Is Your Brand Showing Up in AI Conversations Where Buyers Are Asking Questions about Your Business?
AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are shaping buyer decisions, and businesses like yours can’t afford to be invisible in the answers these models give.
Avenue9’s AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) services help you get LLMs and AI-powered search engines to tell the story you want them to about your brand. Get your AI Trust Score for Free!
Our trademarked Human-First AI Marketing® approach combines real interviews, customer stories, and authentic brand narratives with the latest AEO, GEO, and AI indexing strategies. This ensures your business isn’t just seen in search, but recommended in AI conversations, cited in prompts, and surfaced in the key buying moments that matter.
Our mission is simple: help businesses scale with AI while staying authentic, personal, and relevant. If you want to win buyer prompts, increase AI recommendations, and build durable brand authority in the next generation of search, we’re here to help you do it the right way.
What is AEO?
AEO is becoming the source AI trusts from which to get its answers.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of helping your brand, products, and people show up in AI-generated answers, summaries, and recommendations across chatbots, voice assistants, search engines, and generative AI tools.
Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for clicks and rankings, AEO focuses on earning trust and visibility inside AI models so your brand becomes the answer, not just an option listed in the 10 blue links.
At Avenue9, we believe AEO is about amplifying authentic knowledge, not gaming algorithms. It’s a Human-First AI Marketing® strategy that:
- Prioritizes real voices and verified insights over keyword spam.
- Publishes trustworthy, structured, human-first content that AI can easily ingest and recommend.
- Focuses on Share of Model (SoM) or how often your brand gets included in AI-generated responses, rather than just search position or volume metrics.
We’ll dive into it more here, but AEO is about conversations, not clicks. It’s about human-generated answers, not algorithm-generated results. And it’s about questions, not keywords.
What is Share of Model?
Share of Model is how often Large Language Models (LLMs) mention or recommend you in AI answers.
Think of it like market share, but inside LLMs, the ChatGPTs, Geminis, and Perplexities of the world. Your thought leadership is not just for ranking for keywords anymore. It’s about creating training data for AI.
When your blog clearly explains industry topics, solves buyer problems, and shares expert perspectives:
- You feed the model with your narrative
- You increase the chances AI cites or mentions you in answers
- You build Share of Model, meaning you own more conversational real estate inside the AI ecosystem
At Avenue 9, we believe in earning trust before you earn traffic. That means building trust with your customers but also with the AI that will be recommending you to those customers. We use the following nine strategies to help you build trust signals, tell your story, and create answer-worthy content.
Remember, all of this is about building a recommendation engine that will generate the artificial word-of-mouth marketing you need to grow your business in 2025 and beyond.
Now is your chance to train the AI on who you are, why you matter, and why they should recommend you instead of your competitor.
Check your Share of Model with our partner, Optical. Get your AI Trust Score for Free!
The Avenue9 AEO Strategy Guide to Start Winning AI Answers & Recommendations
1. Teach AI Your Story
LLMs don’t follow you on LinkedIn or read your website unless you make them.
Start here: Refresh your About Us, founder story, and value props. You’re not just writing for people; you’re training the machines on why you matter. Make sure everything is consistent, credible, and relevant to what you want to be known for.
2. Success Stories Are the New SEO Goldmine
Google rewards backlinks. LLMs reward believable proof. Natural language is what wins the day. So, getting customers to offer testimonials, case studies, or interviews is more powerful than marketing-generated arguments.
Quick win: Publish more testimonials, founder quotes, and success stories. AI loves citing real results, not generic sales copy.
3. Answer Real Prompts, Not Fake Keywords
Your buyers aren’t typing “best CRM solutions” anymore, they’re asking:“What’s the fastest way to track sales deals without manual reports?” The answers aren’t 10 blue links with your page title and website. The AI is providing natural language answers directly to the question or search, which means you need to serve the AI with exactly what it needs.
New rule: Write like you’re answering a question. Use the question instead of the keywords in your titles and headlines because AI listens to useful answers, not SEO buzzwords.
4. Get Mentioned in Places AI Trusts
If AI doesn’t see you on Wikipedia, industry blogs, or credible directories, it defaults to someone else. Previously, Google was looking for backlinks to confirm credibility. Now, AI is scraping these other sites to include in its training data, so while the guest blogging or citation tactics are the same. The strategy is much different. You don’t need to worry about duplicate content as much as you do about creating a consistent message in multiple places where AI might scrape its training data.
Pro tip: You don’t need to “go get links.” You need to show up in the right places where AI companies go for training data, like Reddit, Forbes, and YouTube. Interviews, guest posts, industry roundups… these are LLM gold.
5. Feed the Machines Everywhere (Text, Voice, and Video)
Blog posts? Good.
LinkedIn posts? Better.
Podcasts, YouTube clips, webinars? Chef’s kiss.
The longer formats are much better for natural human conversations. Podcasts and YouTube clips have transcripts. Webinars have recordings that involve natural human conversations, which is what AI is trying to mimic and train. So, these longer formats, real-life human conversations, are the gold mine for AEO.
Action: Mix up your content formats. LLMs are multi-modal, and so is your influence. Focus on having more conversations and making the full transcripts available to the robots.
6. Use Structured Data for Easy Scraping
Yes, we’re getting a bit technical here with llms.txt, schema markup, and FAQ sections. It’s not glamorous… but it’s foundational. The FAQ sections of a web page guide, PDF, or doc allow the AI to categorize exact questions that your customers might ask and provide the answers in short, punchy, and direct results.
No excuses: Help AI read your content properly, or it will read your competitors’ instead. I still see a lot of companies trying to block robot scrapers and companies trying to hide their IP rather than serving it up to the AI to be included in their recommendations. If you choose to block AI, you choose to block all of the recommendations to the millions of users worldwide.
7. Fresh, Opinionated Content Wins
AI scrapes recent content. It loves human takes. It rewards opinions that sound like people. We need your hot take week in and week out. At Avenue 9, we interview your founders, your top salespeople, your best clients, your referral partners, and we continue to generate new training data for the LLMs that are based on human conversations, questions, and the most recent data, events, and context.
Monthly goal: Publish fresh takes, founder rants, or expert opinions. If it feels “too human” for Google, it’s probably just right for LLMs. This doesn’t need to be highly produced and edited. It needs to be real, raw, and authentic.
8. Turn Your Team Into Expert Voices
While we’re at it, the era of hiding behind corporate logos is over. AI tends to prioritize people over brand promotions and corporate speak. Let’s face it: Most corporate marketing is about as honest and genuine as a resume about the applicant’s background. To be taken seriously in AI, we need to build trust just like we do with our human prospects and clients. That means being credible, reliable, and honest, and never being greedy, pushy, or manipulative.
Shift your strategy: Put names, faces, and expert bios on your content. AI promotes real people, not just brands. Pick a human expert for each one of your target audiences or core offerings and make them the industry-leading expert on that category. You can do that by guest blogging, podcast guesting, and creating original thought leadership.
9. Measure Share of Model Like You Measured Rankings & Traffic
Pageviews are nice, but how often does AI recommend you when it matters? It’s time to take this seriously. And there are new tools on the market that will allow you to test your brand’s voice across AI tools, platforms, and even models. You need to know how and how often AI is recommending your company. This critical step lets you fix mistakes, see where the holes are, and measure the impact of your AEO initiatives.
First step: Run an AEO Audit. See where you’re mentioned, where you’re missing, and start tracking your Share of Model monthly. You can’t fix what you don’t see. There are plenty of AI tools available for this, but reach out to me to find out which one I recommend, or to get expert analysis of the AEO audit.
SEO Was Yesterday.
AEO Is How You Win Search Tomorrow.
If you want to win in the AI era, you need more than random keyword focused blog posts or SEO algorithm gimmicks You need a real AEO strategy built for trust, relevance, and visibility inside AI models.
Avenue9’s new AEO program is built for businesses who don’t have time to guess what AI wants or waste months and millions chasing algorithm ghosts and vanity metrics.
Why Choose Avenue9 for AEO?
- Human-First Context Engineering — We craft the story AI should tell about you, not just keywords and clicks.
- Fast-Action Share of Model Gains — You’ll see where you show up (and where you don’t) with real data and quick wins. No more mystery, no guru fluff.
- Done-for-You Content, Schema & Prompt Testing — We create the blogs, posts, prompts, and technical setups for you, so you don’t have to.
- Seamless Marketing System Integration — HubSpot? WordPress? ChatGPT? We plug into what you’re already using, No tech headaches or expensive AEO software.
- Trusted Advisors, Expert Marketers — Clear strategic roadmaps, transparent reporting, and honest feedback that makes your marketing team better, not just busier.
If you’re serious about being the answer when your customers ask AI for help, Avenue9 is path to success.
📩 Book your free AEO Discovery Call now and let’s turn AI into your best referral partner.
