The Rise of Answer Engine Optimization
Key Takeaways
How LLMs make recommendations. Models compress the web into a consensus. Completion probabilities determine which brands get mentioned. The model isn't ranking your site, it's finding agreement across sources.
Why the search market is growing, not shrinking. Human search is roughly flat. But agents run 5+ queries per session on top of that. Total search volume is closer to 2x.
Brands vs. publishers. If you're selling a product, the buyer journey is changing but the purchases aren't. If you're monetizing traffic, that's a harder position to be in right now.
Onsite vs. offsite footprint. Classic SEO is about ranking your own site. AI search is about consensus across the web. Reddit and YouTube are influencing B2B purchase decisions.
Citation rate as a KPI. When someone explicitly queries your brand, you should be the source of truth. Map your buyer journey prompts and track who's getting cited, not just whether you're ranking.
Summary
Marcos Ciarrocchi — Co-Founder of Graphite — joins Keith Richman for a 45-minute walkthrough of Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): the discipline of getting recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
In this new world, you can make room for yourself in AI search and start winning market share while you build up authority.
Marcos Ciarrocchi, Co-Founder of Graphite
Marcos explains actionable strategies to optimize your brand for AI consensus, leverage “information gain” to stand out, and structure your website data so AI models can easily cite your products. He breaks down how to build topical authority, track AI citations, and capture high-converting referral traffic in the new agentic search era.
The conversation also digs into the numbers behind the shift: why AI referral traffic converts up to 4x higher than SEO, how “dark attribution” hides AI-influenced revenue, and why Claude referrals to B2B sites have grown roughly 5x since December. Marcos closes with a look at where this is all heading — agents researching and buying on our behalf — and what that means for marketers.
