How to Build an AEO Strategy That Keeps Your Brand Visible in AI Search (with Lindsay Boyajian Hagan of Conductor)

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: subscribe

In today’s episode of Found in AI, I sit down with Lindsay Boyajian-Hagan, VP of Marketing at Conductor, to unpack how AI search is redefining visibility — and what brands need to know about optimizing for AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) instead of traditional SEO.

We cover:

• What AEO actually is — and how it differs from SEO in the era of AI-generated answers
• Why content depth, topical authority, and schema markup now determine who gets cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews
• How to map personas as prompts, not slide decks, to create content AI can understand and surface
• The role of structure, author schema, and data-driven content in improving AI visibility
• Practical steps to audit, prune, and rebuild your content strategy for AI search

If you’ve been noticing traffic drop-offs or wondering how to keep your brand visible when algorithms stop playing by the old SEO rules, this episode will help you recalibrate your strategy for the next era of search.

📌 Mentioned in this episode:

• Conductor’s approach to AEO and topical authority
• Schema, author markup, and structured data best practices
• AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini
• Building audience-driven content systems that scale

💬 Let’s connect:

LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Content Strategist
Website → cassieclarkmarketing.com

Keywords: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, AI Search, Topical Authority, Schema, SEO, Conductor, AI-Driven Marketing, Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, Content Strategy, B2B Marketing

Find the transcript and show notes here.

Transcript

0:15

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Listen, there's a tiny panic happening in marketing teams right now. The dashboards still show search traffic, but conversions are slipping. They just kind of Houdini'd and no one knows where those clicks went. Well, that's because search isn't search anymore. It's answers. It's AI. And the rules that we built around content for the last decade or so just changed seemingly overnight. Honestly, this change has been months in the making, but if you blinked, it does kind of feel a little bit like it's overnight. I'm Cassie Clark, a fractional content strategist and CMO, and this is Found in AI. It's the show about helping your brand stay visible when algorithms stop playing by the old STL rules and it feels like nothing's working. Today, I'm joined by Lindsay Boyajian-Hagan, head of marketing at Conductor. Conductor is a platform helping enterprise teams navigate this exact shift. We talk about what it really means to optimize for AI engines, not just Google, and how to rebuild your strategy for a world where content depth and authority signals decide who gets seen and who gets wiped off the face of the internet forever. Here's part of that conversation. So tell me all about yourself, all about Conductor, the good things that you all are doing. Of course. Yeah, so my name is Lindsay Boyajian-Hagan. I am the head of marketing at Conductor. For those that may not know Conductor, our roots are in search. We've been around for 10 plus years and we have deep expertise at SEO. And as the SEO and search space has evolved, so has Conductor. And so today we're the leading enterprise AEO, so AI search optimization platform, that's really designed to be end-to-end. So meaning we help you from everything from measuring your AI visibility and traditional search visibility to creating content that will be visible in search, to also monitoring and measuring that across your website. So before we really dig in, one of the things that we've been talking about on this show is, what are we calling it? So are you all settled on AEO and not like... We are settled on AEO, yes. Okay, I'm just... It's just all... There is a debate online about it. But no, we've explored AEO, AIO, GEO, AI search, all of the acronyms and we've settled on AEO. It's what our customers are using. We really believe in using the customer voice when it comes to naming conventions. So we did a lot of research and talking to folks and AEO seems to be the best for folks. Yeah, I think that one makes the most sense. But I've heard it called everything under the sun at this point. Correct. And I'm sure that won't stop anytime soon as the space continues to evolve. Yeah. So for anyone not living in the weeds of SEO or AEO, what's happening behind the scenes when AI overviews or answer engines pull responses? Yeah, great question. So, I mean, similar to Google in a lot of ways and sort of what we know from traditional search, but when someone puts in a prompt, the AI bots go out. And so whether that's chat GPT or perplexity and they go and look for the best answer. And they have their training data, but they're also now going out in real time and looking across the internet, across all the different websites to find the best answer on the topic. And so bots are calling for brands, your sites and trying to find the most relevant answer. So it's super important for brands to ensure that they have relevant topical content across their own properties, own web properties. So when AI bots go out and find answers for their customers, they're either the ones that are cited. So meaning that they're sort of the source in the fine print or they're actually named in the answer. So I have a lot of questions. I have so many. So let me, my first one, we have like, we're used for traditional featured snippets. So how are the sources for those chosen compared to how an AI search engine is picking answers? Yeah, so it's very, I mean, it's very similar in that Google and chat GPT and perplexity and cloud, they're all looking for the best answers. And they're looking for the most authoritative sources to help folks give answers. So when those bots are going out and looking for the answers, they're going out and looking for really relevant, high quality content. And so the, we like to say the, I'd say the foundations and pillars of good SEO and the things you were doing in Google to rank on the top one, two, three spots in the old world of Google, which is still very relevant, are the same sort of principles that will help you with AI. The big difference with AI is the volume and the depth. So in the world of AI, if you think about prompts or you think about a keyword. So in the past, let's say you and I were both looking for running shoes, Casey, we would both probably search best running shoes. Now, when we go into AI, we're both gonna search something super different. I'm gonna type in probably a 20 to 30 word prompt that's very different than your 20 or 30 word prompt. And that means AI needs more content than ever before. And so for brands, the implication is that we need to be creating more content across more personas with more depth and expertise to help AI and ensure that AI has the answer and is finding the answer on our site. What's happening a lot is that AI is kind of starved for content in a lot of ways. So it's going to places like Reddit and Quora and different sort of forums to sort answers. And that's really not an indicator that Reddit necessarily has the best answers, but it's an indicator that AI is looking for authoritative content. And so for us as brands, it's a huge opportunity for us to be creating content around topics that our brand is an authority in and has a point of view around. Yeah, I do remember when AI, maybe it was Google's AI was telling everyone that pizza dough is made out of glue and it came from a comment on Reddit somewhere. So with that in mind, like what role does semantic relevance play versus domain authority in these new AI driven answers? Yeah, it's a great question. So I would say from a, if you think about the old world of keywords, when you thought about SEO, keywords were really basic in that it was basically keyword matching. So you would try to, it would sort of match together different keywords, find different keywords on your webpage, but AI is really smart. And so what AI can do is it basically maps different, can map different topics that have similar intent and authority. So it's not just basic keyword mapping. I like to think about it, you can almost think about it as like a 3D kind of GPS coordinate map of like, if you have a topic like dog in the old world, the keyword world, dog and cat are different keywords. So those wouldn't be necessarily mapped close together. But in the world of AI, if you're searching something around dog, maybe you're also searching something around cats and it knows the semantic relevance of it. So as brands, it's super, super important for us to start building topical domain, topical authority around our domain. Because when we start to build topical authority around different subjects and topics related to our brand, AI then knows, okay, conductor, they have all this amazing content around AEO. They are experts in AEO. So I can trust their content around this space. What we saw is when the rise of AI, a lot of brands actually got dinged because they had a ton and ton of content, but the content was really thin. So not a lot of depth to that content. And the content wasn't really related to their core area of expertise. So really when AI went out and said, who's the authority on this? It wasn't the brand that was creating content. They were just creating content for ranking purposes. So for us as brands, it's super important that we're creating a lot of kind of deep content around specific topics, but also making sure that we have sort of the breadth of topic coverage. And so a conductor, that's a lot of what we do in our product is we have AI topic maps where it actually shows you where you have opportunities to, in a really visual way, where you have opportunities and gaps in your topical authority. Yeah, so going back to the audience persona in for a second, which kind of ties into the topical authority, should you be thinking about your content pillars in terms of the people within your audience? So if we're talking about running shoes, we're thinking about people that might be thinking about running, then we have the serious marathoners. So should you map out your content pillars according to who's reading? Sorry, Casey, you cut out for a minute there. Do you mind just asking that question? Yeah, sure. So I was thinking about the audience personas that we just mentioned a minute ago. So if we're thinking about the running shoes, so we have, because I'm also a runner. So if we have people that are just sort of thinking about running, like maybe their prompt is best running shoes for a 5K. And then we have marathoners who need something that's going to hold up for all 26.2 miles. Should you think about your content pillars in terms of who's actually reading and then create the content around that? Is that the suggestion? Absolutely. So you certainly should be thinking about all of the new personas and mapping your content along those journeys and ensuring that if you're a running shoe company, that you have content and also your product descriptions are capturing all those different personas and use cases because AI is going to go out to your website and say, okay, what's the best running shoe for expert marathon runners? And if your content or your product descriptions and product pages don't have any of that content, it's going to be really hard for AI to know and cite your product. And especially in the world where now shopping, Tattoo BT, I think you may have seen a couple of weeks ago, released that they are going to have now checkout functionality. Really, really cool. So they partnered with Etsy and Stripe and I forget one other vendor around checkout capabilities. And so with that, it's even more critical that, especially for retailers, that they have really, really in-depth sort of product data and depth of product information on their pages. So the AI has all the detail around the products. And so it sounds like for brands that are noticing they're not getting pulled into AI search or AO, whatever we want to call it, answer engines, it's time to like really dig in to all of your content out there and just make it a little bit deeper than what we have. Absolutely. So I think there's probably, there's a few things that I would recommend. One is exactly, make sure that the content that you're creating has a lot of depth to it. So what you'll probably notice if you start looking at your content and maybe your content that's not doing as well as it was doing, let's say over the last six months, those are probably good pieces of content to start adding a lot of depth to. So more expertise, more originality, more data, more quotes, all of that's super important. It's not just about creating longer pieces of content in chat GBT, it needs to be unique and have a point of view. So it's about the quality of the content too. So absolutely go deeper. Two, you may also want to consider pruning some content. If you have a lot of content that's maybe tangentially related to your business, it's not doing really well, it's a good opportunity to go in and prune, which is an exercise that I think a lot of us always are pushing out. Oh, I know I have to prune some content, but this is a good opportunity to do that. And I think the third thing to think about is also technically structuring your content. So I'm sure folks have heard about schema, but it's basically all the stuff on the back end of your content that's kind of telling the bots and making it really easy for the bots to read and understand what's in the content. Schema and having a really well-structured technically piece of content, technically well-structured is super important too, because you want it to be easy for the AI bots to read and understand. So if maybe you're not as, you don't feel like your content is as technically sound as it could be, this is also a great opportunity to juice that up a bit as well. Yeah, so we've talked about that a couple of times on a couple of different episodes. What are you noticing with the different kinds of schema that you can put that AI is picking up? Like someone mentioned author schema and having your name on every piece, FAQs, we've talked about those a lot. Are you noticing anything different? Those are certainly two of the big ones. Author and author profile pages are really important because again, when AI goes to your site, you really want it to know that it's coming from an actual person that's authoritative on the topic. And so having author schema and author profiles are really important. So don't just have a piece of content that's posted without that. If you can add an author to it, that's amazing. And then FAQs are a great way to add structure. We've seen that being really successful. Comparison pages right now are doing really well in ChatGBT. So you versus competitors are doing pretty well. So definitely aligned with some of your past episodes. Yeah, so are there any other types of content that's getting cited more than the others? So how to guide, we know those comparison pages are, is there anything else that we're missing? I'd say the big thing is making, research and data does really well. Obviously in AI, again, AI is starving for content. It's not just looking for kind of, I'd say generic content, it's looking for unique content. So anything with research or data or from a quote from an author or a subject matter expert internally, all of that type of kind of content and unique perspective certainly helps. We always say sort of the conductor that our job as content creators is actually to go into our businesses and find the wisdom and like extract it and activate it in our content. And so that's even more important with AI because we have so many SMEs in our businesses. Every single business has researchers and sellers who are talking to folks. It's our job as the creators to go kind of extract the wisdom from those folks and turn that into content that can't just be replicated in a really generic chat GBT article. Right, so EEAT is still applies here. Absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And we definitely say that to our customers. Do not forget about EAT. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I've called it EAT. I've called it EAT. It's another one of those things that everyone calls it something different. So just out of curiosity, because I know when I'm given like a content brief from a client that, hey, go source some quotes, how many quotes are you adding or do you see as effective per article? Like one that just kind of informs the whole thing with like five or six quotes, like one quote is good. What do you think? You want to, it depends a bit on the length of the article and the subject matter. So it's hard to give a blanket statement, but you do want it to have authority. So more than one quote is probably something I would recommend. Again, when you want the piece to have, feel like it has an authoritative sort of bend to it. So it's important to not only have just sort of one quote, but especially if you don't have research or anything else sort of unique in it, quotes are a great way throughout the article to give it some of that authority. Yeah. Okay. So two more questions. Oh, of course. Yeah. Are you seeing brands change their content strategies to target those aims for engine visibility or are they still kind of sticking towards SEO? And I know that might be like a kind of out there question since SEO is kind of the backbone of AEO, but what are we moving towards? No, it's a really good question. And we get that question all the time. Like, should I stop at SEO? And it's like, one, you don't stop SEO because I think you just said it really well, Casey. SEO is the backbone for AEO. But two, AEO is sort of, I think, a challenge or an opportunity for us to almost step up our SEO game because to compete in AEO, you have to be creating more content and more high quality content at scale, which requires a system. It requires teams. It requires more processes. I think a lot of times with SEO, you could kind of get away with doing a lot of stuff manually and you could get away with maybe just managing it all in like a spreadsheet. But we're talking about much more quantity content that we have to be creating and much more scale, again, with much more depth. And so that's going to require technology and systems and ways to help you prioritize and ways to help you create really unique content. And again, at Conductor, that's a lot of what we spend our time doing in our product is how can we help our customers create more, not just kind of, we call it AI slop, but more high quality content at scale using and having different folks on their team actually contributing to that, the content creation process. Okay. So if I am listening to this podcast as someone who is a content team of one, and I just heard you say that, my immediate question is, how do I do that as a one person team? What would you suggest? Yeah, I think the key is looking, one is using the right technology. So there's a ton of, I think, when you think about creating content with AI, and we get this question all the time, is AI content good? Is it bad? And it's not that binary. It's really, how do you use the AI? And there's a few things that make AI content good. It's one, are you using deep expert prompts? So very simple prompts are going to get you really simple content output. So do you have really good prompt engineering in the background? And again, tools like Conductor and other tools out there can help you with that. But is your prompt engineering really good? Are you using RAG? So is the AI that you're using going out and pulling relevant information in real time to help augment the content that you're creating? And then three, are you infusing your brand guidelines, your own wisdom, your internal documentation into the AI so it's actually creating unique content? So it's sort of a recipe. You can use AI, but you need sort of all the pieces of the recipe to get really good AI generated content. You need the really good prompt engineering. You need RAG or context engineering what folks are calling it now. And then you also need your brand wisdom and your like knowledge-based documents to help inform the content creation. And so as a team of one, if you have all of that going into AI, you will actually get some really good content outputs that will help you show up and be visible in AI. So I'd say being a team of one is actually not the scary daunting thing. You have AI, it's just how are you using AI and making sure you're using it effectively to scale what you're doing is super important. And again, there's a lot of technology out there that can help you create really good website content. Okay, I lied. I have two more questions now. I love it. We're talking about content output and like we need more high quality content. So for many brands, like two to four blog posts a month was kind of covering it for SEO purposes. Do you have guidelines on how many we should be pushing out now? Is two to four still the recommendation? Should we go up a little bit higher? Two to four is definitely not enough. So you should be thinking about increasing that pretty dramatically. Again, it depends a little bit on your brand and the topic areas and all the different topic areas you wanna cover. But I'd say the old world of two to four, no longer works. It's just not enough content for the amount of prompts that are happening right now. And so as a brand, it's really important to think about how can you kind of exponentially, maybe even 10X that content output per month, which sounds really scary. But again, if you're using AI, that can help you. And then for a lot of brands that we work with, they're enterprise. So one of their biggest hurdles actually isn't the content output itself. It's the legal and regulations and compliance and governance processes that really slow it down. So a lot of what our customers are focused on is how can we partner with our internal teams to help expedite some of those improval processes that may have been okay for SEO, but are now too slow and are gonna start impacting your AI visibility pretty dramatically. Yeah. So we've kind of talked about on past episodes that user behavior when it comes to search, slowly shifting more towards like AI search engines. Maybe people outside of the industry are still using Google, but if you had to choose between chasing traditional rankings or AI visibility right now, where would you put your focus? We've talked about this a little bit. It's not mutually exclusive, which is the nice thing. Again, your SEO backbone and foundations are going to help you in AEO. But I would say now is a great time to start really focusing and doubling down on AEO because everything you do in AEO is going to help you across different surfaces. Google's moving towards an AI only world with Gemini and across all of its different surfaces. Same with chat, TBT and perplexity. So although today, maybe only 1% of traffic or so is coming from the AI engines, it's growing exponentially every single month. And so it's super important, I think for folks right now to be thinking about their AEO visibility and putting strategies in place. And I think the good news for brands is like maybe brands feel like they're behind or folks feel like they're behind on SEO. But the good news is you can make up a lot of ground because this is new in a lot of ways. So having a good strategy for AEO with again, those SEO fundamentals, you can get started today and still do really, really well, which is exciting. And I think a lot of folks feel like they're really behind in SEO, but this is actually a great opportunity for folks. That was Lindsay from Conductor. Listen, I'm officially becoming a real podcaster now and I've got episodes recorded ahead of time. Lindsay and I had this conversation back in mid-October and I've been digesting her tips ever since. Her insights about audience personas, simple, simple, but so stinking profound. I've been thinking about this more than I like to admit. So here's your experiment for the week. Stop thinking about your personas as slide deck profiles. Instead, start thinking about them as prompts. For example, if we're going back to those runners, let's say you sell running shoes online, what would your beginner runner type into chat TPT? Like specifically the one who signed up for a 5k at Thanksgiving. Compared to what they're asking to the marathon runner, these are two totally different types of runners and they have different questions and different needs. If your content can't answer both, you're invisible to half of your audience. And unfortunately, you're also invisible to AI. So as Lindsay said, the brands that win an AI search are the ones that are mapping depth to every persona, not just top of the funnel awareness. I'm Cassie Clark. This is Sound and AI. If you need help with your content strategy, you know where to find me. Head over to LinkedIn or at cassieclarkmarketing.com and just send me a little message. And remember, personas aren't demographics anymore. They're how AI decides who gets seen when someone has a question. I'll see you next week.