📑 “The key to content marketing is simple: all you have to do is show up and answer questions your right people are asking.” - Ash Ambirge

Hello Reader,

SEO gets your website listed in the directory, but AEO gets your website recommended by the concierge.

In the previous decade, when you wanted your website to get found by your target market, you used Search Engine Optimisation to show on the first page of search results. I

n the coming decade, people aren't going to Google to ask their questions. They are using LLMs, and AEO - Answer Engine Optimisation - is how people are getting recommended in AI responses.

You've probably seen AEO in action, if you're an English speaker who typed a query into Google.

Beneath your request, above the traditional search result, there is something new called 'AI Mode.'

💡 AI Mode Reduces Organic Traffic by 15%

1 billion monthly users are introduced to AI mode this way, mostly in English-speaking countries. When researchers compared 161,000 English-language Wikipedia articles with a foreign language translation, they noticed that English articles had an average 15% reduction in traffic.

Why? People don't need to click if they get the answer in AI mode.

Some people learn this and feel threatened. If Google isn't sending traffic to your website, does this mean the end? I the dead Intenet theory coming to pass?

I don't see this as a threat, because traffic is a vanity metric.

Just because people (or bots) visit your website, that doesn't necessarily turn into business results.

In March of 2026, Adobe found that AI-referred retail traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic. If traffic goes down, and purchases go up, traffic isn't the right metric to measure.

In this month's free webinar in the AI Coaching Academy, AEO: get Recommended By AI (replay below), I shared some of the best techniques I've learned in getting recommended by LLMs.

These include:

• FAQs are the easiest place to start to quickly improve AEO.
• List 5 high-intent customer questions on the homepage.
• Use Google's E-E-A-T framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
• Add items to your homepage that support these 4 qualities.
• Structured Data and Schema make your website readable by AI bot crawlers.
• Tables and bullets containing keywords and questions stand out.

In the age of SEO, we focused on keywords.

With AEO, we focus on questions.

🤖 Do an AEO Audit of your own website

Open the replay in one window, your website in another, and your favourite LLM in a third. Use the following prompts, and paste your website address where it says URL:

AEO Audit prompts

FAQ Generator prompts

There are a bunch of other prompts I used in the webinar, and they are available to anyone with a free account in the AI Coaching Academy. You can copy/paste all the prompts here.

🔍 Competition research gives you shortcuts.

The final point I'll leave you with involves a chapter from my book, Marketing Yourself. If you are not the recommended answer to an AI query, go to the website that is, and use this prompt:

There arean additional two dozen prompts included with the replay.

Login with your free account at the AI Coaching Academy, put on the replay, and start copy/pasting.

📰 New AI News This Week

• Anthropic is aiming to beat SpaceX's record-breaking IPO raise of $75 billion, aiming for $100 billion next month.
• Nvidia guaranteed $100 billion in funding for OpenAI's new datacentre in Ohio
• LinkedIn's Anti-Slop button has been used more than a million times in one month, reducing slop in users' feeds by 40%

👓 What I’m Reading

• ​Tech's Trust Problem Is a Product Problem by Peter Diamandis - "The public has heard this before. From the oil industry. From the chemical industry. From the tobacco industry. Trust us is not a strategy. It is a delay tactic. And the public knows the difference."
• ​A Week of Grok Bot Lessons in 10 Mins by Nate Herk - "The system gets much more useful once every agent can reach the same tools and report what it is doing."
• ​Spend Less Tokens by Vasuman - "90% of your company's token spend never needed to happen in the first place."

Upcoming Events

Free webinar for members of the AI Coaching Academy:

Friday, September 18 at 10:00 AM GMT+12 Human-First AI: Find the Work that Matters Most AI won’t replace you. But someone who learns how to use it—without losing their humanity—might. In this reflective, hands-on session, Caelan Huntress shows how to use Generative AI to amplify your creativity, not replace it. You’ll learn to map your workflow to a five-step creative cycle—Collect, Sort, Craft, Polish, Publish—and discover which... RSVP

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Thursday, August 27 at 10:00 AM GMT+12 Ai205 - AI for Marketing Expand Reach & Engagement Multiply your marketing output without multiplying effort. This workshop explores how AI can support content creation, campaign planning, and audience engagement at scale. Increase content production while maintaining quality. Personalise messaging across channels using AI support. Design repeatable marketing systems... RSVP

Premium mastermind for members of the AI Seminar:

Friday, September 11 at 12:00 PM GMT+12 AI Mastermind Weekly accountability meeting. Come prepared to share your: WINS - what were your wins with AI this week? CHALLENGES - where did AI go wrong? COMMITMENTS - what will you be working on this week? RSVP

Keep on growing!

- Caelan Huntress ​[email protected]​ ​https://ai-coaching.academy/​

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