🔦 Turning prompts into keywords

I'll be honest, I turned a blind eye to optimizing for AI search engines.

I'm lucky that my site performs quite well in all the search engines and LLMs (ChatGPT and Perplexity included).

So to me, the way I approach traditional SEO is how I would also approach AEO (I think that's the word the community is starting to agree on).

Answer Engine Optimization for anyone wondering.

But as the months have gone by, and I've tried to be more methodical for my clients, I've realized that understanding the mechanics of AEO can actually help you get better at SEO strategy.

So I made it my mission to crack this thing.

How do you improve your visibility in AI search engines?

My first step was to test out all of the AI visibility tracking tools. And what I realized was that they all do the same thing:

1. Add your brand + competitors you want to track

2. Add prompts you want to track

3. Tool searches those prompts on ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, etc.

4. Tool gives you a report on how well your brand shows up compared to your competitors for those prompts

Cool, I can see how my clients are currently performing against their competitors.

But what do I do now?

And I recently heard someone say that back in the 2000s, a bunch of keyword tracking tools popped up in the market and most of them died (and only a few lived on). I guess we are seeing that cycle again with prompt tracking tools.

But anywho, I decided to get off the tools and try and learn AEO the way I learned SEO — simulate tests and observe the why behind the results. In ChatGPT, I looked up "what are the best alternatives to Zapier."

I got a list of results. But then I asked myself, "how does ChatGPT know what to search to figure out what to surface?”

Well, you can find out.

When ChatGPT does a web search for a prompt you give it, what it does is break down that prompt into keywords. Yes! Keywords are still alive and well.

To sound smart, we call this a "query fan out."

So when I search "what are the best alternatives to Zapier" in ChatGPT, what actually happens is that ChatGPT does a web search for these 3 keywords:

To not make this part of the newsletter long, check out this guide on how I extracted the query fan out keywords.

As a SEO/content strategist, what this tells me is that if I want to show up in ChatGPT for the given prompt above, I need to make sure my content is covering the 3 keywords that are in the query fan out.

This means if I'm a competitor of Zapier, I need to position myself as:

• A Zapier alternative

• A workflow automation tool

• And compare my brand against all of the other Zapier alternatives

This means writing blog posts that are from lived experience and optimized for SEO around things like:

• 10 best Zapier alternatives in 2026

• 10 best workflow automation tools in 2026

• {My brand} vs Zapier: Which is better in 2026?

• Zapier vs n8n vs {my brand}: Which is better in 2026?

The goal would be to write these and mention my brand in them. But also, I would try to get mentioned in existing articles on other sites around these topics (more on that in a different edition of this newsletter).

And this can be done for any niche. I'm just showing a hypothetical example for workflow automation tools.

So as you can see, this is not much different than the way some people approach SEO. But if you've traditionally thought SEO was about top of funnel keywords and generating a lot of traffic to your website, this is where your thinking has to change.

The true value of AEO lives in the bottom of funnel. All 3 keywords from the query fan out shown above are bottom of funnel searches. These are keywords where there is commercial intent behind the search (hence why it triggers a web search in ChatGPT).

Hopefully by now, you can start to shift the way you view AEO. And maybe you'll learn to give it some more love like I'm trying to do.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• The state of B2B GTM right now

• Why Nietzsche matters in AI

• How to fix your website for AEO

• The 2025 social media salary report

• Ad in the wild

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Vine is back, rebooted as diVine, funded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey

• Meta’s retiring its Like and Comment buttons for third-party websites

• Publishers swap traffic angst for strategy in Q3 earnings

• Facebook launches content protection for creators

• Meta commits to spending $600 billion on US projects by 2028

🚀 All things growth & product

 🤖 AI, emails, & copywriting

✍️ SEO & content marketing

🤳 Social media, paid ads, & branding

🧠 Wild card

📣 Ad in the wild

Show the environment you would use the product in.

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool marketing jobs

• Growth Marketer (Contractor) @ Obvious

• Content Marketing Video Producer @ Motive

• Brand Marketer @ Phantom

• Performance Marketing Specialist @ Mercury

• Vibe Growth Marketing Manager @ Ramp

Okay, that's it for now 🧡. See you in the next edition!

“Only with absolute fearlessness can we slay the dragons of mediocrity that invade our gardens.” — George Lois

Riddle answer: Blueberries