The AEO Playbook: Own the AI Shortlist - Live with Sydney Sloan at GTM Tailwinds - Ep 80

Episode notes

Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2, joined Craig, Matt, and our amazing audience of GTM leaders at our GTM Tailwinds event this spring for a live recording where she outlined the major shift in B2B buyer behavior, how to measure and track Answer Engine Optimization, and why the partnership and distribution layer is as important as content creation. Critical Takeaways Over half of B2B buyers (51%, up from 24% just one year ago) now start their research in an LLM rather than Google. GTM leaders must treat AI answer engines as the new top-of-funnel, not a novelty. Waiting another year means your competitors get a 12-month head start on owning these answers. Stop writing for search crawlers, instead write for the person you're trying to influence. The old HubSpot model of casting a wide content net (writing for non-marketers to drive traffic) is losing effectiveness. Instead, teams should map out the specific jobs-to-be-done for each buyer persona, the product leader, the CFO, the practitioner, and write questions and answers directly for that person. This persona-centric content approach is what gets surfaced and cited in LLM responses.

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