Welcome to Contentment

Hey good folks and happy Wednesday! 

We’re in full-on back to back travel weeks over here between both me and my wife’s dad’s 70th birthdays. Private chefs, sibling gatherings, and lots of wine. It’s been a ton of fun! 

This week, we’ll talk about AEO, the famous Ethan Smith “How to win at AEO” piece, and what you can do now. 

Was this email forwarded to you?

Ethan Smith’s How to Win at AEO piece is making its rounds in all the channels that VPs and CEOs pay attention to. If you haven’t been sent it on Slack from a colleague or your boss, color me shocked. 

The insights are good. In fact, I linked a variant of it in this newsletter several weeks ago, here. But it's often hard to translate this kind of content into actionable advice. So, here’s my take:

Not just case studies. Not just resources. Start adding content to your core pages. Explore what folks like Salesforce do. Looks at this URL structure:

• Solutions page: https://www.salesforce.com/communications/
• Feature page: https://www.salesforce.com/communications/artificial-intelligence/
• Editorial page: https://www.salesforce.com/communications/future-of-telecom/

Not all editorial content needs to live on your blog. And if it does, it's likely hurting both your SEO and your AEO. 

You should already be doing this, but just in case: put CTAs about the fold on all of your editorial content. Make sure folks know what action to take next. 

This is especially true for any content that follows that Salesforce model above. The content that expands off of your blog shouldn’t look like blog content. It should feel elevated. It should have clear CTAs and action. There should be breadcrumbs and product education. 

All of this helps LLMs mention you as people ask deeper and deeper product questions. 

No feature you have, no partner or integration, no use case is too small to be included.

These were smart investments before, but they are required now––and content teams may or may not be responsible for them. 

• On Reddit, you need folks who know how the product works answering questions. You can set up AI workflows to help generate these using tools like AirOps (and even find which Reddit threads are most important for you to comment on). 
• On YouTube, you need folks creating content on how to use your product to do [whatever thing] or more general videos on things like how to grow your business with [email marketing], as an example. The coolest tool I’ve found recently is Screen Studio. 
• Third-party sources: You need a PR person and an affiliate person, ASAP. What others think about you heavily influences what AI thinks about you, naturally. 

Don’t forget that while AEO pulls a lot from Reddit, YouTube, and third-party sources, it also still looks at what Google is ranking highly to pull citations. 

How well you rank in traditional SEO impacts your AEO citations, and traditional SEO is still driving the lion's share of traffic (even if conversions from AEO are much higher). 

• For Google’s AI mode: “Organic links still matter: In the 7% of AI Mode queries where additional links appeared below the response, there was an 89% domain overlap and 80% URL overlap with Google’s top 10 search results.” Additional evidence here.
• For other LLMs: “12% of citations in AI assistants also rank in Google’s top 10, on average.” This might not seem like a larger number, but with LLM citations, you want to make sure everything is working for you. 

You need both.

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you! 

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT

• What I’m watching: Astrology TikToks have entered the feed. I’m an aquarius if that answers anything. 
• What I’m wearing: New PJs from Negative Underwear. They are so soft and light. I’m obsessed. 
• What I’m eating: The private chef for my dad’s birthday served us 6 different courses of scallops, cod, rib-eye, and so much more. It came out to ~$110 a head. It was amazing!

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all.

Tracey

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