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
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.