How to Win AI Search and Prove it Drives Pipeline (with AirOps, Compt, Muck Rack and more)

Dasha, remember when McKeal from Optimizely won our exit five live AI agent showcase the 2000 custom landing pages. That was really impressive So he's their director of AI innovation and he built them with Optimizely's agent platform one for every account in an abm campaign He built them from signals like job postings, press releases and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of abm That's why today's sponsor Optimizely is where I'd point anyone who wants to know what AI agents can do for marketing Their agent platform is built specifically for B2B marketers build your own agents or pull from a directory of 50+ prebuilt ones They also launch virtual teammates. These are digital team members that learn over time can join meetings complete tasks support campaigns and keep your website Optimize. Why do I need to go to work? Let me get those. Okay. I need one of those Same being asked to look into AI agents, which I know a lot of you listeners are right now go check out Optimizely Put them at the top of your list and you can go build cool stuff just like McKeal did check them out at optimizely.com/exit5 Hey quick shout out to web flow who is also sponsoring today's episode their team actually ran one of the highest rated workshops at drive this year Which is our big annual conference people raved about that one guy their chief evangelist really knows AEO And you shared a ton of advice on turning your website into an ongoing revenue driver And that matters a lot right now right AI is cutting into organic traffic. I don't go to Google and search anymore I'm talking to my AI agents all day long So AI is cutting into organic traffic and buyers just like you and me are using AI to make purchase decisions about 95% of the time Web flow they're a great team to follow on this more than 300,000 brands can you believe that build on their platform It helps you get discovered in AI search build fully custom sites without a developer Gov on your content and see how agents read it all in one place and they just launched web flow campaigns Agents help you write a campaign brief from your brand system then generate on brand landing pages and matching ads together Check it out at webflow.com/exit-5 and make your website your biggest growth engine in 2027 That's webflow.com/exit-5 You're listening to the exit five podcast Woo, very live Are we just true and just true what's up, Dash? How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm rocking my Halloween shirt. Okay, we're in October Yeah, how are you? I'm good. I'm wearing us. So today I my My team has outfitted me in the exit five staff polo These will soon be available at exit five.com/merch I also have the exit five mic cap and I have the exit five water bottle I'm full on team brand because I feel like these are the things you can do It's all about brand and visibility to these days Dash and I feel like more people will search for us in chat Gbt and Claude and AI search if just the exit five brand is everywhere And so you someone actually backstage said you should have these I should have five of these So I'd like to have five of these sent to my house. They just wear one every day. So we call it exit five maxing That is also yeah, I like that And I heard that there's a There's a little Halloween. We're doing this back-to-back. So next week. So we have right now. We're talking about AEO Next week is all about events. We're pivoting to do a webinar all about in-person events. So very different than this one I think you should come next week. Spoiler alert. There may or may not be some costumes and different attire there Is that safe to say you didn't say there will be you said there might there might be Can you just clarify something do they is there Halloween in Canada? Yeah, stay there's Halloween in Canada And people go trick or treating all right Okay, but but but one thing I did want to know so when I was a kid and I trick or treat in is I don't know if that's right Your white trick or treating yeah, we would bring pillowcases. Yeah, is that a Canadian thing like you really want Okay, it's because it can fit a lot of candy. No, you got it Americans we definitely have more loss for sugar and awful things So we have much bigger pillowcases this week. Okay, but the pillowcase thing is not a Canadian Maria is literally yelling at a start to product. You know what I mean? Once I get out here, I'm in charge You're not in charge. I'm in charge. Well, hey everybody. Thanks for coming. We do these on Fridays This is called exit five live. I'm Dave Gehrhard founder of exit five This is my co-host asha. She's VP of marketing a company called proton AI just a good marketer who's good on camera good to hang with us every two weeks We do these although we're doing one back-to-back next week We go deep on a topic that is really important to you all right now in marketing and no surprise This was the most just real quick shot. This is the most people we've by the time we went live here We probably broke 2000 registrants, but this is the most people we've ever had registered for one of these and we've been doing them for four years so amazing and Not surprising marketing 101 which is like the number one. It's not because we sent a bunch of emails Not because we had some promo trick up our sleeve It is because this is the hottest topic in marketing I was interviewing a CMO of a seven hundred million dollar cyber security company last week in New York City And he looked at a hundred people in the room and he said the number one thing that matters in marketing is winning AI search And I think that is why so many people have turned out to this session So real quick, can you just give people the rundown? What do we do in these and then and then we'll get into the Show today, please well first. I think we should think air ops. Oh, you do have to do that first. Okay I'm just having a good time today. I'm I'm on my sixth coffee Stop scripting guys. That's okay. I'm better. I'm better off script. All right. Yeah, so fine We'll do we'll do this now, but I want to give a quick shout out to the presenting sponsor of today's session That is our friends at air ops shop speaking of AEO AI searches the topic everyone is being asked to get smarter about right now I see constantly in the exit five community and across our newsletter podcasts like I said on stage with the top CMO last week Made me feel very inadequate about what I know about AI and SEO Air ops helps you get their air ops is your partner in turning AI search into your next growth advantage They help marketing leaders build the strategy systems and channel presence to win AI search Powering companies like karta ramp and chime those good logos right there Rather than choosing between software or agencies air ops gives you the platform expertise to figure out what works for your brand Executes your strategy across the channels that matter and helps you execute one step ahead of the competition Go check them out after today's session. It's air ops.com And by the way, even if you're not ready for air ops yet They have a ton of free resources smart marketers on their site You can check it out about AI search and creating content with AI and they run live sessions like this a couple times a month So go check that out. I'm sure there's a bunch of air ops customers in the chat feel free to to tolerate that Dash up back to you now you can tell us what's now I can deliver on your ask Okay, so what the heck are we doing here today? We are going deep on AI search And why does this matter? We surveyed a bunch of you we surveyed close to 900 people about what's happening with AI search on their teams And the alarming thing is that only 30% of folks can prove that AI search is driving pipeline Which if you listen to Dave if this is another one thing we should be focused on as marketers We'd better be able to talk it about why it ties to pipeline and why this is helping our company grow So the focus today Dave take it away. I think you have to say I have some questions about this data. I mean, obviously we we did this poll so this is on us But I think to me, this is like the same as asking like do you know if if SEO is working And so I think there's like it speaks to the deeper question inside a marketing team Which is like how do we prove it's not that can we prove that we're showing up in AI search? I think that problem is solved it's can we prove that showing up in AI search is actually driving Leads meetings pipeline revenue and that's kind of always going to be the the million dollar question I don't think anyone has ever figured fully attribution out But this is still telling I think there's a lot of questions here And I think that's why we got these eight experts to hopefully dive in and give you something new I want you to take notes at this session get a couple new ideas You can bring back to your team for Monday and start to make some progress here with aio at your company The other thing we surveyed you guys on is what is your biggest aio talent and I love this not sure what actually works. I mean same. That's why I'm here too I'm hosting, but I'm also learning I'm taking the transcript from this and sending it back to Claude and Distilling it down for insights for our team. I also forced my team to to show up to this webinar So shall be in Brian. I hope you're in the chat reveal yourselves. All right We are here to talk about what actually is working for eight marketers. This is how it's going to work So we've got eight speakers We're going to split everyone up into two groups So group one is going to present. They're going to have two minutes to present their play You're going to vote on who you want from group one to make it into the finals This is important lots of people Criticize us in the chat, but you don't listen to the instructions at the beginning of this folks It's a two-minute teaser. So everyone's going to come on. They're going to tell you two minutes for why you should vote them into the next round Okay, then they're going to get longer if they win. There's going to be three people two winners from each round in a wild card We're going to have three people that will each get four minutes in the back half of this session to go deep and tell you more about that topic So you're going to vote for the person who you want to see explain more not who they had the best presentation Which of these eight people do you want to see get more time on the clock to explain their their thing? Okay Okay, and then questions as you go you're going to have questions because you know That's what happens when someone presents only for two minutes You're going to have questions ask them in the chat There's also a Q&A function and our speakers are going to be hanging out in the chat and answering your questions Dave what happens if someone wins? What's going to have another finalist? So if you win we're adding a new thing where I'm going to go to your house I will live at your house for seven days and I will give you access to my LinkedIn No, we sent out this handmade Dan has custom made this trophy. It goes out. This is real. Just Jessica Molly Logan spot rule, we actually send this trophy out in a world where we don't do anything in person or physically anymore. We're sending you this trophy. Who's it going to be? Which one of these eight folks going to be the next to post this coveted exit five trophy on LinkedIn? We will find out in about 40 minutes. Dan's getting so good at engraving too. Okay. Let's talk about our lineup. We're going to bring everyone on the stage and everyone is going to give you a little feel to who they are, where they work, and what they're going to talk about today. All right. John, go. Take this off. Hey, everybody. I am Josh Looker, head of search marketing here at Aerobs. And I will be talking about our Aerobs answer page and why it is one of our most cited pages. David. And everyone, my name is Vivek. I'm from Crossings. I'm from Crossings with the K and I will be illustrating an example of why thinking in terms of brand is just as important as thinking in terms of SEO tactics, for Aero visibility. Love it. Valerie. Hi, Valerie Leary. Up until recently, I was head of marketing at gift program. Now I'm living that fractional life. And today I will be talking about how to answer your CEO when they ask why you didn't show up when he chatted G.P. TV. Let's go. I love that. Sean, round us out for group one. And I'm Sean Blana from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I run a category creation agency called GATECHEC Studios. And I am talking about why most Aero advice, it's just SEO advice, so you should focus there. Love it. Okay. And then group two, Linda. Hey, everybody. I'm Linda. I'm VP of communications at Muck Brak and Generative Pulse. And today I'm going to be talking to you about why most of what the A I answer say about you is not in your control and why media and journalism drives your visibility. Spicy. I liked it. Pedro. Hi, everyone. My name is Pedro de Silva. I lead the A O S E O strategy, a bill. And today I'm going to be talking about how a bill we saw an increase of a 30% in marketing qualified leads quarter over quarter. Love it. Ross. Hey, everybody. I'm Ross. CEO of siege media. I just wrote a book on geo today, I'm going to be talking about zero is geo and some power in credibility nuggets. So what the heck is G is your web and other sorry, I brand it. I brand it. Apologies. Lauren. Around us. A group too. Yeah. I'm Lauren. I lead brand communications and product marketing at Comp today. I'm going to tell you that your homepage might be beautiful. It might even convert, but it might be still costing you AI recommendations. So I'll tell you how to fix that. If you vote for me, obviously, obviously, OK, that is great. Let's bring Josh on stage, kick off the timer and take it away. Let's go. So there's lots of stuff I can talk about with air ops today. But I wanted to focus on one particular play that I did recently and it is an air ops answers page and this is not a blog post, it's not a homepage, but it's actually our most cited page. So for example, it has over 35,000 citations influencing LLMs and AI answers. This is over the past three months. And it also changed from my proms here recently and it was up to like 300 prompts, but it covers over 240 prompts. And then in Q3 of 2026, it touched over 10 closed one deals worth over 700, hey, and that is 10x, what a medium, a median blog post would do. So this is a really great thing that lots of people can put in place this afternoon or even Monday and get going with that. And so if you vote me, oh, wait, I forgot about this part. But don't even take my word for what you're about to see. J.A. Jerk, one of the most critical people in the SEO space. I probably have some people out here who could vouch for that. He loved this play, Cassandra and Campfire Labs used to be at animals. She also thought this was really interesting. And then I got lots of other comments about it when I have shared this in the past. So this is a really great, super actionable thing that everyone can literally do this afternoon. And so definitely vote me through. And I will show you how you can get started and exactly what you need. Epic call to action with 30 seconds left to leave the people wanting more. Yeah, yeah. Andrea also just put you in a body bag. I can't trust anyone who can't remember. There's a second slide. So just one is we'll see yourself out. Well, there was so much great stuff that I just had so much to say. But that slide speaks for itself. So many great people recommending this play. You have to check it out. So vote me on. All right, kicking off the timer. Ready set. All right, hey, everyone. My name is Vivek. I'm from Crossing. And I'm actually tuning in from Lisbon. I feel like I'm the only person here who's tuning in from Europe. But anyway, it's a complete slander. There's some European. There is. Okay. If you're in Europe, go in the chat right now, please. All right. And my play is I'm going to show you how brand first thinking actually took one of our supply chain industry lines from 0 to 44%. Hey, I visibility in just eight weeks. In February, basically, their visibility was zero showing up for absolutely nothing. And even worse, as you can see from this little screenshot over here, if you zoom in, they were being mistaken for a marketing agency of the same name. Most AEO playbooks at this point would have probably gone in, fix the site, make some technical changes, the page clusters, what have you. We actually saw this as a brand problem because AI learns about you from basically an internet not just your website. So this was a brand recognition problem and you can't optimize your way to brand awareness. So essentially what we did is we built one asset, just one landing page and these are the results that we got. Here's something I want to point out, which would go against SEO advice. Organic traffic actually decreased the whole time, but ICP traffic increased. And in terms of reporting, we didn't just stop at a visibility score. We actually use a bunch of metrics to tell a story that the CMO could take to the board. There were no page clusters, no major campaigns. We built it from two data sources that most companies already have, but never seem to use. So all my pitches wrote me through, I'll show you what we did, where we source the data from, which tools we used, and how we measured success and told the story. So that's it. I think I'm still on time. Good job. After you're done scroll back up in the chat, look at how many people are from Europe. Good job. There's 121 people here right now, FYI. Okay. Okay. I'm kicking off the timer. Let's go. Hi, so kicking this off, raise your hand if your CEO head of sales or a board member ever asked you, I googled it, and why didn't we come up? You're going to want to keep your hand up for the second question, because now in 2026, it's, I asked chat GPT and we didn't come up. So I'm going to be talking about, and we all know as marketers, that's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. And so we are going to talk about how to proactively disprove that question and got on top of it. So while is that giftogram, we really needed to build a lot of the foundation, so starting Q3 last year, we were doing things like schema updates, copy updates, FAQ builds, claims, there was just a lot going on. And so if you are doing a whole bunch of different things at once and not one specific play, you need to prove that it's making an impact, right? And then meanwhile, making all these foundational changes in the dashboard, we were seeing that paid inbound leads. We're going down. I'm sure we weren't the only ones. And that direct and organic traffic were going up and we didn't know where it was coming from because if someone's researching it in chat GPT or claw and they're arriving as direct. And then the CRM is logging in as direct or organic. Your AI influence is invisible. We have the data that 70% there love a citation on the bottom to back that up. And so then we had a working hypothesis. The CEO was like, so is it a yo and I was like, probably, but you can't say that you're going off vibes when you're answering a CEO. And so we needed to start tracking it for efforts of rigging impact. However, only 22% mark of marketers were tracking AI disability. And we were on the 78% side of that. So we needed to start building it out. And so we put together a three part framework. This is part one. We implemented cognizzo, big shout out for them, love their tracking. And then we complemented it with a yo hub spot, which is in beta and track those tools. Well, for me to unlock the other two parts, we started tracking the framework. All right. We've got our last one in group four group one or fourth person. Oh my God. Okay. Anyways, starting timer. So guys. So I'm here to tell you is more of a mindset shift that a yo what works in a yo is SEO. And it really comes down to this, which is there are two stages to surfacing things in AI chats, whether AI finds you and then whether it chooses to output you, we can control whether it finds us, but no one knows how it chooses to output us. And do you want to spend your one precious life on this planet, guessing what the magic machines one from you? I say no, focus on what you can control. Even the people who make these things don't know how they work. They don't know why they surface certain results. So how can you possibly guess that? I don't think you can. So let's focus on what we can control further. Let's talk about some of the a yo advice you may hear today or elsewhere, which essentially boils down to SEO advice from 2017. In fact, you can replace the words in SEO advice and it holds for a yo like this one. You should build backlinks on sites that aren't yours. Great. HRFs told us that in 2021, how about create thoughtful content that gets the intent of the user? Awesome. Mods told us that in 2017, create information, gain content. Great search engine land told us that in 2023. So later, if you vote for me, I'll share more data and what to do instead, including, I did an analysis of 375 B2B blogs, and the correlation between organic search traffic and assetation is 0.93, that's pretty tight, which means if you get SEO or rate, you'll get AI right. Stop worrying about it, go take a vacation instead. - I need Sean's voice on my alarm in the morning. - Hold on, hold on, I agree, but everyone's gonna leave the freaking webinar right now. I think great job, and also with the heck. - We love a contrarian, thank you Sean. - Okay, we're gonna vote. Who did you love? Who do you wanna see in the finals? - All right, so this is who is the best, but who do you need to hear more from, right? Based on what they just said, who do you need? We got five seconds, we're gonna wrap this vote. Wherever you are in the car on the plane, Starlink on United, wherever you are, please pull over the side of the road. Five, four, three, two, one. Hands up, put your hands up, put your hands up. The voting is complete. - Wow, this is a tight one, is it? - Yeah, yeah. - Josh, the Aerobs Guide has juiced the numbers, and Josh is going next on. However, this is gonna be really interesting, because we have Sean and Valerie could be the wild card. You never know, that's what's amazing about this format. Hashtag innovation, that's what the Double M's, Marie and Merissa, that's what they'll do to you on these webinars. Quick break for Zoom webinars. This is the platform behind the world famous exit five live. Someone on LinkedIn just said, I compare all other webinars against exit five live. Now, how good is that? - So good, I wanna print that out, send it to my mom, put it on my fridge. In a world of AI slot, we just wanna make something that's worth showing up for, even a webinar. - Especially a webinar, but don't you dare call the webinar even though I break my own rule, and do that all the time, it's a live session. Our team puts over seven hours a week into each one of these choosing the topic, the prep calls, building the run a show, and making it valuable and engaging. - Zoom webinars is a big part of how we pull it off. We average 1,500 plus registrants for session, hundreds of people show up live, and the chat goes off. - Yeah, the last time we have a new high water market, 527 people live for an hour with us, Zoom does registration, emails, polls, analytics, and all lives in one place, so running a polished session every two weeks isn't a scramble. At Showtime, our team swears by Zoom's production studio. They preset every scene and push each one live on cue. Clean transition, zero chaos, at least that anyone can see, just please do not look at our internal slack. - Okay, all the caps lock in there, don't share that. That's our pro-level webinar production powered by Zoom. Check it out, zoom.com/exit5, learn more about Zoom and all the webinars and all their products there, and come see it live. We do these basically every week now. Go and check them out, it's called exit5 live, and learn more about Zoom at zoom.com/exit5. All right, if you're at a B2B tech company spending over $50,000 a month on paid media, compound growth marketing wants to give you two free sessions to build out your 2027 plan. - Free? Okay, I'm listening, what do you get? - I know, free is usually too good to be true, but check this out. In the first session, they're gonna learn your business, and in the second, they will deliver you a custom plan. - So you'd know how to split demand capture and creation, which channels drive the best ROI and where you're reporting, has gaps. - And look, I'd trust them with it. I've hired CGM twice. They're one of the best agencies I've worked with back in my day as a head of marketing. - Twice, well, I've hired plenty of agencies as a VP of marketing and that is rare. - I'm more than just a thought later, Dash. You should know that. So CGM helps high growth, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies show up earlier in the buying journey with full funnel paid media, AEO, and a dedicated GTM engineering team. Ooh, and a former VP of marketing started it, so they actually get B2B. - That's right, John was one of us back in the day, so check it out. You can go book your 2027 planning session right now at compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. - That's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. Link in the show notes. - All right, let's keep it rolling, Dash. What do we got? - We got a timer. I can tell you that for free. - All right, great. That's huge. - Let's go. - We're back. - Okay, so I'm Linda, MVP of Communications at Muckgrack, and I'm going to tell you about why pages you control aren't the way to get into the answer. So for us, one article was cited 159 times, and it was our single biggest driver of AI visibility. We didn't write it, we didn't own it, and we can't edit it. And it was published, guess, April 2023. And it is still our number one say Haitian. So everything you own, and everything you buy, your site, your campaigns, only adds up to 16% of what AI sites. How do we know? We looked at 25 million links to cross-chactive VT cloth in Gemini. Three times, our fourth report is coming out next week. So Journalism alone is nearly a third, and paid is less than half a percent. So what I'm talking about for journalism, I'm talking about a reporter writing about you, not your blog, not a press release, not a paid placement, not your digital site, your earned media on a journalistic site written by a journalist. So what AI says about you is all in essentially pages that you just can't control. So we stopped theorizing, and we looked at it ourselves, our own earned media. I do comms for a comms tech platform. It is very meta, but we looked at it over nine months, 109 prompts and 77,000 answers. And we traced every single citation back to the exact piece of content that produced it. So earned content was cited seven times more than a press release. A press release is a paid distribution model. So that is paid seven times more. And 10 articles produced 70% of our citations. So the right articles matter here. The citation rate did not decay, and that 2023 article gets cited as often as 2026. And if, all right, she go. We go in there next speaker. Let me start my timer go. - All right, everyone. So talking here about how to increase qualified leads with a high intent AOS strategy, a bill we saw a 30% increase quarter of a quarter, coming from organic search with a combining with AI referral traffic as well, which also got some recognition within a profound index report for the summer as the second largest mover and visibility in AEO within the FinTech and financial operations. What we did pretty much is we identify high intent prompt strategy by focusing on prompts that actually cite brand names and not just informational. Also, how we mind sales calls with our potential customers to identify some prompts to track. We also identify the top site sources within AEO and define the third party size represented 80%. And now we build a tiger team led by the SEO team to execute the strategy, the dividing conquer, to actually drive qualified leads to the business. So if you choose me for the next round, I'll be talking more in detail what those strategies were. I went on about it, I'll be attracted and more metrics and their results as well. - Wow, was a minute live? - Yeah, what should we do? Should we donate that to charity that remaining 30, 45 seconds? That's high ROI right there, let's go. - Let's keep going, 'cause then we'll have more - Hard time for today. - We'll come jokes, yeah, if we keep going then we have more time to banter, so. - All right, I'm ready, you ready? Go. - I'm ready. So we looked at 500 instances on our peak of different sites we're tracking visibility for and we saw that the sites that have the most visibility in the mid authority market have five plus trust symbols on their homepage compared to those that did not. So it's a linear path where the more trust symbols are credibility nuggets you have on your homepage, the more visibility you had in that mid authority segment on average. So what do I mean by that? That's the awards, that's the reviews, essentially saying at the core, CRO is AO, Nageo, however you wanna call it. And the homepage in particular is most important 'cause that's 15x more bot requests than any other page, it's valuable. So how do you do this fruitfully? Ideally you have text that looks nice, a product team will love it. We don't know for sure that LM's everywhere can render this. You can use alt text on those awards, the G2 call outs for your category, that can be helpful. The secondary thing beyond just the overall product reviews is what I would call a stats block. So you can pull out a stats block with core first party or third party proof about your company. Here's Zendask, here's Gorgias, which are pronouncing incorrectly probably. And you can see the details about their product usage that differentiates them that LM's will pull out in reference and this makes sense why they're used so frequently. So it's not simply just the data points that logos, et cetera. It can be anything about your company, this near short dev company, it's simply the quality of their clients and logos that is referenced by the LM specifically. You can use these nuggets and repurpose it across all the transactional content on your website. So that overcomes the core objection around first party content in best X format 'cause you're now pulling in a third party data and first party proof that will get you referenced and it won't matter if you're calling yourself number one because that's helpful. So here's some examples from that near short dev, the logos, clutch, client retention stats, how many clients you have, these are all confidence inducing. HREFs has a ton of backlinks. That's specific to that landing page that matters and you see it get pulled into the core thing. - We gotta do it. We gotta do it for the people. We gotta do it for the time. If you wanted to hear more, vote him through. We've got our final speaker, Lauren, take it away. - All right, two and a half times. So that is how much our homepage is AI citation rate increased from April to September. And also our main product page, a nearly triple two and no we did not turn our home page into a giant FAQ here is what we started with lifestyle benefits at work that work cute super on brand but imagine someone asking chat GPT What is the best platform for what we do managing employees stipends reimbursements taxes our home page was great at selling the dream have your employees better culture more flexibility ability but where were the answers about all the actual software so that is the problem that I set out to solve now as a brand and product marketer I couldn't just like throw a thousand words of product documentation onto the home page that was super tempting and I also couldn't expect AI to recommend us based on just a great headline and some Chris Loundly alone so we read thought the page around three C's clear what do you sell compelling what should buyers choose us and sightable what specific information can AI reference so we need our category explicit ownable we address the administrative work our buyers want to eliminate we got specific about our what our software actually does Now the hardest part wasn't figuring out what to add but what not to add because you can give AI every answer imaginable and end up with a home page that is ugly and that no human wants to read so if you vote for me I will show you where we drew the line plus like five minute home page test that you can run on Monday for free with no new tools required because the goal isn't to build a home page that AI loves and humans hate come on people that was epic Lauren someone in the chats that I love your voice and I agree you do they like human parentheses thing it's awesome okay we're doing a vote who do you want to see in round the final round which AEO idea deserves a deeper dive who was it who is going to be is going to be Linda Patro Ross Lauren who do you need to have who do you need to have who do you need to have back up here to teach you to see what matters holy cow there's so many people here to stay now quick these votes happen look at Lauren just running laps right now ripping just totally amazing in the yeah this is awesome more people want to hear Lauren's voice and you know what there's no offense no offense not respectfully not taking but there can only be there can only be three people that are going to advance that's what makes this form this format such a smash good thing we had Claude did come up with a webinar topic that works so well for us right wing quick okay I think we can call it so we got who's the first one things have happened so fast who's our first winner Josh Josh shout out to Josh we got Lauren who's the wild card producers behind the scenes who's the wild card hold on give us a minute we got to tally the votes we got a sharpie them up real quick that's a tight I don't know who that is yeah okay Valerie shout out to Valerie okay so we got Josh Lauren and Valerie moving on to the final round dash let's keep this thing rolling no naps no naps we're ripping right now let's keep this pace going because you know no one has a real attention span today so we have to keep going so let's keep going okay everyone in the final round has four minutes and we will continue to be ruthless you can yell at us in the chat all right let's take it off Josh take it away I'll be honest here I don't know how many slides I have coming up but it'll be great for everyone involved and I promise you you will not have to get your marketing leaders to site off on a home page redesign with this page because what you're going to do is you are going to create one page that for every question that buyers ask about you so what we did here was we went live with a very simple what is air ops page it's always there always present the answer comes first in that paragraph and then we have seven different sections that answer buyer questions directly in collapsible q&a's and then our proof is there in each and every answer so here's an example of what it is you can go to air ops dot com slash answers to check it out and how do you set up a page like this so it has 76 questions with six types of questions that buyers are asking so 28 of them or how does it work? 18 is comparing it against other tools nine of those questions are about use cases and fit and then it's what it is buying and evaluation like how does air ops pricing actually work with the features and then proof and trust which companies are using air ops today what are some of the values are getting out of it and so another great thing I don't even know if I have a slide on this so I'm going to say it now is this really improves your internal linking to all of your pages across it so as you can see here where I have use cases and fit you can link over to your platform pages link over to your solution pages proof and trust link out to those G2 pages link out to your use cases buying and valuation link out to your pricing pages this becomes a backbone for all of your internal linking across your site, especially for those branded search results. OK, and so here's a great example ask chat to see why teams are picking and the AI answers page comes up. Here's one example why do some teams adopt air ops over traditional AI tools. You can see that page being cited right there and yes, this is the air ops interface. I just pulled out the other day. And so why this page matters your own content shapes what AI says about you lots of stuff out there from our end from others about third party sources being an important source for how your brand is mentioned at LMS that is all true, but where do they pull from initially it's coming from your own content. So your own content serves as an important function for LMS and for other parties and other sites to pull from. And then second reason it answers questions that lead directly to revenue and so that includes pricing comparison use cases and to be perfectly honest as we all know we're not exactly sure of which pages are always going to be cited or pulled in an answer. And so this helps to shape that narrative. And then again, yes, this is the number one cited URL on air ops dot com beyond our docs pages beyond our home pages. And again, this is something you can set up right away using all of your sales questions, customer calls, all those types of things. And yes, this page influences revenue. Like I said before, it influenced several closed one deals contributed to pipeline with over 250 mqls in q3. And then maybe this could be the main reason this is one page that is easy to refresh as your product changes, we have lots of workflows and air ops that helps you do that lots of playbooks in air ops to help you make those changes. Stay up to date as your product as your positioning changes as you add new product lines, this page is something easy that you can refresh right away. I do have some more slides here. It looks like, okay, so what are you going to do? You're going to track the questions. You're going to answer them in short direct answers with proof. And again, this page index very quickly. And then we try to do a refresh on this every time our product or positioning changes, but you can also set like a monthly or quarterly schedule for that as well to refresh it. And then yes, start your page. I put Monday on here. You could start this afternoon here. Go to air ops answers, air ops comm slash air ops answers, find 20 questions that buyers ask about you. That's step one. The other steps are here. Please sure and vote for me. See you later. All right, Josh, go in the chat. Go in the chat. There's a thousand questions for you to go in the chat and answer. I think one of the funny things is when the music comes on people just start talking louder like it's going to go away. It's so it's so great. Yeah. Yeah. All right. She's back. Is that might be the number one vote getter of all time. I don't know that I've never then I don't think anyone has ever had that many votes because there's never that many people here, but she's putting it on my grave, Dave. I'll be your grave. You don't have to die putting a freaking LinkedIn. Oh, good. It's okay. Well, sure. All right. We start the timer. Great. I promised you that I would show you what we actually changed. So here is our home page at the beginning of the year. And I can hate on it because I wrote it and designed it. And here is our home page now. So this is our hero section. Obviously on the designs different throughout the page, but what's more important is what the page communicates. So before we talked a lot about employee happiness flexible benefits, sadly, that is all fluff. Now within seconds, you know what comp does who it's for the problem itself and really interesting decisions happen farther down the page. I don't have screenshots for those. That's me plugging our website go to comp. There were three things that I kept coming back to number one. Do not make people guess what you sell. We moved away from leading with a clever headline and made our product category explicit. That's important for buyers. Obviously, but it's also important when AI tools are trying to decide whether they're going to recommend you or whether you belong within a particular recommendation. The second is to show the problem and then explain how you solve it. Sounds easy. For comp that meant taking talking about spreadsheets, talking about manual reimbursements, all administrative work that comes with managing employee stipends, but we did not stop at saying that we make HR's life easier because that would be too simple. So that's why I wanted concrete explanations of how the software actually works, the nitty gritty it's boring, but it gets the job done program rules tax treatment payroll reimbursements, those are details that our buyer needs to evaluate us and they're also specific information that an AI tool can reference when explaining our capabilities. And this is probably the most important you got to know and to stop girl, you got to know when to stop because our homepage does not need to answer every possible question about employee benefits. There's a whole rest of a website for that. It needs to answer the important questions to help someone quickly understand and evaluate comp. So we made our products easier to identify. We separated what is included. from optional add-ons. We brought common buyer questions onto the homepage. There's an FAQ section. You can see it's right above our footer CTA. And we linked two deeper pages for more detail. And we also, secretly, but not so secretly, overhauled our navigation and our footer. So those pages were easier to find. And then also when we introduced some AI capabilities, when we were putting some more product features out there, we didn't just slap the words AI-powered on the homepage. We actually showed what that means with some product screenshots. Now, the point is we weren't adding more content for the sake of doing so. We were giving every single section on this page a specific job results. I highlighted our citation growth earlier. We tracked those page level citations in a tool called Gage. But as a product marketer, I also care about what happens when people reach our website. So we're looking at GA4 and HubSpot 2. So across five priority pages that I'm measuring our tracked conversion rate, I improved from Q1 to Q3. 34%. Even with slightly less traffic, we were down like 6%. Honestly, SQL's grew 12% year over year in Q3. Now, obviously, we're doing a lot more work than that. We're doing earned media. We're doing founder brand. We're doing content. But that's why we're looking at both. Are we getting discovered? And are we giving buyers a reason to take action? So here's the part you can steal. It costs absolutely nothing to get started. No AEO platform, no new software. First, name the thing is your product category explicit. Two, how have you given AI a concrete reason to recommend you? Three, link it. Link it. If you're missing any of those things, you found your starting point. So don't make it easy for AI to just understand. What you said, give a reason to recommend you. That was great. Go read the chat. The people love you. I think I'm obsessed with you. Yeah, like literally in the middle of that, she sends a message to Marissa and Maria. It was like, I need to book her on the podcast. And I'm like, not now, this is like asking the chef. Dave gave me so much. This is, I was like, this is like going up to the chef in the middle of dinner and being like, when's the staff meal? And I deserve that. I deserve that. But Lauren, I think it speaks to how great your prezzo was. Yeah, I almost broke Maria's flow for that. For you, for you. OK, we've got our wild card. Take it away. You love a wild card. So this is where I left off where I think the music started playing. So three part attribution model. So this is my four minute part that I actually prepared it, guys, where the AI influence goes. Again, coming back to that 70% are coming up as invisible. So we put together three parts for this framework. One, AI visibility tools. This tracks where AI sites you. But it's going to miss where anyone clicked. The next is web analytics. It will see visits direct growth. But it's going to miss what sent them. And then three sales conversations who says AI sent them. And it's going to miss anyone who never said. So each of these alone are kind of weak. Directly, you can kind of see things. Here, you're seeing traffic. Here, seeing live feedback. But to combine with our powers combined for any other 80s children, they will do the same direction. We'll give you that signal that you need. So to combine, they try to ingulate so that you can make sure that the work that you're doing is driving an impact. So the first layer of this is the AI visibility. This is our leading indicator. This is what's going to move first. So we implemented cognizzo. Great tool was one of early adopter there. And it's grown a lot over the last year. And we were tracking prompts that buyers were actually asking best gift card platform. Really specific prompts. We were tracking over 200 of them. We watched the citation right there, share of voice against competitors. Whether we're recommended or just listed in what that sentiment analysis is. And then we also cross-check that with HubSpot AEO. And that was and still is in beta and had a much less number of prompts that you can do. So we actually ratioed out the prompts based on our ICT or industries are different topics so that we could cross-reference the volume of citations in both platforms. That way we can cross-check them. Because we know that they're running at different times. Sometimes we would see maybe a little bit of a disconnect. And so with those two reports, we would combine them and analyze them. If they generally agree or are going in the same direction, we were trusting the trend when they joined Burj is when we would start to investigate. Is there one ICT that's kind of dropping or one industry that's not being cited as much? Was there one prompt that was getting a ton of visibility on Cognizza but isn't coming up on HubSpot AEO? While we felt that Cognizza was really robust since HubSpot natively lived in our CRM. We wanted to be able to utilize it. And since it was in free and in beta, I thought there was a great way to again combine them and look for that directional accuracy. And then the next is traffic signals I actually saw at the beginning of the webinar a couple of people were talking about GA4 and tracking the AI assistant natively in Google. This was added in May, 2026. There are some shortcomings with it, which I think is kind of what people were chatting about in the chat. It's not retroactive. Sometimes it makes this perplexity. It's not great on Gemini. We created a custom channel group to pull in the platforms that we really cared about the most. And that also echoed what we were tracking in Cognizza because you can pick which platforms and LLMs you wanted to track. And then in addition to that, we set that up one time and then watch monthly brand and search and direct. Again, citations move first. That's the leading. And then our lag indicator was this layer number two. And then the third, this is something that you can do really quickly. And easily we set up a gong channel that listens to all calls but flags specifically and listens for any time or prospects as they found us to AI. So constantly listening and manually updating a custom field in our HubSpot property that then gets pushed both from the contact level and then follows to the deal. And then we did really deep training for all of our client-fusing teams. VDRs at ease, AM, CSMs to always ask that question so that we can follow it from the contact level all the way down. And this is an example of the report. And I got cut off on things. - All right, good job. So we got them all. So this is it. Now's the time to pick the winner. Who will be the next owner of the coveted exit five live hand-made trophy? Is it going to be Josh? Is it going to be Valerie? Is it going to be Lauren? It's close right now. It's close, 73, 36, 92. Just set, just roasting out numbers. Okay, so hey, while we pick a winner right here, I have a question for all of you. If you all let me take a question. We're trying to just, we had some questions in the chat but a higher level question right now. What advice would you give to someone who needs to go and talk about AEO back to the leadership team, right? Like today was very tactic focused. Here's how I did this, that led to this thing. But if I need to go back and explain where we need to invest, how do we think about this? Any advice from the three of you? Like where do you start? How do you have this conversation with leadership around the things that you need to be doing from AEO standpoint? - Yeah, I mean, we're all thinking about this world of the like balancing the performance versus the brand awareness. And I would say it's multiple things like attributing to that. What we're seeing is a lot of increase from our direct and also organic search. I mean, branded organic search coming through. But then when we ask people like, and how did you hear about this type of forms, they do mention AI search or AI referrals. GA4 has started tracking some more of those AI assistance and referrals. So the measurement there is still a work in progress but a lot's coming along. - Yeah, good and long value, you want to build on that? - Yeah, same kind of thing happened for us because we use HubSpot, we were seeing a pretty sharp increase in the number of chat GPT referrals that were coming in specifically. And that was before we even got like an AI tool and decided to do that because we wanted a little bit more visibility into what we were doing. And we were able to get the funding in our marketing budget for an AI tool because we were able to prove like, there's something happening here. Like people are coming in through chat GPT, they're having conversations with our sales team and we've had a lot of closed one as a result. So because we've seen some revenue coming in as a result, then we get more money for it. But to be fair, like our CEO is pretty down with the AI stuff. So that helps. - I think this is just a matter of just streamlining it all. I think that was really like the big conversation which is why I focused on reporting, right? Like you're doing a whole bunch of little things and because you're all figuring out the same time, I think just starting to document is really what started to make that shift. And once you kind of start the documentation, you can build upon it and then to Lauren's point, once you can get a couple of documented wins and revenue on the board, then you know that you can start to really then invest with both just resources and not just free efforts. - So we have the final results in our winner, the latest trophy holder. - Jerome Roll. - Who was it? Do you know? I forgot. - No. - That was Lauren. Yeah, that was Lauren. Yeah. Right? Am I right? - Yeah, yeah, you're right. - Ah, okay. - And you just sound keen and so confident. I was like, you've got this. It was Lauren. - No time for a speech. Thank you for that. We'll hook you up with the trophy. You'll be the next person to hopefully post it on LinkedIn way to go. Josh, Lauren, Valerie, all the other folks behind the scenes right now. Thank you for coming on. The big value prop here is just getting out there and learning from other humans who actually have stakes and have something on the line when you just ask Claude a question about marketing. They don't have the same risk and stakes that you do. So thank you. There's also a poll up here. We measure all these sessions. Did you find this session valuable? I see a bunch of people voted for that. Thank you for that. And we're out. We're back here next week. We're going to try to get a bunch of our speakers in here to do more stuff like this in our community, the discussion board in there. Get a bunch of questions to your AEO questions, GEO questions, whatever you want to call it. We'll do an AMA in there. And we're back here. Maybe hypothetically a little Halloween themed episode next week. I would tune in. Absolutely. Dasha and I have a little, you know, we got one. something. The team's got a little something. Thank you, Marissa, Maria, everybody behind the scenes, Dan, Ben, Anna, Allison, Matt, shout out to you all. What an awesome time. Great job, everybody. We'll see you here next week for another world famous exit five live session. Thank you. Real quick before we wrap up, I just want to give a quick shout out to all the stuff that we're doing at exit five.com. You can get on our newsletter there. A couple times a week, we're going to send you some really useful stuff about B2B marketing. Our whole mission is to help you get smarter about B2B marketing and get better at your job. In a world where everyone is talking to AI and Claude about how to do marketing, our whole pitch with exit five is real insights from real people. We've built our whole business around it. You hear it here on the podcast. Just see it in our newsletter. And check out all of our stuff. We are creating the number one resource for you, B2B markers. So go and check it out exit five.com. Get on our newsletter. You'll find all of our podcasts, links there, show notes, all of our webinars, articles, and a bunch of other stuff. Plus you can also join our community over there. So check it out exit five.com. The best marketing leaders have a strong agency or two backing them up and convertive is one I put on that list, especially if AEO is a priority for you right now. It definitely is and a good one is a lifesaver. They bring fresh creative angles and go deep on specialties like AEO when your team's short on bandwidth. If you're shopping for a B2B agency, check out Convertive. They help enterprise marketing and ops leaders grow revenue across the business. Who do they work with? They work with legit companies like DocuSign, DataBank, and Constructor. And they build on the search work that you're already doing, optimizing your site. So more buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. In this month, exit five listeners get a free AEO search snapshot. They'll run your buyer's real questions through Google and AI tools, show how you stack up against competitors, and tell you what's worth fixing. So if you're building your AEO strategy for 2027, start here. Go and check out convertive.com/exit5. That's convertive.com/exit5 and you can see the link in the show notes.