GoKawiilThis story appears in the May 2026 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
For a long time, the marketing firm Vital Design kept a blog. It was a basic SEO tactic: Write posts about the things your target user searches for, and those people are more likely to discover you in Google searches.
Then AI came along, and Vital’s organic blog traffic plummeted by 60%. Maybe you’ve experienced the same problem, just like businesses everywhere.
But here’s the twist: While Vital’s traffic cratered, its sales-ready leads remained steady or increased. How? Because Vital had started investing in the next SEO-like strategy: It’s often called answer engine optimization, or AEO, and it helps boost your company’s visibility in AI search queries.
In addition, AEO can help search engines more efficiently inform your consumer — which is changing the entire sales cycle.
Max DesMarais, Vital Design’s director of strategy, calls this the “marketing funnel push.” Customers’ research phase now happens outside your website, through AI tools that synthesize information from multiple sources. So by the time they reach your site, they’ve already been prequalified by AI.
“They are already further down the funnel than they previously were, creating a better environment for them to convert on sales-ready leads,” DesMarais says. So if you can get AI to recommend your business during that research phase, you’ll attract more qualified prospects who are ready to buy.
Here’s how to do it.
Create hyperspecific service pages
One of the most effective tactics, DesMarais says, is to create content such as new product pages on your website — including features, attributes, and FAQs — that address extremely specific customer needs. The more niche and targeted, the better.
... continue reading