Search Without Clicks, Brands Without Visibility Open a browser, ask Google or ChatGPT a question, and look at what happens. You do not get ten blue links anymore. You get an answer. Studies on zero-click and AI summaries show that the majority of Google searches now end without a visit to any website and that AI style […]
Open a browser, ask Google or ChatGPT a question, and look at what happens.
You do not get ten blue links anymore. You get an answer.
Studies on zero-click and AI summaries show that the majority of Google searches now end without a visit to any website and that AI style results can cut organic traffic by 15–25 percent or more, depending on industry. (sparktoro.com)
Put simply, a lot of people get what they need on the results page or inside an AI assistant window and never touch your site.
For B2B brands and PR-driven companies that is a problem:
If your brand is not part of those AI generated answers you are not even on the short list.
This guide walks through the Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) playbook we use with B2B and PR-heavy brands so they can show up in those answers instead of getting quietly erased by them.
Let’s keep it simple.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your brand easy for AI systems to understand, trust, and quote when they generate answers.
Think of answer engines as anything that returns a direct answer instead of a list of links:
AEO focuses on making your content show up in those places.
SEO.com describes AEO as the practice of improving a brand’s visibility in AI powered platforms like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity by earning mentions and citations in conversational responses. (SEO.com)
Profound defines it as ensuring a brand, product, or service is accurately represented in AI generated responses. (Profound)
Same idea, different wording. AEO is about being the source behind the answer.
Traditional SEO is about helping search engines find, crawl, and rank your pages in their result lists. It cares a lot about things like keywords, links, and technical health. (Profound)
AEO still cares about that, but its main job is different:
That means AEO leans harder into:
It is less “stuff the keyword into every heading” and more “make this content easy for an AI to trust and reuse.”
Zero-click studies have been warning us for a while. SparkToro’s 2024 analysis found that for every 1,000 Google searches only a few hundred clicks actually reach the open web, with the rest handled by on-page features. (sparktoro.com)
As AI Overviews rolled out, multiple case studies and analyses started showing double-digit drops in click-through rates. Some reports estimate organic traffic losses of 15 to 64 percent on queries that trigger AI summaries, depending on the vertical. (Terakeet)
Bain’s research found that about 80 percent of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40 percent of their searches, which lines up with these traffic drops. (Bain)
For B2B and PR heavy brands that means:
So the question shifts from “How do we rank number one” to “How do we become the source AI relies on when it answers questions in our space.”
PR already creates a lot of what answer engines care about:
All of that is raw material for AI summarization.
The issue is that if it is not tied back to clear, structured content on your own properties, models may recognize the topic but fail to recognize your brand as the authority.
PR and content teams who adopt AEO can:
Think of AEO as the bridge between earned authority and how AI systems actually consume it. (CXL)
Here is a simple framework you can steal.
Start by figuring out what people actually ask when they are orbiting your brand or category.
Look at:
Group them by intent:
HubSpot’s own guidance on generative engine optimization and AI content planning starts with the same thing: clarify the questions and journeys before you touch a title tag. (HubSpot Blog)
If you skip this, everything else is guesswork.
For your high-value questions, you want pages that are clearly built to answer them.
For each target question:
This format lines up with how engines decide what to surface in featured snippets, AI panels, and conversational answers. (CXL)
You do not need to turn into a developer, but you do need to help machines read your site.
Google’s own documentation explains how FAQ and HowTo markup can make it easier for search to surface your content in richer formats. (WSI)
Agencies that specialize in schema and technical SEO keep repeating the same advice: clean HTML and consistent schema help both search engines and generative engines extract meaning from your content. (Backlinko)
Also clean up the basics:
You do not need a 200-page technical audit, just remove the obvious friction.
AI systems are getting more picky about what they quote.
The industry is seeing a shift from “backlinks are everything” to a broader, information centric view that weighs accuracy, consistency, depth, and corroboration across sources. (Foundation Marketing)
To play nicely with that:
Your PR hits, conference talks, and research all help here. AEO just makes sure those signals are easy to connect to your site and your core explanations.
You cannot optimize what you never look at.
There are now purpose built LLM visibility tools that track how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI engines. (Backlinko)
Use them, plus a bit of manual spot checking, to answer questions like:
On the analytics side watch:
Then iterate. Update pages as your product, pricing, or messaging changes. Add new Q&A content when you see emerging questions. Retire content that is confusing or off strategy.
Scenario
You sell a platform that helps mid-market companies do something critical. Prospects often search or ask AI things like:
Without AEO
With AEO moves in place
Now when someone asks a generative engine for options, your comparison page has a much better shot at being cited as a source or summarized in the answer.
Scenario
A client gets a big feature in a top trade publication. Great win. Traffic spikes for a few days then drops back down.
With AEO thinking
You:
Now, when AI models scrape and connect the trade article with your site, they are more likely to understand the relationship and treat your owned content as an authoritative explanation of that viewpoint.
Here is a quick starter checklist you can run through with your team:
If that sounds like work, that is because it is. But it is a lot cheaper than pretending AI search is a fad while your traffic quietly erodes.
If you would rather not rebuild your AEO strategy alone, this is literally what we do.
We help B2B and PR-driven brands:
You can check out our Answer Engine Optimization service and request a quick consultation to see whether AEO is worth pursuing for your brand right now.
