One of the most interesting sessions I attended at Unbound 2026 was about HubSpot's own experiments with AEO and the results. It was an excellent session because the presenter Amanda Kopen didn't go on about how their team is an absolute expert at AEO. Instead, she explained how at HubSpot, they experimented with a few key strategies around AEO and how they each fared.
The way buyers are discovering businesses has fundamentally changed in the last 3 years - essential since ChatGPT became mainstream with 100 million MAU (Monthly Active Users). Within 2 years since 2023, Google was forced to rollout its own AI answers inside the search while ChatGPT's MAU grew to 1 Billion.
Many business that rely heavily on SERPs were suddenly caught off guard as their Impressions soared but clicks dropped. In many cases, the impressions dropped too. The reason - The users that were their web visitors were now getting answers and recommendation with Google's AI answers or they are completely skipping the traditional search and going to their favorite AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. So even though the Search has fundamentally changed, the marketers still need to generate demand - and this is where AEO comes in.
AEO is the practice of optimizing or improving how often or how accurately a brand appears in the AI-generated answers. The idea being - the brand gets cited in answers for either its content authority of product/services excellence. While this may not lead directly to clicks in the traditional sense, the buyers, carrying a high intent become aware of the brand and are more likely to trust. This is because they are already one step further than a traditional keyword search.
For a research mode and to explore findings, a technical and a content was deployed. In practice however, a one time technical set up plus a regular content team/individual is sufficient as long as they are aware of the best practices.
Goals
FAQs is already a much talked about strategy and glossary takes it a step further. A glossary of relevant terms would generally improve AIOs, citations, and mentions in AI answers. This works because AI engines look for semantic relevance to come up with answers.
Pro tip: When creating FAQs or any such structured content on your pages, make sure to use schema tags.
This strategy is based on the hypothesis that we can reclaim citations from hallucinated URLs. As good as they are, LLMs still hallucinate - sometimes to the extent that they produce made up URLs on a domain with subject matter authority. This can lead to citations links leading to 404 errors.
The possible solution is to reclaim this citation credit. Reclaim AI-hallucinated URLs by building a dynamic 404 module that routes this “ghost” traffic to real pages, recovering thousands of views and signups.
HubSpot's team noticed a jump of at least 1000 additional signups that would otherwise be 404 or ghost traffic with no value
For many companies, the pricing of a product or service depends on a number of factors like sign-up term, quantity, bundling etc. A very typical tendency is to use a dynamic JavaScript component to render the correct price for the options selected by the user. While this is great for User experience, it's not ideal for a bot looking at your site - they will not interact with the elements to discover the pricing that they need. They will read the initial render and display the price in an AI summary or in an answer.
Example - the base price of your SaaS product is $50/month but if a user signs up for 12 months, you offer it at $500 instead of $600. The user has to choose an annual term to see the discounted price. An LLM is very likely to display the headline price of $50 without exploring annual price options. So, the user looking at an AI answer will never know that a discounted option is available
This invisible conversion problem can directly hurt your funnel.
Solution - create text modules or sections on your pricing page explaining all pricing options in text format. This could include any term-based discounts, onboarding fees, incidental charges, taxes etc. Make sure that the pricing in these sections is up to date and un sync with your actual offers at all times
While your products/services and offers pages include all information at a high level, the buyers would sometime look for more specific solution or combinations. A buyer could be asking AI - "what is the best ERP system for my supply chain business". An AI bot crawling your pages will find the high level information but having an industry specific or location specific page will be more cited in the answers as it is closer to solving the user's specific problem.
HubSpot observed an increased crawl of such specific pages including a 92% jump in citation of these pages
At The Web Plant, we have also noticed a similar result very successfully. One of the websites built by us beebuddy.in lists after school classes for kids. While doing SEO and AEO, we created "location x category" pages. These pages have shown great success in AEO as well AEO. We have seen increased citations and traffic
Pre-rendering the content on your web pages will improve crawl efficiency and eligibility for citations. This matters because AI crawlers aren't as adept as Google's search crawlers to read and process CSR content and would prioritize SSR i.e. content pre-rendered on a page. Such content becomes readable without any additional user action or javascript execution.
When the AI bots notice more readily readable content, the site gets crawled more often. With pre-rendered content there are several other factors that improve like:
The idea behind LLMs.txt file is to make the content more accessible to LLMs in an attempt to get better AI visibility. LLM crawlers are relatively new and behave differently from traditional search crawlers.
In our observation of multiple sites and brands, we have not seen any measurable impact of this file. While it doesn't hurt to add the file, do not expect any noticeable or drastic changes in your AI citations.
How accurate are the responses in ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI mode are for target queres
Ensure you’re listed in 3rd party directories.
Confirm you have a presence on review sites and that your reputation is positive.
Secure spots in best-of guide
Be active in online communities to establish expertise and authority.
Invest in affiliate/partnership marketing
Ensure your product pages & pricing pages are comprehensive and up-to-date
Remove javascript from your most valuable pages
Use a prerendering site
Add schema to your pages
Monitor if your pages get indexed quickly and stay indexed
Monitor the crawl frequency of your pages
Mention your company or brand in Top Of Funnel content