C-Suite Strategies

S2E22: From SEO to AEO: The Four Pillars of AI Search Strategy

• Stacie Sussman • Season 2 • Episode 21

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In this episode, Stacie sits down with Jenna Hannon—first marketing hire at Uber Eats and founder of GetHatter.ai—to break down the shift from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), and what it means for your attribution model, your pipeline, and your competitive position.

This isn’t just about “showing up in AI search.” It’s about making sure your company, your founders, and your thought leaders are the ones being cited when your buyers are doing that invisible dark funnel research.

Guest: Jenna Hannon
Founder of GetHatter.ai and former first marketing hire at Uber Eats

What We Cover

SEO Fundamentals (And Why They’re Not Enough Anymore)

  • How SEO has worked for the past 20 years
  • The constant chase of Google’s algorithm changes
  • Why keyword strategies and backlink volume dominated the game

The Rise of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

  • What AEO actually is and how it differs from SEO
  • Why 97% of searches still happen on Google—but summaries are changing everything
  • How LLMs decide whose content to cite (spoiler: it’s not about hacks)
  • Why AEO actually rewards good marketing better than Google ever did

The Attribution Blind Spot

  • Your buyers are researching for weeks before filling out forms
  • AI-assisted research makes the dark funnel even darker
  • How to influence research you can’t see or measure
  • Why this is a revenue strategy conversation, not just a marketing tactic

The Four Pillars of AEO Strategy

Jenna breaks down the four key areas where you can move the needle in AEO—and why most companies are starting from 1% visibility (or 0%). She explains which pillar matters most, where to start if you’re overwhelmed, and why this isn’t about abandoning your SEO investment.

The Truth About “AEO Hacks”

  • There is no magic button (Jenna tried to build one—Google shut it down overnight)
  • LinkedIn influencers selling shortcuts? Jenna’s tested them. They don’t work.
  • What actually works instead (and why it’s better than you think)

Why You Shouldn’t Be Intimidated

  • The fundamentals haven’t changed—you’re just extending your strategy
  • AEO rewards strong marketing better than Google’s algorithm ever did
  • This isn’t a complete rework of your marketing priorities
  • Where to focus your energy for maximum impact

Key Takeaways

  • SEO isn’t dead—97% of searches still happen on Google
  • But AI summaries are changing how buyers consume information
  • Most B2B brands show up 1% of the time (or less) in AI search results
  • There are no shortcuts—AEO rewards good marketing fundamentals

Connect with Jenna Hannon

Please note: The audio quality in the opening minutes of this episode is not up to our usual standard. Rather than delay sharing this important conversation, we chose to release it as-is because the insights are too valuable to wait. We appreciate your understanding and hope you enjoy the episode!

Connect with Stacie:
Book a free growth consult
LinkedIn
Website


SPEAKER_00

Hey B2B leaders! Feeling stuck in your growth journey as you've exhausted all your plays? Tired of doing things the same way and not seeing results? I'm Stacey Sussman, your host, and this is C Suite Strategies, your podcast for the explosive business growth you've been chasing. We'll bring you conversations with industry visionaries who've truly mastered the art of scaling businesses. This isn't just theory, it's what we live and breathe every single day. Get ready for game-changing insights that'll transform your approach to business growth. Whether you're a seasoned C-Suite executive or an ambitious founder, we've got you covered. C-Suite Strategies is your backstage path to reaching that next level of business. Follow C-Suite Strategies now and let's make this your new reality. Hey Pod Squad. Welcome to another episode of C-Suite Strategies. Today we're talking about your buyers are already using AI to research you. Here's what you need to do about it. Super excited to have you back for another episode. We are going to be talking about SEO and AEO, search engine optimization versus answer engine optimization with our guest today, which we're super excited to have, Jenna Hannon, the founder of Hatter AI. And let me tell you why I'm personally excited to talk with Jenna on the pod. Jenna was the first marketing hire at Uber Eats. She'll get into more details about that, but she knows what it's like to build marketing foundations at one of the fastest growing consumer apps ever. Obviously, pressure, speed, intensity, stuff that, you know, we're all dealing with every day. And you got to figure it out fast and you got to figure out what works and what doesn't work because there's really no time for anything else. Jenna spent 10 years in Silicon Valley, startups, fractional CMOs, and now working as a co-founder and founder of Hatter AI, a fully managed SEO and AEO, helping companies found in both Google Search and AI Search. And she's working with tech clients, creatives, higher ed, and more, Jenna. You can tell us all about it. Welcome to the pod, Jenna. Hi, Stacey.

SPEAKER_01

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome. So tell our pod squad a little bit about you and why I'm so excited to nerd out on this topic because this is just such a fun one for our folks here.

SPEAKER_01

I agree. So I'm excited for the conversation. We will get deep into AEO, which is kind of the new hot SEO. My a little bit more about kind of my background to kind of getting here. So I come from a marketing background, have spent my career in marketing, always in tech, started in startups, always kind of my bread and butter is kind of the first marketing hire. Let's figure out how to build a marketing organization. I joined Uber in 2016 on what was called the internal experiments team. So this was just a team that was working on anything Uber wanted to try. At the time, one of the experiments of many was delivering food. You everyone knows the story of that today. Uber Eats is a billion-dollar company. So started in the very early kind of pod within Uber, working on Uber Eats, spent four years there scaling Uber Eats, which was a wild journey. When I left Uber, I went back to my bread and butter of building marketing teams and was a fractional CMO. So did everything marketing, usually Series B or C companies. And then we started Hatter. So my co-founder of Hatter is from an engineering background, and he came from Deliveru. So he was at Deliveru when I was at Uber Eats. So now we are we are former competitors now working together. And we are working on AEO. So we wanted to take kind of our marketing growth backgrounds and figure out ways to use software for marketers. We ended up in the SEO space actually solving our own problem, which was trying to get more distribution for experiments that we were running. And so we were we were kind of hacking SEO, which led us to AEO, which is what we're talking about today. So I'm excited about this conversation and I'm excited to share what we've been learning in the AEO space now that we've been working with clients of all sizes and different types of companies specifically on AEO strategies.

SPEAKER_00

Amazing. So I'll back you up a little bit. Tell us, we're gonna get into AEO and SEO, but talk to me about working for what I consider like a big container company and running what I say are like marketing experiments. I you had a formal name for it, within like a really big company. And I don't know how big Uber was at the time. But like talk to us about just how do you even start? How do you weigh? You know, does food work better than packages? Or I lived in New York City. Like, how are you weighing even which experiments to go after? Because this is something our clients ask us all the time at Rev Up Advisory. Like, how do we even decide where to spend our time and effort? But I would say if we're having this conversation in 2027 and you haven't listened to this podcast episode, you you're a little behind the ball here.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so let's let's remind there for a sec, you mentioned SEO not going away. And I think that's important because SEO is is not going away. First of all, 97% of searches are still happening on Google and people are still looking for a list of options through that search. There is a shift towards AI summaries, but summaries are still doing a search. They're just summarizing it before you. So the game is still SEO. The difference is in the strategy because the algorithm that that pulls you into that summary is ever so slightly different than the algorithm that's ranking you in search results. And I will say to tell us more. I will say to your point about the why did they change it every six months. And in Google's defense, they they are trying to make the algorithm better. So all of us people on the SEO side that are trying to help companies show up, we are all looking for the next hack to try to get companies higher higher in the results because we know how meaningful that is to a business. You can make or break a business through SEO alone. And so everyone on the other side is always trying to hack, and those aren't always great practices. And so Google is always trying to refine the algorithm to make the search experience better for the consumer. Obviously, they're trying to sell ads as well, but let's pretend that Google was on the SEO side is is not the bad guy, and they do want the consumer to have a good experience, which is not always the same as incentives. This is what the business wants. So the reason I bring up that algorithm is because that's that's kind of the change in strategy and shifting to AEO. So the way that SEO, the game of SEO in a nutshell, the 101 of SEO is pick all of the keywords that you want to show up for and make sure that those keywords are properly inserted inserted onto your website, and your website is technically optimized for the Google crawlers to crawl to your website and find those keywords and figure out what which keywords that you should show up for. The way to hack SEO is most companies would say, you know what, we want as many keywords as we can grab. We want to show up for as many keywords as possible so that we are getting as much people clicking on search results and coming to our website, whether or not we think that keyword has this intent to purchase something from our business. And so SEO is becoming this game of get as much traffic as possible. And that's that's partly why Google's algorithm is changing is Google is Google is always cracking down on what they call click farming, which is people just creating massive, massive amounts of their content to try to rank for those keywords. In the world of AEO, that game ha has gotten easier for people to hack because you can just create massive amounts of content with AI to try to rank for those keywords. So what Google is doing now, and I would say the the LLMs are doing decently well in in terms of where we are in AI, is trying to remove all of this clutter to try to figure out who should we surface when someone is typing in a prompt into Chat GPT or perplexity, so that we're not just bringing back crap that's been filled up by people creating AI content all over the web. And the way that they are doing that is they they are basically saying from an AEO perspective, if you want to show up on uh in the LLMs, we need you to tell us very precisely who you are, what you do, why you matter, when you should matter, to train us to understand when we should show up. And they are quite good at weeding out scenarios where you don't fit because even with all the AI power in the world, if you start creating content way too far outside of your domain, the LLMs have no idea what you actually do. So they don't know how to surface you. So in some ways, the game has gotten more clear for marketers because it's classic marketing. AEO is now marketing 1101. It's training the algorithms on who you are, who you're for, what you do, why you matter. And the the predominant way that you're doing that is still in content on your website. So that game is still the same.

SPEAKER_00

Which marketing channel closed your last three deals? How much did you spend, and what revenue did it generate? At RevUp Advisory, we help CMOs prove marketing IROI with real attribution connecting campaigns to closed revenue. We create strategic alignment between marketing and sales teams, and yes, we know the buzzword. We're using agentic AI too. If you're ready to show pipeline impact and scale with revenue predictability, contact Stacy Sussman, CRO at RevUp Advisory. You're building Hatter AI now, and you're building it kind of around this like specific problem that we're kind of describing, and not problem because you guys have a solution for it, but I would say, where did you sort of like notice that you're like, oh my God, we're gonna build like a company around this whole idea because there's like an inflection point or like I use the analogy that's like the tsunami is coming, and I'm either like you can like ride the waves or you're gonna get like swept out to sea. And so when I was in sales in Manhattan and I was in print dating myself again and moved into more like digital YouTube, brand partnerships, et cetera, like I saw like the the trend that like everything's going digital, everything's gonna be like on the web. Like if my retailers and my fashion guys weren't ready to like adopt that, I was like, I gotta get a new job because like I'm gonna be out of business even with my print quota. And so that's when I left and kind of went into all in and digital in the early OOs. And so I saw the trend, I think, before it was happening. And you've obviously built a whole company around this. So let's just talk about like what what do you think maybe were the trends or the moments where you're like, this is so important that we really need to do this? Because you're obviously passionate about if you're building a company around it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, I would I would love to say that I saw the future, and then we were like, we have a vision and we see where the future is going and we have to build for it. That is not how this happened. The way this happened is we had a problem in front of us, which is we were building some MVPs of product ideas, and we wanted traffic to our website. I have a marketing background, so I knew some about SEO, but I would not say I was an SEO expert. And so my co-founder and I were basically hacking around on SEO. How do we get traffic to our website? And we were doing exactly what I said you shouldn't do. We were going to L LLMs. He had built a script to write a bunch of AI content to try to rank for keywords. And then that started working. And we were like, oh, this is amazing. We're getting all this traffic to our website, and we're just creating essentially all of this AI slop. And our Google numbers were like, went from nothing to something, and traffic was coming in. Granted, this traffic was not converting to use our product, but we were kind of enamored by this SEO. Oh, like, oh, suddenly we have all this traffic. And then one day, overnight, it all went away. And we were like, oh, Google is on to this. So we we were like sitting back there and we're like, oh, we could come up with this whole company where we just help people like with an AI generator, just generate all of this content and like trick Google into ranking for all of these keywords, and we'll just give them a button that they press, and it's like the SEO button. People will press the SEO button and then all this content will proliferate, and their website will be 10,000 pages and it will have all of this traffic. And that's how that's how we had thought of it. We were like, oh, yeah, we're gonna use AI. And then Google overnight was like, nope, slap on the wrist. Like, that's not working. And then we got interested in it. We're like, okay, this is actually kind of smart. Why is you know, Google's gonna prevent this from happening? So where is this going? And then we started playing more around with okay, it's clearly going towards AI and AI summaries. And at the time, Gemini hadn't even started yet. So this is still us in so fast. Exactly. This was us just in Chat GPT, just see kind of seeing how Chat GPT at the time, I were they even showing you that they were doing real-time search. We kind of just knew how they were how it was working on the back end and became, yeah, became interested in it. And we're like, in the past, you had to we thought we had the most magical hack for SEO, and we were gonna go sell people this magic button and they're gonna pay us all this money to like press this button and get SEO. And then we realized, oh, that's that's not how it's gonna work. Let's actually figure out what this it's gonna be a new game, it's gonna be AI. Now we're interested. And so we we just kept pulling the thread. And it's actually how our service business got started. So originally we were a software, and the software was for content creation. You could add a keyword and we would help you create SEO optimized content. And then we said to truly learn this AEO game, we need to get on the team of companies and help them figure this out. And we are a different type of team in the sense that my co-founder is an engineer. So we can build custom tech to kind of hack around and figure this game out. And so that's that's how essentially it started, more by accident. I will say in the early days, happy accident. Yeah, happy accident. But you know, Silicon Valley, like some people are like, oh, we saw the future and we had this vision. But then you look at some of the biggest companies like Slack. They were a gaming company and Slack with an internal tool, and the internal tool became the product. Right. So this happens all the time in Silicon Valley. So we're like, okay, let's let's not be embarrassed, let's ride with this. I will say the in the early days when we were, when we saw what was happening in SEO, we were chatting and we were like, should we with with our tool with SEO? We were chatting and we're like, should we be an SEO company? Like when we were dreaming up this like one button SEO, should we be an SEO company? And we were like, well, SEO is like, it's not interesting. It's not big, it's not interesting. And then I woke up the night like one morning and was like, wait, SEO is huge. Like, Jenna, you're a marketer. Like every business needs SEO. Like my my pitch to CEOs as when I was a CMO was always you must build a foundation of organic discovery. And you cannot rely on ads forever. So I'm like, I'm I'm the person in the company telling people to invest in SEO, yet I don't want to build an SEO company. And I remember getting on a call with my co-founder, was like, wait, I think SEO is interesting. Hear me out.

SPEAKER_00

It was all it's always interesting. I feel like you could be like the car wash down the street or the you know, tailor, the laundry service, or the florist, or Slack, or Uber, or Uber Eats. And I feel like everyone is in some type of SEO game, whether, you know, obviously budget constraints and all that, but every client that we work with, every advisory, you know, are doing paid campaigns. And I would say SEO is part of it. So if you're talking to, let's say, a CMO of a$30 million company-ish, will say, and they're like, Jenna, this sounds great, but like, I don't even know. I need to start building this. Like, where do I start? What does sort of like day one look like? Maybe let's say they're running some sort of SEO. Like, what are some ideas of like where they can even start? Because they they definitely probably have a website, they're probably running loose campaigns, maybe not as organized as I'd like them to be on how I see it. But like, where do they even start to build this muscle? Because this will take time.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, agree. So I think that's that's well said in in in that SEO AEO is an investment. It's not a paid channel where you just turn on ads and and traffic comes in and you hope it converts. It's three, six, 12 month investment. And it takes consistency to see the results start to compound. So going to back, going back to where do you start? Every company right now is kind of dealing with the same problem, which is if you're a company that's invested in SEO prior, you're probably seeing your traffic decline. So most of our clients are coming to us saying we invested a bunch in SEO. That's a main channel for us. And now we're not seeing as much traffic. But we've been on some sales calls in the last couple of weeks, and we've had prospects mention that they've done research using AI or using Chat GPT. And so they're coming to us saying, How do we show up in AI? We were winning Google, we're not getting traffic. How do we now appear in AI? So the I would say the f the first thing to make clear is it's not a complete shift. You're not ending your SEO, you're not stopped doing SEO, it's not a brand new thing. But it is, it does have some differences. So the first step is usually to get a sense of are you appearing already? So this is this is not a plug, but we do have a free, we have a free tool to check your brand AI visibility. Some of the tools that started in this market were insanely expensive. So there's competitors in the space that are a thousand bucks a month. And so companies couldn't even take the first step, which is am I even showing up in AI search? And that's not even the hard part. Knowing if you're showing up got the hard part, doing the work to make sure you show up is the hard part. So the first thing you want to do is understand how you're showing up. And it works very similar to classic SEO for anyone who's who's done SEO, which is understanding what do you want to show up for. So most of these tools are gonna ask you for the prompts or the questions you think that your prospect might be typing into AI search that you want to show up for. And so this starts with about 30 to 50 just ideas of what you think your customer might be typing in AI and seeing how often you might be showing up. I'll be honest, in most of these audits, it's gonna be low because it's a tough game and it's tough to move the needle. So most brands that we get started with are showing up 1% of the time.

SPEAKER_00

That's good. I mean, I looked at us and I think we're at 0%. But I I always I always Google myself and then I put myself in AI to see what they say about me. So I feel like at least they're they're talking about me, even if the clients can't find me yet.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Good start. You you start somewhere. Uh the qualify that that. Percentage to you because it's important to note. So the way that these tools measure how you're showing up is they are essentially running simulations. So they are asking Chat GPT perplexity and thousands of times that prompt, and they're seeing what percentage of the time you show up. So when you see a percentage as a result, which is called your AAI visibility score, it's basically that. What percentage of the time is your brand being mentioned in those two prompts? So that's that's step one. The next step is strategy of how you run AEO. And I would say that at a high level, the AEO is a mix of four things. There's four things you can do as a brand to move the needle in an AEO. The first and most important is the content on your website. So just like the old game of the CEO, the LLMs is starting pulling in the text that sits on your website to understand exactly who you are, what you do, who you're for, why don't you care about you. And the LLMs are training on everyone's website every three to six months. And so that the text matters because you're feeding the LLM. So that's that's number one. Number two is any mention of you around the web. So I would say number two would be social media. So any other forms of distribution where your company is being talked about, and again, you are answering who you are, what you do, who it was for, why you have a matter. The third piece is very related to that, which is press. So just like with Google, you still need to be mentioned around places that are not your website and not your own social media. And so you want to make sure that that publications are talking about you, but the difference from SEO to AEO is the way that SEO worked with publications as you were going for volume of press, the most amount of links is pointing to you and the how important those links are. This is called a backlink strategy in an SEO, which is basically saying it is was Forbes writing about you and is Forbes pointing to your website, we're gonna wait rate that highly more highly than some website that's that's not a known publication. But at the end of the day, all we care about is volume. AEO is not particularly volume of press. It's more the types of press that you get, and it's more targeted. So what we see show up for brands is press in their industry. So industry publications, more niche press seems to matter more than the big press names because LLMs are are better at understanding what industry you're part of and how you should appear in the summaries based on what the if you know the industry is being mentioned in the prompt. So that's the third piece. The last piece is reviews. How are your customers talking about you around the internet? So LLMs are quite good at going and understanding how customers are mentioning you on Google reviews, Reddit, if your software, G2 or Captera. So it takes into account your customers' perspective. All of the these are the four main pieces of AEO. They are all very difficult to move, which is difficult, they're all very resource intensive to run marketing strategies in each of those four lanes, which is why we say if you're just starting today, no need to boil the ocean. The first step is to focus on your website and make sure that you are communicating to the LMs exactly what you do. And if you only do that, you are still building the foundation to show up in AI Search.

SPEAKER_00

That is so fascinating. And I would say that's a great place to start if we're looking forward as we wrap up this episode. Because I know Pod Squad, that's a lot of information that Jen has shared. Do we have any thoughts on trends of where this is gonna go? Or are we building this so quickly that whatever we say today and whenever you listen to this, things just may change because I mean, even some of the updates to the LLMs are are pretty remarkable in such a short time. I've seen like, oh, it took a year back, you know, a year ago to do this, and now that update's happening in like two to three months, which is just bananas to me.

SPEAKER_01

I I would say don't be intimidated by the speed at which this is going. Because if you take all those four things that I mentioned, they are still classic marketing. Most businesses are thinking about what's on my website, am I doing social media or am I investing in social media? Am I doing press? Do I care about my customer reviews? These are all normal business activities that aren't gonna fundamentally you're not gonna stop doing them because of AEO, like suddenly I need to do this new thing to appear. You're actually gonna do the same things. And I would say the LLMs are actually better at rewarding you for strong marketing than Google was in the world of SEO. Because there's very few, I think what we're learning as the AEO community is there's no hack that is getting you to win AEO. It's not something you could say, I'm gonna do these one or two hacks and then I'm gonna show up. And there's a ton of content that says there is on LinkedIn, but it doesn't work. As someone's been here, guys. Yeah, all of our clients are sending us like this LinkedIn article, this LinkedIn article. We're like, we've tried that, we've tried that, we've tried that. Yes, it's great for these influencers to tell you there is a hack and they might be able to try to sell you something by telling you there is a hack, but there is no hack. So I would say don't be intimidated. The speed of how AI is moving is doesn't mean that AEO is fundamentally something that you always have to play catch-up. It it's basically rewarding you for doing good marketing and rewarding you, exactly, which we love, and rewarding you for having an AEO strategy on top of the marketing that you're already doing. So it it does add one extra step, but it shouldn't be intimidating and it's not a whole new reworking of your marketing or your marketing priorities.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. This is mind-blowing. And I feel like, and this is why there is growth marketers these days, because we're taking the fundamentals of marketing, I would say the basics, which I think we both agree that are really important to building a solid foundation to a business and kind of supercharging them in different directions and the future of sort of what I believe is like growth marketing. Okay, so now that our listeners' mind have been totally blown about AEO and SEO and what Jen has to say, how do they get that AI visibility tracker that you were talking about? How can they get to it? And if they want to talk to you and go in-depth on their business about what this looks like, how do we find you and how do we get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, of course. So if you want to use the tracker, which I strongly recommend, it's a great place to start. You can go to our website, it's gethatter.ai, and you can just use the free tracker right from our homepage. If you want to chat with me, I'm always happy to hop on a call with folks and and chat through where they are in this journey and even as a resource. I can be contacted at Jenna at gethatter.ai. Or if you're on my LinkedIn, Jenna Hannon is my full name. You'll actually see a button on there where you can book a 15-minute call with me. So always happy to pop on a call.

SPEAKER_00

Love when people make things easy. Amazing. Thank you, Jenna, for being on the pod today. I feel like I hope everyone has, I would call it like the acronym soup of tech, where we're always talking in acronyms, SEO, AEO today. There's all these other acronyms. I'm not going to confuse you, pod squad. But I hope you listen to the end because Jenna threw down some amazing knowledge today. And like she said, this isn't something that needs to scare you. This is something that you can do in a couple easy steps. And if you're not doing it yet, that's okay. You need to just get started. So thank you, Jenna, for being on the pod today. Thank you, Pod Squad, for listening till the end because your next big business breakthrough may be an episode away. Speak soon, Pod Squad. Thanks again. As we wrap up this episode of C-Suite Strategies, I want to express my sincere gratitude to you, our listeners, for tuning in and engaging with our podcast. Your commitment to business growth and operational excellence is what drives this podcast forward. A special thank you to our guests today for sharing their valuable business insights and experience. Your wisdom is a gift to our audience, and we're honored to have had you on our show today. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be thrilled if you follow and subscribe to the podcast. Your help supports us to reach more ambitious business leaders just like you. And if you didn't enjoy it, well, I guess I'll see you never. This is your host, Stacy Sussman, Chief Revenue Officer at RevUp Advisory, signing off.