AEO: The Strategy to Ensure ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity List Your Company First

In a nutshell:

• 56% of global search volume now goes through response engines.
• The blog remains your most powerful channel, but not like in 2023. According to HubSpot, 62.1% of pages cited by AIs are blog posts or listicles (analysis of 14 million citations).
• AEO is driven by several key indicators: brand visibility score, share of voice, sentiment score, visibility by prompt, citation sources, traffic referred by AI and conversion rate. All detailed in our AEO strategy guide.

For several months now, we've been getting the same signal from our customers, with good leads saying they found them via ChatGPT or Gemini. The AI traffic source is starting to have its own dedicated line in our customers' reporting, and to generate qualified pipeline.

According to data presented by HubSpot at the HubSpot Summit in Boston in June 2026, AI session volume already represents 56% of traditional search volume worldwide (source: Graphite.io).

What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of improving the frequency and quality with which your brand appears in responses generated by AIs such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity.

Unlike SEO, which aims to position a link in a list of results, AEO aims to become the brand that the AI quotes, recommends and positively describes when your target asks a question.

AEO doesn't replace SEO, but complements it in a field that SEO can't cover: the conversations that take place directly inside AI interfaces.

Should I write content on my blog in the age of AI response engines?

Yes! In an analysis of 14 million citations in AI Mode and AI Overviews, 62.1% of the pages cited by AIs are blog posts and listicles (short text written in list form with enough content to be published as an article), compared with 16% for product pages and just 3.5% for user reviews (source: HubSpot, "Reimagining Marketing: The AEO Playbook", June 2026).

In other words: your blog is the foundation of your AI visibility, provided you don't approach it as you did in 2023.

How can I structure my content to be cited by AIs?

Based on an analysis of around 10,000 URLs across 10 companies and 8 AI engines, HubSpot identified the factors that correlate most strongly with citations:

• Formulate H2, H3 and H4 as questions, as AIs more easily extract a clear answer to an explicit question.
• Add an FAQ section aligned with the real questions your prospects ask AIs.
• Implement the FAQ schema to help engines understand content structure.
• Add your data: figures, internal studies, benchmarks that nobody else has.

Remember: AIs prefer structured, information-dense content. No long narrative introductions. One question, one direct answer, some numbers.

Why are LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube essential to AEO?

Because search engines look for consensus. A brand mentioned only on its own site doesn't have the same credibility in the eyes of AIs as a brand mentioned consistently and positively on several external sources.

HubSpot has observed that LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube dominate citations for questions with high purchase intent (source: HubSpot, AEO Playbook 2026). If your competitors are appearing in these ecosystems and you're not, you're quietly losing ground, month after month.

Where to start building an AEO strategy?

Three actions to prioritize in the next 30 days:

1. Measure your referral visibility on 10 to 25 buyer prompts relevant to your category on ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
2. Audit the sources that AIs cite in your sector, and identify those where you're absent.
3. Update or create 5 structured blog posts with H2 questions, FAQs and your original data.

This is exactly the approach we've documented in The Complete Guide to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO): a 13-page strategic guide that details the 5 pillars of an AEO strategy, the success indicators to follow, and a concrete roadmap for the Quebec and Canadian B2B market.

Your competitors may already be cited by AIs, and the question is no longer whether your customers will use the answer engines, but rather whether they'll find you there!

Contents of the AEO guide written by Parkour3 :

• The research landscape has changed for companies
• Why it's even more important in the manufacturing and technology sectors
• What is AEO (with AEO vs. SEO)
• Why AEO matters now
• How AEO works
• The five pillars of an AEO strategy
• How to measure success in AEO
• How to get started in AEO
• What good AEO content looks like
• How Parkour3 can help

What indicators should you monitor to measure the success of your AEO strategy?

Here are five metrics to integrate into your marketing dashboard. HubSpot's AEO tool lets you track these metrics.

HubSpot's AEO tool is available as part of the Marketing Pro and Enterprise packages, or as a stand-alone version for around USD 50 per month.

• Brand visibility score: the percentage of tracked prompts in which your company appears in IA responses = main KPI.

• Share of voice: the frequency with which your brand is cited compared to your competitors on the same prompts.

• Sentiment score: how positively or negatively your brand is described when it appears, on a scale from -100% to +100%.
• Visibility by prompt: which questions from your prospects you win or lose, so you know where to focus your content efforts.

• Citation sources: which areas and types of content the AI uses to answer in your category. This tells you where to build your presence (LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.).
• AI-referred traffic: traffic to your website from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
• AI traffic conversion rate: how well AI-referred visitors convert compared to other channels. This rate can be 4 to 23 × higher than that of organic traffic(sources: SEMrush 2025, Similarweb, Ahrefs).

For reference: the HubSpot marketing team deployed its own AEO strategy and observed a 1,850% increase in qualified leads from AI-driven discovery, with a conversion rate 3× higher than for organic traffic.

AEO is a strategy that requires expertise in visibility monitoring, content strategy, channel optimization and continuous iteration, as well as the tools to tie it all together in a coherent workflow.

How can Parkour3 help you with your AEO strategy?

AEO is now naturally at the heart of the way we help our customers capture attention.

Parkour3 is the largest HubSpot partner in Quebec and one of the only HubSpot Elite partners in Canada. We specialize in helping manufacturers and businesses build and execute AEO strategies using HubSpot's AEO tools (in French and English), with a deep understanding of the regional B2B market.

If you'd like to take advantage of a free AEO visibility assessment to find out where your company stands in IA responses, what you need to put in place to become the benchmark, and measure your AEO success, book your assessment here.