Tagged: answer-engine-optimization
7 results
Why Your Company Doesn't Exist to ChatGPT Yet
A field report on the quiet reason mid-sized companies vanish from AI answers: not quality, not product, not people, but publishing cadence. Salesforce and Microsoft publish daily. Most companies publish quarterly. The models cite what exists, and the rest becomes a guess.
AthenaHQ
AthenaHQ is a San Francisco AI-search optimization platform that helps brands see, measure, and improve how they appear inside generative engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini. Founded in 2025 by ex-Google Search and DeepMind PM Andrew Yan and ex-ServiceNow engineer Alan Yao, the Y Combinator-backed company treats GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as the successor to traditional SEO, analyzing millions of AI responses to tell companies whether AI models recommend them - and what to change if they don't.
The Dashboard and the Printing Press: How Profound and YesPress Split the Job of Being Seen by a Machine
A head-to-head look at two companies fighting the same war from opposite trenches. Profound is the instrument panel — it measures how ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity talk about your brand. YesPress is the printing press — it manufactures the citable, on-the-record stories those engines actually quote. One tells you the score; the other puts points on the board. For scaleups, B2B startups, enterprise sales teams and employer-branding leaders, the two are less rivals than a dashboard and an engine bolted into the same machine.
The Ten Blue Links Are Dead. Long Live the One Answer.
For twenty years businesses fought for the click: rank #1, get the traffic, win the customer. That war is ending. Millions of buying decisions now begin inside ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, where AI doesn't return ten blue links but a shortlist of a handful of recommendations, sometimes only one. This piece argues that the winners of the next five years won't have better SEO, they'll own the conversations AI has with their market by becoming the most credible, useful, and trustworthy source on the topics buyers care about. It offers a concrete exercise: write down the 25 questions your ideal customer asks before buying, ask the AI, and see whether you appear at all.
Ethan Smith
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite and a veteran SEO expert, breaks down answer engine optimization (AEO) - the practice of getting your product to show up inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. He explains why AEO is the second-biggest shift in his 18-year SEO career, how it differs from traditional SEO (the head and the tail are different), why being mentioned most often across citations matters more than ranking first, and shares a tactical seven-step playbook covering question research, tracking, landing pages, and off-site citation strategies across YouTube, Reddit, and affiliates. He also debunks widespread AEO misinformation and warns of the dangers of AI-generated content and model collapse.
The Machines Are Reading. YesPress Decided to Give Them the Facts.
As AI answer engines replace the ten blue links, being cited beats being ranked. This YesPress story unpacks Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — the practice of structuring content at the fact level so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews quote you verbatim — and explains why YesPress builds verified, machine-legible profiles so generative engines cite confirmed facts about founders and companies instead of half-remembered ones.
Marcel Santilli
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.