Most companies have spent years optimizing for Google. They've built pages, earned backlinks, and tracked rankings. And that still matters. But a growing portion of buying decisions now start somewhere else entirely; ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google's AI Overview. When someone opens one of these tools and asks for a recommendation, they don't get a list of ten options to evaluate. They get one answer. One platform named as the solution to their problem. If that answer doesn't include you, it includes your competitor, and the buyer may never look further.
This is not a future problem. It's happening right now, and most companies in most industries have no presence in AI answers at all.
Research by Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, one of the world's leading growth agencies and a company we work with directly, shows that AI now receives 45 billion monthly sessions worldwide. That's 56% the size of traditional search. ChatGPT alone commands 20% of global search traffic when you account for both web and mobile usage. In the US, AI usage grew 300% between December 2024 and December 2025.
83% of AI usage happens on mobile apps, which means the vast majority of people asking AI tools for recommendations are doing it on their phone, in the moment, looking for a fast and confident answer.
Search hasn't died. The pie has gotten bigger. But the way people find answers has fundamentally changed. Google still matters. AI matters more every month. And the companies that show up in both are the ones that are hardest to displace.
The window to get in early is still open. It won't be for long.
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making sure your brand shows up when AI tools answer questions your buyers are asking.
The difference from traditional SEO is straightforward. SEO is about ranking in a list. AEO is about being the answer. When someone types a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity, they don't get ten blue links, they get one synthesized response, drawn from multiple sources the AI considers authoritative and relevant. Getting into that response requires content that is structured differently, written with a different intent, and supported by mentions across more than just your own website.
The brands that consistently appear in AI answers share a few things in common.
Their content leads with the answer rather than building up to it.It's structured clearly: short paragraphs, direct definitions, comparison tables, specific numbers. It covers the questions buyers actually ask AI tools, not just the keywords they type into Google. And it appears across multiple sources: their own site, YouTube, Reddit threads, comparison pages, third-party content, so that AI tools have enough signals from enough places to confidently surface them as a relevant answer.
Building that presence is what we do. It's not a quick fix and it's not a single piece of content. It's a system built over time, and the earlier you start, the harder your position becomes to displace.
The first step is always an audit. Before we write anything, we go through your existing website, blog, help center, and resource content to understand what's there, how it's structured, and where the gaps are. Most companies already have more raw material than they realize, it just hasn't been written or structured in a way that AI tools can extract from easily.
What we look for specifically:
Content that buries the answer. A blog post that spends three paragraphs on context before getting to the point is a blog post AI tools will skip over. We identify every piece of content where the answer arrives too late and rewrite it so the most important information comes first.
Content written for the wrong audience. Help center articles are the most common example. Most help center content is written for existing users who already bought the product. It assumes context, uses internal terminology, and focuses on how to use a feature rather than what the feature does and why it matters. But when a prospect asks an AI tool "does this platform support WhatsApp monitoring" or "how does this tool handle multi-language sentiment," the AI may pull directly from the help center to answer. If that content reads like an onboarding guide, it's working against you at exactly the moment it should be working for you. We rewrite help center articles to serve both audiences, clear enough for existing users, compelling enough to influence a prospect who's still deciding.
Missing comparison content. Queries like "best platform for X," "tool A vs tool B," and "alternative to Z" are among the most common searches buyers run through AI tools in the final stages of a decision. These are people who are close to choosing, they just want confirmation they're making the right call. A well-structured comparison page that directly addresses these queries gets surfaced repeatedly across multiple AI tools and drives qualified traffic long after it's published. We identify which comparisons are most relevant for your business and build pages specifically designed to capture that intent.
Missing use-case and industry content. AI tools increasingly match content to the specific context of a search. A buyer at a bank asking about a customer experience platform gets different results than a buyer at a logistics company asking the same question. Industry-specific and use-case-specific content performs significantly better in AI answers than generic product descriptions. We identify the verticals that matter most for your business and build content that speaks directly to each one.
Stat-rich content. AI models favor specific, citable numbers over general claims. If your content says "our platform improves customer satisfaction" it gets ignored. If it says "clients using our platform have seen a 238% improvement in positive sentiment" it gets cited. We build content around your real numbers, such as case study outcomes, product benchmarks, customer results, because those are the claims AI tools reference and repeat.
Everything we produce is delivered ready to publish.
Your own website is only one source. AI tools don't build their answers from a single place, they synthesize from everywhere. Reddit threads, third-party reviews, community discussions, YouTube content, industry publications. The more places your brand appears in the context of a relevant question, the more consistently and confidently AI tools surface you as an answer.
When a buyer is evaluating enterprise software, they don't just look at the vendor's website. They go to Reddit. They want to know what real users in similar roles and companies actually think. Reddit threads consistently rank on the first page of Google for searches. AI tools pull from Reddit heavily because it's exactly the kind of genuine, third-party, human signal they're designed to trust.
We monitor relevant subreddits continuously specific to your industry. When a thread appears where your product is relevant, a software comparison, a tool recommendation request, a question about a problem your product solves, we contribute a genuine, useful response. Not a promotional post. Not a link drop. A real answer written from scratch that earns your brand a mention naturally in a conversation that was already happening.
Every contribution is written by hand. Reddit communities are highly attuned to inauthenticity, a low-quality, AI or obviously promotional comment gets flagged, downvoted, or removed, and it damages the brand rather than building it. The only approach that works is genuine contribution, done consistently over time.
Done correctly this compounds significantly. Threads get upvoted, rank on Google for relevant searches, and get referenced in future threads. A single well-placed contribution in the right discussion can drive visibility and qualified traffic for years.
YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Google owns it. And AI tools, particularly Google's AI Overview and Gemini, increasingly pull from YouTube content when answering questions about software, tools, and processes. Most SaaS companies underinvest here, which means the competitive gap is wide open for the ones that show up consistently.
AI doesn't care about production value. It reads transcripts, titles, descriptions, and chapter markers. A clear screen recording walkthrough with a structured description carries the same AEO weight as an expensive produced video, sometimes more, because it's more specific and extractable.
We develop your YouTube content strategy. That means identifying the topics your buyers are searching for, writing titles that match how they actually search, crafting descriptions that function as keyword-rich summaries indexed by both YouTube and Google, and structuring chapter markers so AI tools can extract specific sections cleanly. The production stays with your team. The strategy, titles, descriptions, and structure are ours.
On-site content gives AI tools authoritative, structured material to pull from directly. Off-site mentions, such as Reddit contributions, YouTube content, third-party citations, give AI tools the signals that your brand is a trusted, widely-referenced answer to a specific problem. One without the other produces partial results.
On-site without off-site means AI tools have good content to pull from but limited signals that it's trustworthy or widely relevant. Off-site without on-site means there are mentions across the web but no authoritative home base to anchor them to. Together they reinforce each other — every new piece of on-site content gives the off-site mentions something to point to, and every off-site mention gives the on-site content more authority. Over time, as both accumulate, the position compounds and becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to displace.
Strategy without execution is just a document. The content we produce, the landing pages we build, the comparison pages, the help center rewrites, all of it needs a technical home that's fast, structured correctly for AI extraction, and easy to update without a development bottleneck slowing everything down.
That's where Webflow comes in. And it's where we have a significant advantage over most agencies doing this kind of work.
Ebda is a certified Webflow Premium Partner. We don't just recommend Webflow, we build in it every day, for high-growth SaaS companies, enterprise platforms, and fast-moving startups that need their website to keep pace with their strategy. We have built and launched over 200 projects in Webflow, working alongside world-class agencies including Graphite and Pacific, for companies including Webflow itself, Adobe, Linktree, Boku, and others.
When we identify a content gap that needs filling, a comparison page that needs building, or a help center article that needs restructuring and republishing, we build and publish it directly. The same team doing the AEO strategy is the same team building the pages. That's not how most agencies work. It's how we work.
For AEO specifically, the technical build matters more than most people realize. Page structure, heading hierarchy, internal linking, load speed, schema markup, and content formatting all affect how AI tools read, parse, and extract information from your site. A page that looks good visually but is built incorrectly under the hood is a page that AI tools struggle to process cleanly. We build pages that are structurally sound, technically fast, and formatted in a way that makes it straightforward for AI to identify and cite the right information.
If your website is already on Webflow, we work directly inside it. If it isn't, we can build standalone pages that integrate cleanly with your existing setup or advise on what a migration would look like.
Companies with a real product and a considered buying process. SaaS platforms, enterprise software, professional services — any business where the buyer researches before they decide, compares options before they commit, and where showing up in the right place at the right moment actually changes the outcome.
If your buyers are the kind of people who ask AI tools for recommendations before they ever fill out a demo form, and increasingly, they are, this is directly relevant to you. The question is whether they find you or someone else when they ask.
We work with Graphite, Ethan Smith's growth agency, behind AEO strategies for some of the world's fastest-growing companies including Webflow, Adobe, and Upwork. We work with them directly, which means the methodology we bring to this isn't something we read about and applied at a distance. It's something we work inside on a regular basis. That relationship informs how we approach every client engagement.
Every piece of content is researched and written by us. Every Reddit contribution is written by hand, in the right context, in the right thread, as a genuine response to a real conversation. There is no AI-generated content posted at scale. The work takes longer that way. It also actually works, and it holds up over time in a way that shortcuts don't.
As a Webflow Premium Partner, we bring technical execution to everything we do, so strategy and build happen in the same place, with the same team, without the gaps that slow most agencies down and cause strategies to stall between planning and publication.
If your buyers are searching for what you do and not finding you, in AI tools, in Google, or in the communities where real buying decisions get made, that's a fixable problem.
