Stop Optimizing for Clicks. The. Real Truth About AEO

Answer Engine Optimization isn't SEO 2.0. It's not even the same game. SEO is a click economy — your goal is to win the visit. AEO is a citation economy — your goal is to be the answer buyers see before they ever click anything. In this episode of Revenue Marketing Raw, Jeff Pedowitz and Debbie Qaqish strip the hype off AEO and lay out what actually works. They walk through how the LLMs decide which brands they cite — third-party authority, organic conversations on Reddit and forums, structured topical depth — and why the marketers who built thousands of empty SEO landing pages are now sitting on a depreciating asset. They make the case for building topic clusters around what you actually want to be known for (Jeff's are revenue marketing, AEO, and HubSpot), monitoring branded mentions across organic conversation channels, and treating Reddit as a serious B2B intent signal that virtually no marketer is actually mining. They also tackle the strategic question: do you optimize content to flatter your own brand, or do you write to make AI engines confidently cite you over your competitors? If your AEO strategy is "we added schema markup," this episode is the next ten chapters.