“You know those recipe websites where the answer is all the way at the bottom, under a story?” asks Aja Frost. “The most hated type of content on the internet, and yet we all still need recipes.”
Aja and Kyle are back, and this time they’re going to teach you how not to be the most hated thing on the internet.
In this episode, they break down the anatomy of a good web page, plus the 7 AEO best practices that make up the secret recipe that answer engines love. (And I promise it’s not buried under a sob story.)
Field Notes
On AEO vs SEO:
"The first very important thing is that an AEO web page is a lot more specific and tailored than a traditional web page.
In the old world, you'd be publishing 'The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.' And in the AEO world, you are publishing 'The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing If You Work at a Logistics Company in New Jersey' because answer engines surface highly relevant, contextualized, tailored information to every person who is using them.
If you’re publishing very generic, broad content, it’s not going to get surfaced."
~ Aja Frost
On how LLMs read content:
“Something very important to know about answer engines is that they are very lazy readers. They're looking for quick hits. And the more you can break up your content with structured lists, with tables, all the structure that you can add, it's going to help answer engines really easily interpret the page.
Something else people should know is that they are not pulling the entire page at once. And that's actually a big difference from how Google interprets pages. Google will look at the entire page. An AI engine will just look at one, two, three paragraphs. So, you want to make sure that every passage on the page makes sense in isolation." ~ Aja Frost
On original insights:
“Answer engines are looking for two things. They're looking for consensus — everyone's saying the same thing. And they're also looking for net new information. That could be data, quotations, market research, anything you’ve got that no one else has.” ~ Aja Frost
"At the end of the day, you don't want to produce content that all other brands are producing. You want to have an expert. You want their insights. You want their lived experience. You want the results from their work. That's the stuff that search engines and LLMs are looking for." ~ Kyle Denhoff
On making it worth the work:
"Here’s the one that you’re not going to like. You want to make sure every point ties back to [your] product.
If you're just providing original insights and you're not explaining why that original insight is so relevant to the product, you're basically making the answer engine smarter without getting any recommendation or visibility from it." ~ Aja Frost
“If AI has to make a connection between a thought leadership post and the product, it's not going to make that connection. But there are tasteful ways to do it, right?
Make sure the LLM and the reader know, ‘Okay, I'm reading this education or this thought leadership piece and it's brought to you by said brand or product.’”
~ Kyle Denhoff
In the full video, they dive into real examples that HubSpot is implementing as we speak. Just ~15 mins. will change how AI engines see your site.
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This week's email was brought to you by Curt del Principe. Content by Aja Frost and Kyle Denhoff.
