the same plan?
   If conversion work lives in a separate backlog with separate metrics, the shortlist you win in an answer engine will leak at the last step.

This is how we scope AEO at Edgar Allan: inside brand, CMS, and CRO engagements, as the thread that ties them together. If you want a second opinion on your plan, our AEO audit is a good place to start.

Put AEO at the center of the plan, then fund the floor, so the website at the end of it still proves the answer right.

This article grew out of a conversation between Edgar Allan founder Mason Poe and Zane Coffin, Senior Manager of Brand Strategy and Performance at Edgar Allan, for the ongoing series Building the Next Web. It's the same series that's brought us conversations with Finsweet’s Alex Iglesias, ourCMO's Josh Webb, Code & Wander's Alessia Sannazzaro, Edgar Allan's own Witt Langstaff, Webflow's Nathan Huening, and more.