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 Hey Marketing Bestie, Ari is heading to San Francisco and I'm so jealous. Not for the work trip part, absolutely not lol. But the DoorDash! What I would do for a real burrito. Actually, I know what I would do. Nothing. Because I could come but then it's a 6 hour flight so enjoy, honey. Send me pictures. Should I send her off with a Yeti cooler? Could travel well? Was this email forwarded to you? Sponsored by Roku Same ad. 2 different settings. 2 very different reactions. What they found: My take: You might have social creative sitting around that's got untapped results. They just need a bigger screen. 7 REASONS LINKEDIN BELONGS IN YOUR AEO STRATEGYThe typical LinkedIn post that gets cited by AI has 15–25 reactions. Seriously. Not 15K. Not even 150. According to Semrush’s study of LinkedIn URLs cited in AI answers, a lot of the content getting picked up by AI barely made a dent in the LinkedIn feed. They didn't have a: Top Voice badge Just someone answering a question clearly. That's the sauce! The whole sauce. For the last many years, we’ve been trained to write LinkedIn posts for the algorithm. Get the hook right. Drive comments. But now there’s another reader consuming everything you publish. It doesn’t like, comment, or follow. It reads. And then it can use what it learned when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, and other AI tools questions about your category. So maybe we need to start writing for that reader, too? Here are 7 reasons LinkedIn is becoming a seriously interesting AEO channel and how I’d use it. As a reminder, I know LinkedIn. 1️⃣. LINKEDIN MIGHT BE THE MOST UNDERPRICED AEO CHANNEL RIGHT NOWWe think about LinkedIn as a social channel. Post content, build an audience, generate awareness, drive some leads. But AI engines are starting to treat LinkedIn more like a giant library of expertise. Semrush found LinkedIn was the #2 most-cited domain in AI answers, behind only Reddit. That’s wild when you think about it. While marketers are obsessing over getting their websites into AI results, there’s already this MASSIVE domain where you can publish whatever you want, and almost nobody is treating it like an AEO channel yet. That’s the opportunity. Your competitors are still posting “Excited to announce…” while you could be publishing the best answer to the exact questions your buyers are asking. And, honestly, Reddit is harder. 2️⃣. GETTING CITED MIGHT MATTER MORE THAN GETTING CLICKEDWe’ve spent basically the entire history of Digital Marketing chasing the click. Rank on Google, get clicked, bring them to the website, convert them.AI changes that journey because when an AI engine uses your content to answer a question, it can pull in your framework, explanation, steps, data, and language. Imagine someone asks, “What’s the best way to measure Creator Marketing?” You don’t JUST want your link sitting underneath the answer. You want the answer itself to sound like something your team would say. A click gets someone onto your website. A citation can shape how they understand the problem before they ever get there. 3️⃣. YOU DON’T NEED 100K FOLLOWERSThis might be my favorite part. The LinkedIn feed LOVES distribution. If you already have 100K followers, you’re starting every post with a pretty big advantage. AI search...Maybe not. OtterlyAI found that likes, comments, and hashtags had basically no relationship with whether LinkedIn content was cited. So a product marketer with 1,800 followers could potentially become the source AI pulls from instead of the CMO with 80K simply because they gave the better answer. That’s a HUGE opportunity for smaller brands. You don’t have to spend 3 years building an audience before your expertise matters. You can start answering the questions your buyers care about TODAY. 4️⃣. YOU GET TO BORROW LINKEDIN’S AUTHORITYGetting your own website trusted takes time. You need content, backlinks, technical SEO, domain authority, consistency, and a whole lot of patience. And you should absolutely keep building all of that. But LinkedIn already has something your six-month-old company website doesn’t: a true halo of authority. Publishing there lets your expertise live on a domain that search engines and AI systems already know extremely well. Your website is the house you’re building. LinkedIn is the giant billboard you can rent while you’re building it. You still want the house. But there’s no reason to wait three years for people to find you. 5️⃣. STOP PUTTING EVERYTHING ON THE COMPANY PAGEI think a lot of brands are going to screw this up. 🆙 They’re going to hear “LinkedIn content is showing up in AI search!” and immediately tell their social team to start publishing more from the company page. But OtterlyAI found 91.7% of LinkedIn content citations went to named individuals. PEOPLE. Not logos. Which means your biggest AEO opportunity might not be your company page. The opportunity lies with your employees. With YOU! Your Product Marketer knows something. Your engineer knows something. Your sales leader knows something. Your customer success team knows something. Your founder definitely knows something. Most companies have YEARS of expertise sitting inside their employees’ heads, and almost none of it exists publicly. That’s the content. 6️⃣. STOP WRITING LINKEDIN ARTICLES LIKE BLOG POSTSIf I were testing 1 LinkedIn format specifically for AEO, I’d start with articles.OtterlyAI found LinkedIn articles accounted for 72% of LinkedIn content citations in its dataset. And it makes sense. A normal LinkedIn post gets pushed into the feed and disappears. An article has a permanent page. So instead of asking, “What should we post this week?” I’d ask, “What’s a question our buyers ask constantly that we could give the best answer to?” Instead of writing “5 Marketing Trends We’re Watching in 2027,” write something like “How Should a B2B Marketing Team Measure Brand Marketing?” Then answer the question immediately. Use clear sections. Include numbers. Show examples. Include things you’ve learned from actually doing the work. 7️⃣. “AI SEARCH” ISN’T 1 CHANNELThis is one of the biggest things marketers need to understand about AEO. We talk about “AI search” like it’s one giant thing. It’s not. ChatGPT isn’t Perplexity. Perplexity isn’t Google AI. Google isn’t Copilot. And they don’t all pull from the same places in the same way. Current research suggests LinkedIn has been particularly visible across Google’s AI experiences, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot, while appearing less consistently in ChatGPT and Gemini. So I wouldn’t build a strategy that says, “We’re going to publish everything on LinkedIn so ChatGPT finds us.” I’d build an ecosystem. Publish the deepest version on your website first. Turn the best ideas into a LinkedIn article. Have your expert publish their OWN POV on the topic. Turn individual questions into standalone LinkedIn posts. Then connect everything. 1 idea. Multiple surfaces. Multiple chances for an AI engine to understand what you know. And I think that’s the bigger shift here. For years, marketers asked: “Will the algorithm push this?” Now there’s another question: “Could an AI engine learn from this?” Those 2 questions lead to very different content. One makes you obsess over hooks. The other makes you obsess over answers. Figure out how to do both. Because the next generation of thought leadership isn’t just about becoming someone people follow. It’s about becoming someone AI learns from. MEME OF THE WEEK  Sponsored by SiriusXM Media I've been going deep on audio lately (you'll see, stay tuned), and I learned something: people spend over 20% of their media time on audio. But it only gets ~5% of ad spend. That's an INSANELY big gap. 🎙 TUNE IN Podcast to listen to this week: What you will learn: 🎙: Why bringing your exact product into a new market beats localizing it JUST FOR FUN 🤩: Brand of the week: TOTEME Any SF restaurant recs for me to pass along to the missus? Again, I have a Yeti cooler so I can be sure to send her with that if it's really, really good? Your friend, | |||||||||
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