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Editors note: Many thanks to reader B for this share!🌹
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Aja Frost has a simple frame for AI: it’s the new internet, and if your business isn’t findable on it, you’re already behind.
As the architect of HubSpot’s AEO strategy and the brain behind its free AEO Sensor tool, she’s built the playbooks that are now shaping how thousands of businesses think about AI visibility – and she’s got 14 million citations worth of data to back it up.
Mindstream: If you had to explain your AI philosophy in a single sentence, what would it be? How has it evolved over time?
Aja Frost: AI is the new internet: Every business needs to be findable on it.
When ChatGPT first hit the scene, it was obvious to me that it would radically change how customers discover and choose which products to use. It was less clear if businesses could influence AI. But AI is a system, and systems have logic. Once you’ve figured out the rules, you can increase your visibility.
Which human skill do you think is becoming more valuable in the AI era?
The ability to edit. Edit ideas, prompts, AI output… everything, really. I see a lot of people copying and pasting — they’ll clone their competitor’s ad; they’ll take exactly what AI gave them and hit “publish”; they’ll use a prompt they found on LinkedIn with zero changes. That’s how you get AI slop.
If you want to get differentiated, valuable, human results with AI, you need to apply a critical lens and customize it to your voice, situation, and desired outcome.
You started in SEO. What made you realize the old model was losing ground to AEO?
I don’t see AEO replacing SEO. For as long as people use Google — and the models from OpenAI, Anthropic, et al use Google search results to formulate answers — SEO will matter.
But AEO is obviously more important by the day, and HubSpot moved fast here. When ChatGPT launched, I pulled two of our most experimental marketers off their jobs and into a tiger team. The three of us met every day for several months. We had eight-plus experiments running at any given time. When a test noticeably moved our AI visibility, we scaled and standardized it.
Once the playbooks were solid, I shared them with our Product team — including the AEO tooling we’d been using to measure results. HubSpot eventually acquired that software (Xfunnel) and folded our learnings into HubSpot AEO, which went into public beta in mid-April.
Why do some brands show up in AI answers while others don’t?
AI doesn’t rank pages. It answers questions. And most brands are still optimizing for the wrong thing.
Brands that show up publish hyper-specific content that matches exactly what their buyer is asking — think “best CRM for a logistics company going digital” versus “best CRM.” They structure that content so AI can read it: shorter, focused pages that are well-organized and include original data and insights. And they build off-site presence where AI learns — Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, review sites — because brand mentions are the new backlinks.
AI is changing how people find information online. What does that mean for businesses who’ve spent years building their web presence?
That work isn’t wasted. As I said above, AI uses traditional search to find information — it just goes way deeper and narrower than most humans, who only click on the first one or two links.
Here’s a fun fact: we analyzed 14 million AI Overview and AI Mode citations, and 62% were blog posts. Your blog isn’t dead — it’s actually one of the most-cited surfaces on the internet right now.
But the job of the blog has changed. It’s no longer a destination for organic traffic. It’s now also training data, a citation source, and proof AI should recommend you.
So the answer isn’t “spin it down.” It’s “evolve.” Your blog needs to coexist with a presence on social, third party sites, etc.
How can business operators prepare for the transition to AEO?
First, start now. The transition has happened. (94% of businesses use AI in their evaluation process, according to Forrester!) Second, you can’t fix what you can’t see. Step one is figuring out where your brand currently shows up across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity — and where competitors are getting cited that you aren’t.
What does “good content” mean in the age of AI?
The bar has shifted from comprehensive to extractable. For years, “good” meant long and thorough — “the ultimate guide to X.” That’s what Google rewarded.
Now, good content answers one question completely, then connects that answer to what you actually sell. Don’t gloss over that second part; it’s what most businesses are missing right now. If your content educates without pointing toward your product, you’re training AI to be smarter without making it more likely to recommend you.
The other requirement: something only you know. AI can synthesize a thousand generic takes into one paragraph. It can’t synthesize your customer data, your team’s field experience, or your actual business results. That’s what gets cited, and again, makes a buyer likelier to put you on their shortlist.
Can you walk through a real example of content that performs well in AI answers, and why?
Our AEO guide (written by Dani Lopez and Amanda Sellers) is now the second-most cited page in the AEO space for the prompts we track.
It’s written and structured to match the way AI pulls information.
The guide opens with a TL;DR summarizing the main points. Every section leads with the answer, then expands. The SEO vs. AEO comparison table gives AI something clean to extract and quote directly. Each section stands alone — pull any paragraph out of context and it still makes complete sense.
There’s also an FAQ covering the subqueries someone typically asks alongside the main question. That’s deliberate. AI doesn’t just answer the prompt you typed — it answers a cluster of related questions. Cover the cluster and you show up more.
What’s one simple thing a small business can do this week to improve their visibility in AI tools?
Pick the top ten questions your customers ask before buying. (If you’re not sure what those are, HubSpot AEO will analyze your website and industry and suggest them for you.) Run each question through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. See which brands and websites come up.
The responses you’re not present in? That’s your week-one project. Find the most-cited source for that question and figure out how to be there next time — through a guest post, a Reddit answer, a thoughtful LinkedIn post.
You need to show up where the AI is looking.
Will websites ever matter as much as they once did, or will answers live almost entirely inside AI tools going forward?
Websites will matter more than ever… the role has just shifted.
The website’s job now is to talk to AI on your behalf — I call this B2B2C, business to bot to consumer — and to serve as your conversion engine when the consumer shows up, ready to take the next step.
Both jobs are critical. Your content feeds the agents recommending you. Your funnel converts the humans who arrive ready to buy. The websites that win the next decade will be the ones built deliberately for both.
Aja Frost is HubSpot’s senior director of global growth and a key driver behind its free AEO Sensor tool, which helps companies understand how they show up in AI search.
If you want to learn more about how AEO has replaced SEO, get our free guide on how LLMs read and understand websites!
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Rose Rambles... 