How Industrial Brands Can Measure and Improve AI Visibility

Speaker A: One of the hottest areas of marketing right now is answer engine optimization. Of course, we see buyers using more and more of their large language models to make a purchase decision, do their research, move things further along. And with that, of course, each brand wants to be there, uh, and show up in these answer engines. And so today we wanted to pull back the curtain of, uh, how we're working with our clients to assess what, where they are today and then what is the game plan for improving AEO visibility? You'll learn how to use technology tools such as HubSpot's new AEO tool and SEMrush in order to do this evaluation. Set your baselines and then we'll give you very practical tips of what's moving the needle right now with aeo. While I have you, I also wanted to mention that a lot is happening with the Industrial marketing summit for 2027. We're about to release our call for presentations and sponsors. So if you're not already in our mailing list and you would like to be, go to industrialmarketingsummit.com and just sign up for our mail list and you'll be informed the second that news hits the ground. Let's do this.

Speaker B: Welcome to Content Marketing Engineered, your source for building trust and generating demand with technical content. Here is your host, Wendy Covey.

Speaker C: Hi and welcome to Content Marketing Engineered. On each episode, I'll break down an industry trend challenge or best practice in reaching technical audiences. You'll meet colleagues, friends and clients of mine who will stop by to share their stories. And I hope that you leave each episode feeling inspired and ready to take action. Before we jump in, I'd like to give a brief shout out to my agency. TruMarketing. Tru is a full service agency located in beautiful Austin, Texas serving highly technical companies. For more information, visit TruMarketing.com and now on with our podcast.

Speaker A: Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Content Marketing Engineered. I'm joined today by Kara Cook. She is an account manager and our search visibility guru at Trumarketing. Welcome to the show, Kara.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: You betcha, you betcha. I'm so excited to talk about this one because obviously AEO is such a hot topic right now, but HubSpot introduced a new tool in this area, so I want to talk about both. We won't just talk about HubSpot today. So those listening that aren't on HubSpot, no problem. We want to really unpack how to tell how you're doing in AO, how to improve visibility and how tools like HubSpot and others can help you do that. Um, so first, why the heck are we talking about this today, like, from your perspective, Kara? I'm saying it's a hot topic, but is it?

Speaker B: I know this topic has definitely evolved a lot over the last few months, the last couple of years, just with the introduction of AI and all that's changed. But what we're really seeing is zero click is the norm now. And so a lot of the organic traffic that we were seeing coming to websites was just declining year over year. And, uh, you know, it's like, what's driving that change? But search behavior is just fragmented now. People are not going to Google, and they're. You're typing in your inquiry, you're getting those, you know, AI snippets, you're getting the overview answers. People are finding things on LinkedIn. And so even though your site might be performing well, you're just gonna continue to see that traffic decline because behavior has changed. And so that's really what's sparking a lot of. Okay, well, if the behavior has changed as marketers, how do we answer that? How do we start to evolve our strategies to meet the buyers where they're at?

Speaker A: Yeah, and it's so interesting to see that when people use answer engines and then they pop to your website, they're so much further along in their buyer's journey. And I've seen a lot of statistics that support. Support that. Uh, but yet, in our own state of marketing to engineers, the engineers seem still a little skeptical of generative answers. So it's funny, uh, maybe they're lagging a little bit in adoption, but each year, of course, they're using it more and more. So I expect, uh, our 2027 report will look vastly different than 2026.

Speaker B: I like to say that the. The websites now, they're shifting from traffic engines to trust engines. And. And so a lot of those users are coming and they're validating what they're finding, which is meeting exactly that research statistic of 62% already are finding all this information before they ever find your brand or their site.

Speaker A: Yeah. Love it. Okay. So all the time, clients will come to us and say, hey, I want to show up, I want to do better. I don't even know if I'm showing up today, how much I'm showing up. So. So how do you go about assessing the current state of someone in this area?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we started doing, um, some AI visibility audits. And I think what's important to really Understand too is what is the difference between all of these acronyms, you know, SEO, uh, and aeo, uh, and geo. And it's just a bunch of Alphabet soup of understanding what the heck we're all talking about. And a lot of times I feel like you're scrolling through LinkedIn and people are talking about the same things, but one person might say aeo, another person might say geo. So I created myself a little checklist or cheat sheet if you will, so that when I'm talking to clients I can help explain the differences of these things. And so when we're thinking of SEO, everyone, I shouldn't say everyone knows SEO, but that's really like where we're coming from, right? That's that ah, Search Engine optimization that you're trying to rank your keywords on Google and on Bing and you want to get those clicks. And so when we're talking about like zero click marketing, that's what we're seeing decline because uh, all of those AI overview answers at the top of that search results page. But then we've got aeo, which is the answer Engine Optimization, that's your AI overviews that are at the top of the page. The Google snippets. The goal there is to really be the answer that Google is pulling from, um, and then you're probably not going to get a click. A lot of times the answer is answered at that point and so you don't really need to dig further. But then GEO is different. That is Generative Engine Optimization, um, that's really trying to optimize for the platforms ChatGPT and Perplexity and uh, Gemini, all of those LLMs, um, where you're cited and you're included in responses. If people have gone directly to those platforms to do their search where they're just chatting and asking the questions. And so for that you're really looking to improve your authority, gain context and trust within those models. And so again there's often a lot of times no click. We're also seeing direct traffic increase where organic is decreasing and so that direct traffic you might get mentioned in the answer and then they go and they search you or they type in your URL and so then that's how they land on the site. So attribution in this hot mess is

Speaker A: also getting harder, isn't it ever? And that's such a hard thing to explain to uh, technical like engineer executives that think everything should be measurable and maybe drives the wrong activity because of it. So I think it is important that we educate executives on, um, lack of attribution right now. Yeah, squishy attribution.

Speaker B: This too, I think it's easier to remember. You know, SEO is helping you get found, AEO is helping you get chosen, and GEO is helping you become that source that AI is relying on. And so I think it's easy to think of like, well, we got to scrap SEO and now we've got to focus all on geo. And that is not the case. Like, a key point here is SEO is still very foundational. We're just layering on top of that to optimize for AI. So you still need a lot of those SEO foundational tactics. That's going to help you with this, this audit as well.

Speaker A: Okay, all right, so what goes into the audit?

Speaker B: Yeah, so with the audit, uh, so they're thinking about a framework here. First you got to start with, can AI even see you? That's the big question. And so a lot of times I did an audit recently for a client, and what I'm finding is that these clients, or even just industrial brands, they have so much expertise, it's just not packaged in a way that AI is able to extract it, interpret it, and then ultimately cite it when people are asking these questions. And so when it comes to the audit, what I start with is, uh, AI visibility testing. So are the AI tools mentioning your brand? We use tools at True, So we use SEMrush to look at prompt analysis and citations and what pages are actually getting cited. What's the overall AI visibility score according to that tool? But I have to mention at, ah, Industrial Marketing Summit this year, in the closing session, Dale had to be talking about a lot of this. And he said, well, if you want to know how ChatGPT and how these LLMs are pulling content and recommending content, just ask it. And I was like, well, that's really simple. Duh. You know, we're trying to like, optimize for all this complex AI. It's like, no, just, just talk to it and ask it. So I started doing that, and in the recent audit I did for this client, I asked the same prompt where it was, um, they're trying to. They're manufacturing, let's wire. And so it was, who do you recommend? Who's your top recommendation for litzy wire manufacturers? And I did that across ChatGPT, perplexity, Claude and Gemini, and then started to track, okay, well, who are the ones that are getting mentioned? And is that client's name popping up? Where is it popping up? And there was a couple where they didn't. And so I asked it again, like, well, why didn't this client pop up? And it came back and it was like, oh yeah, you're right, totally should have been included in the list. And I was like, you know, talking to it like it's a human. You're not just telling me that, right?

Speaker A: Like, um.

Speaker B: And so then it did. It truly went through like, no, I'm not just telling you that. They are very much should be included in this list. Here's why I didn't include it. And so it would show me the content that it was pulling from. I did this for true the other day actually. And it was like, why wasn't true mentioned? It's like, well, because you're not part of these, uh, top articles that I was looking at. And so I think a, um, nuance to know with all of this is my searches are going to be different than your searches. Different tools are going to pull up different things. But with this visibility testing, what we're really trying to find is patterns and trends and just gain as much knowledge as we can so that we can then define how we need to move forward. So that's the big piece of, the first piece of the audit I should say is um, just that, visibility testing and tools, but then like an incognito search and just searching on your own. Um, some of the other things then that I look at, uh, is source and citation analysis. So is AI trusting the content that's on your site? You're identifying frequently cited websites, Are those competitors coming up? What content is getting pulled? What type of content is it blog content? Is it listicles? Is it service and solution, product pages? Um, just trying to understand the content that is being pulled. And then you take that a step further. Is your content structured in a way that AI understands? Is it AI friendly? Do you have clear headings? Are they aligned with user questions? And so a lot of the sites that we work with, a lot of them come to us and they're very product heavy. And with this, you know, AI searches, you're not searching necessarily for products. You may not know the product you need right off the bat. You're searching with a problem. And so really aligning your content to be more problem focused then product focused is also going to be helpful here.

Speaker A: It feels when you, when you say problem focused, I feel like we're kind of back to this long tail of search, you know, with these long applications or things, very technical things that people are trying to solve. So yeah, I mean, and it's logical that it would return to that. I think with answer engines it seems even more personal appropriate to plug them in there than Google.

Speaker B: Yeah, that is definitely a great point. Is totally increasing long tail behavior because you know, if you're going to ChatGPT and you're searching going back to this client that does let's wire. They're not just searching, let's wire. You know, they're asking what let's wire should I use for this application? Or you know, um, what compare let's wire manufacturers or whatever the case is. It's definitely more than just trying to rank for those keywords. And so in a way we are going backwards. So Lee and I were talking about that the other day when um, we were looking at an audit we did for Tru and she's like, I feel like we're just going back to things that we were doing years ago. And it's almost like what goes around comes around.

Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, so you've looked at this current state and it looks like testing outside of the company whiles of that chatgpt or whatever, that large language model instance is important to get maybe slightly more unbiased. Um, what about HubSpot's new tool? Are you using it during the audit or are you maybe mainly SEMrush?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's interesting because when I was doing this audit in particular, the AEO tool had not been released yet. And so this was part of HubSpot's spring, um, spotlight. It's currently in public beta. So anybody that has a Marketing Hub Pro or Marketing Hub Enterprise gets instant access to the tool. Um, but then if you don't, if you're like on Starter, you're not in HubSpot, you can also pay, um, a $50 a month membership or subscription to use the tool on its own. Um, so for the audits that I have done, I didn't use the tool. I used the HubSpot AEO grader, which is a free tool that anybody can access. It's on HubSpot site and what they do with that is they uh, assess a lot of the same information that's baked into the new tool. But, uh, what's different is the new tool goes a step further in that it's connected to your CRM, it's connected to your data, connected to your content, so the output is way more customized. Where this AEO grader is giving you brand visibility metrics, it's giving you sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarks, growth area recommendations. And so I used that as a starting Point. And that that was also, I should mention, across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity were the three that that AEO grader uses. I also used SEMrush, um, that took it a step deeper, gave me similar information. Uh, and then I just used the platforms itself. So going into ChatGPT or Claude or what have you, and then just asking the prompts that I was coming up with on my own. Um, but as far as the new tool, I'm really excited about that. HubSpot has come up and just announced all these new changes that has changed so much in the last couple of years. But this tool in particular I'm particularly excited about. And so, um, it gives you brand visibility metrics. So you're seeing your percentage. If your brand is getting mentioned in 7 out of 10 AI answers, then it's telling you your brand visibility is 70%. And so then it's benchmarking that across competitors. So you're adding in your specific competitors and seeing where you fall compared to them. You're also seeing your trends over time. And so it'll show you on, um, the still, the three tools, Chat, GPT, Perplexity and Gemini, how that brand visibility is trending. So are you trending up? Are you trending down? And so that just helps you assess, like, is your content still good on the site? Is it still relevant? Is it, you know, being pulled into the answers in the way that you want that to be visible? It's showing share of voice from competitors. So I was just looking at Truze this morning and it's showing where we stand compared to who we consider competitors. Your sentiment analysis, which again was part of that free tool, but now it's baked in here into your CRM. And so it's. Is it overwhelmingly positive, you know, when these tools are talking about you or referencing you, or is it negative? Uh, you know, just getting a baseline of how it looks to your brand.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so once you have this baseline in place, then obviously you're looking for areas of improvement. So how do you look at this? Do you have a framework? Do you have different buckets that you categorize these improvements into? You go about doing that. Yeah.

Speaker B: So if you're using the AEO tool, there's a really nice feature that I like that it gives you recommendations based on what it's finding. So it has recommended content where it's telling you, this would be social amplification, this would be owned new content. This is outreach. We recommend that you do. Um, it'll tell you like the content type like you should look at creating this listicle. Listicles are huge. Right now we're seeing, you know, top 10 B2, B M manufacturing, marketing agencies, or top 10 research reports, top 10 this, top 10 that. Ah, those are getting cited quite a bit. But in this recommended content tool, it's also showing you which competitors are showing up for similar content. Which keywords should you be focusing on in this piece? If it's a blog, if it's a listicle, and once you publish it within HubSpot, within your marketing tools, it will start to show you the impact and how it's performing and how it's driving changes in that visibility. So, so that's a nice thing about the new AO tool is how connected it is to your specific CRM, your marketing tools, you know, your content in general. But just as a general framework, um, I like to bucket it into four different buckets of things to focus on for improvement. So I guess the first would be technical website improvements. Going back to the glory days of SEO, you still need internal linking. Like remember when HubSpot was talking about topic clusters? Topic clusters are the big thing. And there is a tool in HubSpot for topic clusters that I think people forget about. But that is imperative here so that AI is recognizing your expertise and tying your content together. Your page speed still important, your mobile usability is still important. So just making sure that you've got that foundational technical setup in place, that would be bucket number one. Bucket number two is the big one. It's the content improvements. And so most sites are very product heavy. Like I had mentioned, they're not always question driven and sometimes they're thin on educational content. And not necessarily the educational content where you think back to old blog posts where it's what is let's wire or what is, you know, technical marketing. That's not necessarily the educational content we're talking about. More so now it's why is my brand the best choice for xyz or how should I be thinking about this compared to this option or this solution? Um, a lot of times, especially in the audit that I did for this client a couple weeks ago, the competitors weren't winning, um, because they were better companies. They were just winning because they were explaining things better. So making sure that your content is structured with bullet points. It likes to pull out clear, quotable content. FAQs, it really likes FAQs. And so baking those into your service pages or your blog posts and making sure that those are very easily accessible across your site. But From a user standpoint. I mean, I like a good FAQ too, because as a user, you don't want to go and read a bunch of paragraphs, you know, so there's kind of finding that happy medium with the content of can a user read this and can AI read this? Is this going to, you know, benefit both audiences, if you will, so.

Speaker A: And Kara, once upon a time, more content was better even if there were overlapping topics. And it seems now that less, more focused content is better. Would you agree with that?

Speaker B: Oh, I would absolutely agree. I say it's still quality over quantity, making sure that you have the right content. It's not going out and, you know, publishing a bunch of blog posts for the sake of publishing blog posts like, you know, it used to be.

Speaker A: It used to be. Yeah. That's a pretty big shift. I think that's happened and it's not happened just now. Right. I think it's been since Google changed some of their algorithms. But the large language model, same thing. It seems like the more you have overlapping concepts that don't build on each other or look duplicate, it confuses who you are. Right. It, it's. You lose some clarity when you're training for those large language models.

Speaker B: Yep. I think that goes back to the topic cluster too. Like, do you have a core pillar page? Do you have the supporting content that branches off of that pillar page? Does it all link back? And so it's still having that strategy around those top versus, you know, just creating a bunch of content for the sake of creating a bunch of content. And so I, I would keep the topic cluster top of mind when we're thinking about this.

Speaker A: All right.

Speaker B: But the, Another bucket I want to talk about too, when it comes to improvements. And this one is big. And we're seeing, this is pr. And I know like Morgan is seeing a lot of PR just expand in the services we're doing for clients, but AI very heavily values repeated external validation. So while we're, we've mainly talked about the website, we still want to be visible in those industry directories, guest articles, trade publications. So that's also telling the LLM, like, yes, the structure of the website's good, the content is quality. They know that topic, they're owning that topic. But this is also validating all of that as well. So being visible in that third party, uh, validation, having that authority is also very important.

Speaker A: Okay. How important is it to have a subject matter expert tied like the same person tied to those external topics as internal blogs? Does it matter? I know with Eeat it kind of mattered. And so I'm wondering for large language models, how much play that has.

Speaker B: It does matter and it's just showing, going back to showing the expertise and the authority on the topic. Thought leadership, I would consider that bucket number four. And so uh, from looking at, at what AI is favoring, it likes those quotable insights, it likes original perspectives. And so you're not necessarily going to get that from a company piece of content as you would if you know I was writing something or you were writing something or that SME from the industrial company is writing the topic. And so when we're looking at what engineers also trust and just going back to the research, um, having that unique perspective is imperative. And so it was definitely important piece of the GEO and the AI conversation.

Speaker A: Okay. Um, I imagine there's some panic out there like oh my gosh, my CEO is upset because we're not showing up. I have to do something right away. And uh, so when a company is coming at it from a reactive standpoint, what are some of the mistakes they may make in tackling all of this?

Speaker B: Um, that's a good question. I think one of the biggest, maybe

Speaker A: it's, it's managing expectations, Kara, that might be the other thing is you can't buy your way in yet.

Speaker B: Well, I think it's important to know that like, even if you're looking at like audit results and you're looking at recommendations, this isn't going to change overnight. Changing your visibility, it's going to take time, it's not a quick fix. Um, but I think it is kind of important too if you're managing those expectations, to be able to show whether you're using a tool like the aeo, um, tool in HubSpot or Semrush, or if you're doing your own prompt analysis to just show where things are falling and what's happening, explaining the zero click behavior. But I think what's easy to fall into is just something we talk about. True a lot is running to the tactics before the strategy. So just publishing new content again for the sake of publishing content, doing the wrong tactics, that's not going to drive those changes. So really you have to know where you stand before you know where you're going. And I think that's an important thing to remember here.

Speaker A: Okay, so how important is it to truly be differentiated to getting found as

Speaker B: far as like differentiated messaging?

Speaker A: Mhm. Like really, truly having uh, an offering that approaches the market differently. I mean, is it okay to have a me too commodity offering and you can still be found. Or do you really need that true differentiation?

Speaker B: No, you really need that true differentiation. So that was definitely one of the things, the strongest themes that came out of the audit that I did for this client was they had the expertise, but they, they didn't have the content, the category signals, the differentiated messaging to tell, you know, whether it's a buyer that's looking at their site or whether it's ChatGPT that's assessing the site that they were different and they were a category owner. So they need that repeated messaging. They need that clear specialization on, um, this is why we are the choice. This is why we are the expert. If you have the me too, then you're just falling in a category of like, it doesn't make you any different than any of your competitors. And AI is good to recognize that, but so are technical buyers on your site. Right?

Speaker A: So the biggest nuance, if I look backwards, say five, uh, to 10 years, it used to be if I write enough content on this, say engineering application or this, this keyword phrase, if I write enough about it in different ways, then I'm going to rank for that phrase or that keyword. And now it's about authority and your brand tied to that. Right. So it's, it's, you can't, it's not good enough just to educate on that with generic, um, copy. And that's where I think people were abusing the large language models, right. As they were making kind of generic copy to meet that application need or whatever it was. They were trying to rank for that phrase. But they weren't thinking about their brand authority and whether or not they're differentiated in the market. It's like that hierarchy of messaging.

Speaker B: Yep. Brand is absolutely huge in this. It's the, it's the top layer and then it kind of funnels its way down, you know, to your website, to your messaging. So you need to have that well defined brand at the top of all of this as crux.

Speaker A: Okay, so what about Reddit, is that another. Is it did for a while have an outsized impact, Right. For Google, does it still have things calmed down or is it still one of these highly perceived things?

Speaker B: You know, when I've been doing this audit and from what I've been seeing, and even when I would ask the LLMs M, you know, why isn't things coming up, it didn't mention Reddit. And so I know Reddit is huge. And Reddit's also like, for a time it was ranking on Google where you would See a lot of those Reddit questions when it comes to AI and what I have been seeing in the last little bit, I have not been seeing it Reddit as important as what we originally thought, um, a couple months ago. That's not to say it's not important for a lot of things, but from what I've been seeing as far as this AI audit was not seeing it pop up as much.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it seems to be you've already touched on pr, but we've seen a lot of data that suggests that the credibility of technical publications really has an outsized influence. So it seems it may not always be the case that it's like this really smart kind of shortcut play, but certainly seems to be working right now. And you're meeting the engineers where they are because that's the number one information source anyway.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Okay, so if a marketer's listening and they're like, oh, Kara, I have so many things of all these trade shows going on, so much to do. What is the one thing, Just tell me one thing I could do to improve visibility right now. What's a low hanging fruit for them?

Speaker B: Oh, gosh, Um, I think it would be picking. Pick a topic that you really want to own and be known for and build a pillar page and then branch off from that. Um, make sure it's not product first content. Make sure it's problem, you know, where you're answering those questions that, you know, talk to sales too. What questions are they hearing in the sales process that then you can directly answer on this pillar page? Because you know, the AI systems are just, they're rewarding the clarity, the usefulness, the depth of content. And so that would be my first step is go back, assess the content on your site and really move forward with one topic so that you can start, you know, putting your best foot forward with that.

Speaker A: Okay, good deal. Well, um, m. Anything else we didn't cover. We talked a little bit about measurement. I guess these tools provide a good baseline. So then you're circling back to the same tool. So you have apples to apples and seeing if you're moving the needle. How long does it take to impact change?

Speaker B: It's hard to say. So if you're looking at like, let's say the brand visibility scores or like if you're in SEMrush, the AI visibility score. I don't see those shift quickly. It's going to take months before you'll start to see much of a shift there. But, uh, what you can start to see is citations if you're adding new content, updating your content prompt analysis, that can be fast, faster than the, the overall brand visibility scores. And so I, I don't want to say like, oh, yeah, you're going to see results in two weeks. It's really, it's hard to say. But what I would recommend is set those baseline scores, look at your brand visibility, look at the AI visibility, um, how many citations do you have today? How many times are you showing up in prompts? Write that down in a scorecard and then assess it in three months, six months, a year, and then you can gauge that, ah, improvement from there.

Speaker A: And if you're wiring a press release, if you happen to get a contributed article, you're going to see a spike there. Uh, especially if you're looking at recent news and things like that. Uh, but you have to have the companion of all that content on your website to back that up. Or is it going to be spike that goes away if you're not reinforcing it on your owned property as well?

Speaker B: Correct. Yeah.

Speaker A: Very good. Well, Kara, where can people go to learn more and connect with you?

Speaker B: So I'm on LinkedIn so you can find me there. You can find me on the, uh, the True blog podcast. I occasionally post some content there, but I'd say LinkedIn connect with me there will be linked in the show notes, I am sure. Absolutely.

Speaker A: All right, well, thanks for dropping by today, Kara.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me.

Speaker C: Thanks for joining me today on, um, content marketing engineered for show notes, including links to resources, visit trumarketing.com podcast while there, you can subscribe to our blog and RA newsletter and order a copy of my book, Content Marketing Engineer. Also, uh, I would love your reviews on this podcast. So please, when you get a chance, subscribe and leave me a review on your favorite podcast subscription platform. Thanks and have a great day.