Where should we begin? A prelude to AEO Wrangler
Before I get to the core of my thesis for AEO Wrangler, let’s talk a bit about AI. It has educated me, it helps me figure out recipes, and I am a better father to my plants. And most of all, I use it for marketing. Every single day. The perception of AI is that it can make one lazy. But if you have just a bit of curiosity, I find that it is a rapid-fire learning accelerator.
My key employees are Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. I say please and thank you, and even scold them a bit when they take a wrong turn. Sometimes I argue with them when I disagree. My wife reminds me to stop burning credits on Claude explaining why I was right when Claude was wrong. I am hoping that like my children, it will learn from its mistakes if I correct it.
You hear it and see it every day: AI is dehumanizing how we communicate and making us all sound like robots. Or worse, to the chagrin of professional writers, it makes people who do not have strong writing skills more prolific. And it is not only writing. There is a widely held fear that AI will make everything in marketing more synthetic. One of my favorite LinkedIn writers (Frank Kalman) is a talented professional writer who argues convincingly that AI is a tool that helps writers without replacing them. I think this idea extends into many areas of creativity.
So, why AEO Wrangler?
As a veteran marketer, I started this journey to figure out how to get noticed in AEO. I assumed AI visibility was another version of SEO and I could just plug keywords into a page, get some backlinks and cruise to a solid Google ranking. No offense to SEO pros; I know it is not that easy.
But I found that getting in the head of AI tools is not easy. I felt like an AI anthropologist sometimes, having to work backwards from AI mentions to figure out how they got there. There was no solid guidebook on how to do this, so I wrote one. Then I updated it. And I was still just scratching the surface.
There is a lot of information available and skilled practitioners. I’m grateful for the openness in how others shared information. People like Danny Kirk and Keven Ellison are excited about the possibilities and were kind enough to share their time with me to refine my thinking on this topic. Danny told me that ‘there is enough work for all of us’ and I believe it. I want to extend this notion by sharing skills and tools that I pick up on my journey with others. The idea behind AEO Wrangler is not to hoard information and build a moat with AEO practices; rather, it is to learn how to apply these practices and do the hard work of execution.
I ran case studies for the CAD and MES industries to develop my process. But what helped to validate and refine my thinking was the opportunity to work with an amazing startup in the healthcare billing industry (look for a case study someday soon) and take them from zero AI visibility to a solid 8 on the inside-out perspective. Check out the AEO Maturity Model I developed. Those lessons are baked into what we do at AEO Wrangler.
So, what is my thesis? AI is the catalyst for a marketing renaissance. It makes marketing more human, not less. Over the past ten years, we marketers have been fighting to get resources for messaging and branding. Instead, we have often been asked to focus on demand harvesting rather than demand creation. AEO changes the equation. It rewards authenticity, relies on trust signals, and is very happy when you can provide your information in a language it clearly understands.
And yes, my friend Claude helped with this post. All opinions and mistakes are mine and mine alone. Let's do this.
The Buyer (remember them?) is who matters
When a buyer asks an AI model for a vendor recommendation or how to solve a problem, the model draws on everything it has learned about the topic and the company. If a company has relevance, credibility, consistency in messaging, and depth, it stands a good chance of showing up. If it has a structured way of delivering this information, it has a substantially better chance of showing up. The companies that show up are usually companies that have built something real and actually have a unique point of view. If we boil this down, it translates to two things:
- Strong brand and reputation
- Speaking the language of AI via structured models.
Branding and reputation are back and buyers now have better tools to cut through the noise, and find companies that align with their needs.
As a marketer, this means that performance marketing is not the only focal point anymore. Yes, it is crazy important. But it reinforces the importance of an integrated marketing approach. AEO is more than a marketing discipline, it deserves to be the centerpiece of your marketing strategy.
AI search is, ironically, one of the most powerful forces for authentic marketing that the industry has seen in years. It rewards substance over shortcuts, depth over volume, and clarity over noise. That is the irony at the heart of AEO: the technology most people associate with artificiality is demanding more human authenticity than ever.
And is that not what buyers deserve?
What changed, and what did not
For much of the past decade, B2B marketing drifted toward performance mechanics. Lead-gen funnels, keyword optimization, engagement rates: tactics that were measurable, optimizable, and often disconnected from the harder question of whether we were building something worth finding. Marketing rolling up to CROs has amplified this shift. Don’t get me wrong; marketing should always have accountability for revenue. In the CRO-leads-marketing world, we just need to make sure that long-term success can be constructed while delivering short-term gains.
AI search changes the calculus. Large language models do not respond to keyword density or backlink counts the way traditional search algorithms do. They respond to coherence, credibility, and expertise. A company with consistent messaging, structured content, and genuine authority in its category will outperform a company with better tactics and a weaker foundation, every time.
SEO still matters. Lead generation still matters. Paid media still matters. They all work better, and compound faster, when the foundation is solid. AEO is the discipline that builds that foundation. It is a profound change that places AEO at the top of marketing objectives that other tactics support.
Why shortcuts fail in AI search
Traditional search rewarded behaviors that often had little to do with genuine quality. Keyword stuffing worked, until it did not. Link schemes worked, until they did not. Each algorithm update was a ratchet toward quality, but the ratchet moved slowly and the shortcuts had a long runway.
AI search compresses that timeline dramatically. A language model does not scan a page for keyword frequency. It reads the page, synthesizes it against everything else it knows, and decides whether the content is worth citing. Thin content, inconsistent messaging, and generic positioning are immediately apparent to a model trained on the full breadth of what good and bad content looks like across the web.
The companies that are winning in AI search are not the ones who found the new version of keyword stuffing. They are the ones who built genuine expertise, published it consistently, and made it easy for AI systems to understand and trust.
The foundation that earns AI visibility
AEO Wrangler was built on a specific observation: the work that earns AI citations is the same work that always produced durable marketing results. Clear positioning. Consistent messaging. Structured content that answers real buyer questions. Earned authority from sources that matter.
What AEO adds is precision. We have learned which technical signals AI platforms use to assess credibility. We know how to structure content so retrieval systems can extract and cite it cleanly. We know how to measure AI visibility and track it over time across Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT. And we know the order in which the work should be done, because the order matters.
The foundation comes first (that’s kind of why we call it the foundation :).
- Messaging and ICP definitions: If you don’t have these documented, stop what you are doing, and write it down. I’ll wait for you…
- Ok good, now that you have the messaging and ICP definitions, we can develop a content.
- Then and only then can we build the schemas that help AI speed-read your content. And make sure that your website and other digital properties are structurally sound.
What this means for you
If you are trying to understand what to do about AI search, the answer is simpler and harder than most of what you are reading in this space.
Simpler: the work is the same work that produces durable marketing results in any channel. Build something real, explain it clearly, and publish it consistently.
Harder: that work takes longer than a technical checklist, costs more than a free audit, and requires a clear-eyed look at whether your positioning is as sharp as you think it is. And harder because the signals that AI listens to were often dismissed because they are not easy to measure.
AEO Wrangler exists for the companies that are ready to do that work. We assess where you are, close the gaps in the right order, and build AEO into your existing marketing workflows. Our goal is not to own this forever. It is to leave your team with the process, the muscle, and the methodology to run AEO as a core part of how you market.
AEO is not magic; AI rewards the marketing that was always worth doing.