# How to Get AI to Recommend Your Business | AEO in 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Drsq6ve7w

[00:00] There's a massive behavior shift happening right now.
[00:03] For the last 20 years, if someone wanted a product or service, they went to Google.
[00:07] And if you were a business, the game was pretty straightforward.
[00:11] You rank high, get the click, and convert that visitor into a customer.
[00:13] But now, people are asking AI what to buy.
[00:17] The answer might mention your brand.
[00:19] It might mention your competitor.
[00:20] It might talk about you positively, negatively, or it might not mention you at all.
[00:24] That's where AEO comes in.
[00:27] Answer engine optimization.
[00:29] SEO was about showing up in search results.
[00:33] AEO is about showing up in AI generated answers.
[00:35] And this is becoming a huge opportunity.
[00:37] But for a lot of businesses, these conversations are still a black box.
[00:41] So in this video, I'll show you how to see when, where, and how your brand is showing up in AI answers, what sources are influencing those answers, and what you can actually do to improve it.
[00:52] Now, since people are having these conversations with AI instead of searching, that can reduce direct website traffic, but that doesn't automatically mean fewer leads.
[00:59] When AEO
[01:02] automatically mean fewer leads.
[01:04] When AEO is done well, it can mean more better leads.
[01:06] Someone might ask, "What are the best tools for this thing?"
[01:07] And then follow up with, "Which one is better for a small team?
[01:11] Then, what are the drawbacks?
[01:13] Then, which one would you recommend?"
[01:14] By the time they click through, they may have already compared options,
[01:18] ruled out competitors, understood the trade-offs, and built trust in the recommendation.
[01:22] That's why prospects from AI sources are more likely to convert into customers.
[01:26] Three to five times more likely in some of the data if you're showing up right, of course.
[01:29] So, with AEO, you're trying to understand how AI tools describe your brand, which sources they're using to make that decision, and what you can do to influence the answer.
[01:40] So, I'll pull up Chat GBT to see what this looks like.
[01:41] And if you're testing this out for your own business, you'll want to at least open a temporary chat so it doesn't use memory features and make sure there's nothing related in your custom instructions.
[01:51] But really, this is better in a separate account that won't be swayed towards mentioning your business because it knows you.
[01:57] Let's say someone asks, "What are the best websites for finding useful AI tools for marketing, video creation, and business
[02:03] video creation, and business automation?
[02:05] automation? All right, number one. Glad that worked.
[02:07] And when I look at this answer, there are a few things I'd want to track.
[02:11] which brands are mentioned to us or a competitor and how are they being described.
[02:15] Also, I want to track which sources are being cited.
[02:17] This is how a huge amount of your customers are finding out about your product.
[02:21] You can see the sources mentioned throughout the answer.
[02:24] And at the bottom, you can click to open them all up in the side panel.
[02:26] And there's 10 sources cited for this question.
[02:30] And as you can see, a lot of these are probably sites you've never heard of.
[02:33] A lot of them are blogs and listicles.
[02:35] That's super common.
[02:37] And there are a ton of actions to be taken on that.
[02:38] I'll get to that in just a minute.
[02:41] But this is just in chat GPT.
[02:43] If I ask the same question in Gemini and in Perplexity, I'll get different answers and different sources.
[02:46] And not only that, people will ask all sorts of different questions depending on what's relevant to them or their role.
[02:51] You want to track a lot of customer questions across multiple AI tools over time.
[02:56] So, this gets complicated fast.
[02:58] You can do it manually, but that would take some time.
[03:01] So, I'm going to show you a tool that automates the whole process.
[03:03] that automates the whole process.
[03:05] It helps identify the kinds of questions your customers are asking, tracks how your brand shows up across all the answer engines, and shows which sources are influencing the answers, and gives specific recommendations for how to improve.
[03:16] The tool I'm using is called HubSpot AEO.
[03:19] It has a free 28-day trial.
[03:21] I'll leave a link in the description.
[03:22] You can do everything I'm showing on that.
[03:24] I'm going to sign up with a fresh account so you can see the full setup from scratch.
[03:27] And the setup is straightforward, so I'll go pretty quick.
[03:30] It starts with the basics. your role, company name, company size, and website.
[03:35] Once you add the domain, HubSpot starts analyzing the brand.
[03:37] It pulls information from your website.
[03:39] It identifies competitors, does deep research on your audience and business.
[03:45] If you already use HubSpot, it can use the information it already has about you.
[03:48] But I'm showing this without that connected.
[03:49] And from there, it gives you a few things to review.
[03:51] Just add any brand name variations it missed.
[03:53] Then I'll switch to B to C.
[03:56] Then competitors.
[03:58] It suggests companies that may show up in the same AI answers as you.
[04:00] And you can remove or add anything it missed.
[04:02] Then products and ICPS.
[04:04] Then products and ICPS.
[04:06] These are the different things you offer and the types of customers you're trying to reach.
[04:08] It generated these on its own, but I'll add YouTube and modify it slightly.
[04:12] And once that's set, it generates prompts based on your products, your ideal customers, and the different stages of the buyer journey.
[04:19] This is where you can really see how different AEO is from SEO.
[04:22] With SEO, you'll be tracking keywords or baby's short phrases.
[04:25] But here, these are full questions.
[04:27] How do AI tool directories help compare hundreds of options?
[04:31] What is the best AI tools directory for productivity apps?
[04:33] Which AI tools directory includes user reviews and ratings?
[04:37] And you're not trying to rank for these words.
[04:39] You're trying to become part of the answer.
[04:41] I heard this described as B2B TOC, businesstobot to consumer.
[04:46] That's actually a perfect way to think about it.
[04:47] You're a business trying to influence how the bot describes you to the consumer making the decision B2B to C.
[04:53] And what's cool is because AI polls from so many different sources, smaller brands can show up in AI answers in places where they would have had a much harder time ranking in traditional search.
[05:03] There's an old SEO joke that the best place to hide a body
[05:05] joke that the best place to hide a body is on page two of Google, but that's not really the case anymore because answer engines are pulling from sources way beyond the top 10 Google results.
[05:13] And there's different numbers on this, but it's usually 60 to 80% of their sources are outside the top 10 Google links.
[05:19] And one reason for that is something called query fanout.
[05:22] Instead of just running one search query, many AI searches break a question into multiple sub queries, sometimes 10 or more, that they run simultaneously, then synthesize it all.
[05:31] That's part of how they can find such personalized and comprehensive answers, and also why there's so much opportunity to be included.
[05:37] I'll demonstrate that in just a second when we get these results back.
[05:40] You can edit these prompts, remove ones that aren't relevant, or add your own.
[05:44] I'm going to focus mostly on the consideration phase for mine, then hit continue.
[05:48] Then, HubSpot actually runs those prompts through the different LLMs.
[05:52] Then, it analyzes the answers, tracks the citations, and builds out a full AEO dashboard.
[05:56] I'm going to start on the prompts page because this is where you can see the actual answers behind the data.
[06:01] But up top, there are a few other sections we'll look at in a minute.
[06:03] the main dashboard, the
[06:06] minute.
[06:06] The main dashboard, the citations report, and the citations report, and the recommendations tab, which is a list of recommendations tab, which is a list of really specific actions you can take.
[06:12] But the prompts page is useful because it shows exactly what happened for each question.
[06:18] And I chose the directory product first.
[06:20] That's what Futureedia is most known for.
[06:22] So, we show up pretty consistently across these prompts, but I'll click one where we didn't show up every time.
[06:26] There's usually good information in those.
[06:28] So right here I can see the full answer from ChachPT with every future pedia mention highlighted and that makes it easy to see exactly how we were described.
[06:35] Then I can compare that against Gemini.
[06:38] In this case, Gemini listed us alongside another that's more curated towards productivity specifically plus some others below.
[06:45] And then Perplexity is the one that didn't mention us in the answer at all.
[06:47] It talks a lot about Zapier, which maybe this is just that it interpreted the prompt differently, but that's still useful to know.
[06:54] This makes it really easy to compare how they each answer questions about your business differently.
[06:59] And then here's another prompt where we showed up even less.
[07:01] Again, I can click into the answer and see what the AI actually said.
[07:05] Then an even more useful part is the recommendation.
[07:06] For this prompt, HubSpot
[07:08] recommendation.
[07:10] For this prompt, HubSpot is suggesting a listical comparing AI tool directories for coding assistance.
[07:12] tool directories for coding assistance.
[07:14] This isn't our main focus, so it makes sense why we were weaker here, but the recommendation is very specific.
[07:17] It gives a suggested title, a summary, the target audience, and primary and secondary keywords.
[07:23] And then it explains what's driving the recommendation.
[07:27] In this case, 50% of the citations for this prompt were listicles.
[07:31] And when I scroll down, I can see the exact listicles the AI tools gathered information from.
[07:35] So now I have two clear actions I could take.
[07:37] I could create my own listicle that answers this question better using their suggested title.
[07:41] Or I could reach out to the listicles that are already being cited and try to get future pedia included.
[07:46] So whenever we don't show up, I can see why we didn't, what sources influenced the answer, and what I can do about it.
[07:50] I'll finish up on this page by adding a few more prompts.
[07:53] You're not limited to the prompts generated during setup.
[07:55] You can add your own or generate more.
[07:58] Choose the product you want to focus on.
[08:00] Pick the ICP and select the buyer journey stage.
[08:02] I'll try this with the YouTube channel.
[08:04] I'm curious how that will go.
[08:05] We'll generate some prompts, look through them, and remove or edit anything.
[08:07] This one is a little
[08:09] or edit anything.
[08:11] This one is a little different because I included the evaluation phase where the prompts will mention future Pedia directly.
[08:15] So, the visibility score doesn't apply to those because, of course, we'll show up if the prompt names us.
[08:20] But it becomes really useful as a sentiment analyzer.
[08:23] I can see how LLMs describe Futureedia, what strengths or weaknesses they associate with the channel, what audiences they think it's best for, and look through which sources are shaping that perception.
[08:33] I like how multiple answers said I try to avoid hype and focus on what's useful.
[08:37] Also, that it's aimed at helping professionals move from curiosity to implementation.
[08:41] Honestly, just reading through these gives me a lot of great ways to word things and get clarity on my own approach and positioning.
[08:47] I won't spend a ton of time on this because we already went through one, but I can again see the exact citations to what types of sources AI is going to and how it's synthesizing the information to give answers.
[08:57] I also added some more prompts relating to the newsletter just to have some more in here.
[09:03] They were all 0% which is what I was expecting as that's never been a main focus.
[09:06] I thought that would be some good data to be included in here.
[09:08] Once you have all of this in here, you can
[09:09] you have all of this in here, you can filter by answer engine product ICP or filter by answer engine product ICP or buyer journey phase.
[09:14] There's a ton of insight to be had just on this tab.
[09:17] And something really important I haven't mentioned yet.
[09:18] These prompts get run every day.
[09:20] So you can track all of this data and how it improves over time.
[09:24] So there's a lot just on this prompt tab.
[09:26] But now let's move over to citations.
[09:28] On the citations tab, we have the performance versus the competitors.
[09:31] But the part I really like about this tab is below where it breaks the citation composition down.
[09:35] By content type, you can see 35% of the citations were listicles.
[09:37] That was by far the biggest bucket it pulled from and is one of the most actionable categories.
[09:42] Multimedia was next, then blogs, also a lot of action to be taken there.
[09:46] It's only after that that we start to see the homepage, product pages, and documentation.
[09:48] Those pages still matter.
[09:50] Obviously, there are reasons beyond AEO to make those pages strong.
[09:51] But if you're only optimizing your site, like your homepage, and product pages, you're missing a much larger part of what AI tools are actually using to form their answers.
[09:55] Next to this, we have those citations broken down by channel.
[09:57] The
[10:10] citations broken down by channel.
[10:12] The largest being peer, which is product or service companies that are not direct competitors.
[10:16] That's by far the largest, but there are other meaningfully sized buckets to look at with review sites, owned, and earned.
[10:22] It explains what each of these source types are if you're unsure on any.
[10:25] Depending on your business, these categories could look completely different.
[10:28] You may see a lot of UGC like Reddit and YouTube.
[10:30] That will be a big one a lot of the time.
[10:32] This is all tailored to your own data and what is actually applicable to your company specifically, not just broad generic advice.
[10:40] Below we have the top domains cited, which pages from our own site AI went to, and top citations overall.
[10:47] You can click through to any of these.
[10:48] It's good to think about whether your site clearly answers the kinds of questions people are asking AI.
[10:52] FAQs and help centers can be really useful here because they let you answer those specific questions directly.
[10:56] So, when chat GBT goes out and looks for an answer, you'll have a big influence over how that's worded.
[11:01] This does also mean the technical basics still matter.
[11:03] like your site should be fast, easy to navigate, and crawable so AI tools can
[11:10] navigate, and crawable so AI tools can actually find that information.
[11:11] Moving actually find that information.
[11:13] Moving over to recommendations, this is where HubSpot pulls everything together into a prioritized action list.
[11:15] HubSpot pulls everything together into a prioritized action list.
[11:17] We saw recommendations earlier on an individual prompt, but this tab looks across all of the prompts.
[11:19] recommendations earlier on an individual prompt, but this tab looks across all of the prompts.
[11:21] This is based on a ton of data, but it's meant to make this extremely easy to understand and take action on immediately.
[11:24] the prompts. This is based on a ton of data, but it's meant to make this extremely easy to understand and take action on immediately.
[11:25] data, but it's meant to make this extremely easy to understand and take action on immediately.
[11:27] extremely easy to understand and take action on immediately.
[11:29] Each one of these has suggested content, what's driving the recommendation, and the citations behind it.
[11:31] has suggested content, what's driving the recommendation, and the citations behind it.
[11:33] the recommendation, and the citations behind it.
[11:35] Then you have a concrete list of actions organized by priority and impact.
[11:37] of actions organized by priority and impact.
[11:39] And this list is short since I just created this account, but on an existing one, the list will be much larger.
[11:41] just created this account, but on an existing one, the list will be much larger.
[11:42] existing one, the list will be much larger.
[11:44] The last main area is the dashboard.
[11:46] dashboard. This gives you the higher level view of everything we've been looking at.
[11:47] level view of everything we've been looking at.
[11:49] You can see overall brand visibility, how that changes over time, and since this is a brand new account, some of this will be more useful as the data builds up.
[11:51] visibility, how that changes over time, and since this is a brand new account, some of this will be more useful as the data builds up.
[11:52] and since this is a brand new account, some of this will be more useful as the data builds up.
[11:53] some of this will be more useful as the data builds up.
[11:55] data builds up. These prompts run every day.
[11:57] day. So over time, you can see whether the actions you're taking are actually improving your visibility.
[11:59] the actions you're taking are actually improving your visibility.
[12:01] improving your visibility. It breaks it all down against your competitors.
[12:03] all down against your competitors. then has an overall citation analysis.
[12:05] has an overall citation analysis. The top domains, YouTube is number one, which is very common.
[12:07] The top domains, YouTube is number one, which is very common.
[12:09] which is very common. YouTube shows up a lot in AI citations. YouTube transcripts
[12:11] lot in AI citations.
[12:11] YouTube transcripts are automatically generated and indexed.
[12:13] are automatically generated and indexed.
[12:15] So, a 10-minute video acts like a 2,000word article that is pretty well optimized for natural language questions.
[12:18] 2,000word article that is pretty well optimized for natural language questions.
[12:19] optimized for natural language questions.
[12:21] questions. And if a video has a lot of views and positive comments, that's a massive trust signal, especially when compared to a blog post.
[12:23] views and positive comments, that's a massive trust signal, especially when compared to a blog post.
[12:24] massive trust signal, especially when compared to a blog post.
[12:27] compared to a blog post. So, YouTube gets cited a lot.
[12:29] gets cited a lot. videos, communities, thirdparty sites, review pages, and listicles can all shape how AI talks about your brand.
[12:31] thirdparty sites, review pages, and listicles can all shape how AI talks about your brand.
[12:33] listicles can all shape how AI talks about your brand.
[12:35] about your brand. This also has sentiment analysis to show how you were actually portrayed throughout the answers.
[12:37] sentiment analysis to show how you were actually portrayed throughout the answers.
[12:39] actually portrayed throughout the answers.
[12:41] answers. And that is of course a very important component beyond visibility.
[12:43] important component beyond visibility.
[12:45] You want to increase mentions, but also be sure they're describing you accurately, positively, and in the right context.
[12:46] be sure they're describing you accurately, positively, and in the right context.
[12:49] accurately, positively, and in the right context.
[12:51] context. There is a lot to AEO.
[12:53] Hopefully, this helps give you a clear starting point.
[12:54] starting point. You can see how your brand is showing up in AI answers, which sources are influencing those answers, how you compare to competitors and what specific actions you can take to improve.
[12:57] brand is showing up in AI answers, which sources are influencing those answers, how you compare to competitors and what specific actions you can take to improve.
[12:58] sources are influencing those answers, how you compare to competitors and what specific actions you can take to improve.
[13:01] how you compare to competitors and what specific actions you can take to improve.
[13:02] specific actions you can take to improve.
[13:04] improve. So, if you want to try HubSpot AEO, there's a link in the description for the free 28-day trial.
[13:06] AEO, there's a link in the description for the free 28-day trial.
[13:08] for the free 28-day trial. You'll be able to do everything I just showed.
[13:10] able to do everything I just showed. In traditional search, the goal was to get
[13:12] traditional search, the goal was to get traffic.
[13:14] In the AI era, the goal is to become the answer.
[13:16] And because this is still early, a lot of businesses are not paying enough attention to it yet.
[13:19] Though there's still a huge opportunity to show up in places your competitors are missing.