Why Doesn't AI Recommend Your Company? AEO Guide

The Game Has Changed: Your Customer No Longer Searches, Now They Ask

Picture this: one of your potential customers wants to hire a digital marketing agency in Colombia. Before, they would open Google, see ten links, and click on the first or second one. You had a chance to show up there.

Today, that same customer opens ChatGPT or Gemini and types: "What is the best digital marketing agency in Bogotá for a growing SMB?" Artificial intelligence answers directly with a personalized recommendation. There is no list of links. There is no click. Just one answer. And if your company is not in that answer, you simply do not exist.

This is not a future trend. It is what is happening right now.

What Is AEO and Why Does Your Company Urgently Need It?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, or optimizing for answer engines. In simple terms: it is the process of making your brand the answer that artificial intelligence gives when your ideal customer asks a question related to what you offer.

David Bernal, AEO and SEO Marketing Manager at HubSpot, summed it up perfectly at HubSpot Partner Summit LATAM 2025 in Bogotá:

 

"AEO isn't just technical. It's making your brand your customer's answer."

While traditional SEO positioned you in a list of Google results, AEO positions you inside the answer the AI generates. And the difference is huge, because:

• 60% of Google searches no longer end in a click (the Zero Click Search phenomenon)
• 42% of HubSpot prospects used artificial intelligence to evaluate the platform before reaching out
• ChatGPT alone has 900 million weekly users, not counting Gemini, Perplexity, or other LLMs
• In LATAM, OpenAI holds 80% of the market

This means that the nurturing that used to take two weeks of emails, pop-ups, and retargeting now happens in 10 minutes inside a conversation with an AI. By the time the customer reaches your website, they have already made the decision. They are ready to buy.

The question is not whether you should implement AEO. The question is when you start.

How Do You Know if AI Is Already Talking About You (or Ignoring You)?

There is a signal you can check today in Google Analytics: if your direct traffic is growing gradually and steadily, part of that traffic likely comes from people who reached your site after asking an AI. Answer engines do not leave a referral trail; they show up as direct visits.

To find out what AI is saying about your brand, you can run a manual test right now:

1. Open ChatGPT or Gemini
2. Type: "What are the best [your type of service] in [your city]?"
3. Do you show up? What does the AI say about your company?

Whatever you find, or don't find, is your starting point.

The 3 Key AEO Goals for Your Brand

Based on what HubSpot has implemented in its global strategy, AEO has three specific goals:

1. Get AI Engines to Find Your Brand

If your site is not well structured, AI crawlers will pass through it without understanding what you do, who you help, and how you do it. AI does not read entire pages; it reads fragments (vector embeddings). If those fragments are not clear, your content does not make it into the information map that LLMs use.

2. Get AI to Mention Your Brand in the Answer

The most critical goal: when someone asks about your category, the AI says your name. Not your competitor's. Yours. This requires your content to be optimized to answer the specific questions your buyer persona asks at every stage of their buying process.

3. Get AI to Cite Your Content

When you search on Google and the AI Overview appears, you see some links next to it. Those are citations. Most people do not click on those links (they already have the answer), but if the AI cited your article, it means that your content is what dictated the content of that answer. Not your competitor's. That is brand authority in the age of AI.

How to Implement AEO Step by Step: HubSpot's Methodology Applied to Your Company

Step 1: Prompting (Think Like Your Customer, Not Like a Marketer)

In classic SEO, you looked up keywords in Ahrefs and wrote content around those words. In AEO, it is the other way around.

You have to think exactly the way your customer thinks when they have a problem and ask the AI. Not how you would describe your service, but how they would search for it in natural language.

Examples of real prompts for a marketing agency in LATAM:

• "How do I implement Marketing Hub in my company in Bogotá?"
• "What company can help me automate my email campaigns in South America?"
• "How much does it cost to implement a CRM for an SMB in Colombia?"
• "What is the difference between HubSpot Starter and Salesforce for small businesses?"

Practical tip: Use the AI itself to generate these prompts. Create a project in Claude or ChatGPT, give it your buyer persona's characteristics, and ask it: "What questions would this person ask when they want to hire a service like mine?"

Step 2: Map Your Prompts by Journey Stage

Prompts cannot be random. They must cover the five stages of the buyer's journey:

Creating content that addresses each of these stages is what turns your site into a trusted source for LLMs.

Step 3: Optimize Your Pages So AI Understands Them

Once you have your prompts by stage, it is time to optimize your existing content. Here are the four key techniques:

a) Semantic triples On every important page of your site, explicitly include:

• Who you are (your company name)
• What you do (your main service)
• How you do it (your methodology or differentiator)

Example: "At Digitalegy, an agency specializing in RevOps and Inbound Marketing, we implement HubSpot strategically so your sales, marketing, and service teams work in alignment and generate more revenue."

It sounds obvious, but many sites say "we are the best at what we do" without naming the company or explaining exactly what it does. AI cannot interpret "we" without context.

b) Content chunking Group important information into self-contained blocks or fragments. Create small "In summary," "What you need to know," or "Key result" boxes that sum up the main point of each section. These blocks are what AI extracts and uses in its answers.

c) Schema markup Schema markup is basic SEO that is now more important than ever for AEO. AI engines read your page's HTML structure. Make sure to use Organization, Service, FAQPage, and Article schema types as appropriate.

d) Named entity optimization Explicitly mention your company name, your services, and your tools throughout your content. Do not assume AI knows who you are talking about. Use your brand name consistently across your entire site.

How Do You Measure Whether Your AEO Strategy Is Working?

There are four key metrics you should track:

1. Citation Inclusion Rate

How many times is AI citing your content when someone asks a question relevant to your business? This is the most direct AEO metric.

2. Brand Visibility by LLM

On which AI platforms does your brand appear, and on which does it not? HubSpot discovered that it had high visibility on Perplexity but low visibility on ChatGPT, even though most of its Latin American customers use OpenAI. This allowed them to prioritize their optimization efforts.

3. Brand Rank Position

When AI mentions your brand, what position do you appear in on the list? Are you the first option or the fifth? The goal is to be mentioned first.

4. Brand Sentiment

How does AI describe your company? What attributes does it associate with your brand? If AI describes your company as "ideal for SMBs" but you want to position yourself in the enterprise market, there is an AEO gap you need to correct.

AEO Does Not Replace SEO: You Need Both

This is a point David Bernal strongly emphasized in his presentation, and it is worth repeating: AEO does not kill SEO. SEO is the foundation of AEO.

Having a well-structured site with quality content, fast load times, relevant links, and domain authority is still the foundation on which any AI visibility strategy is built.

Think of it this way:

• SEO = getting Google to find and rank your content
• AEO = getting AI to understand your content, trust it, and use it to answer questions

Without solid SEO, AEO has no foundation. With both implemented well, your brand will be visible in both traditional searches and AI queries.

AEO in LATAM: An Opportunity to Level the Playing Field

One of the most interesting points David mentioned was something that resonated with the LATAM partner audience: the democratization that AEO brings.

Before, an agency in Bogotá or Quito competed at a disadvantage against agencies in Mexico City or Buenos Aires that had bigger SEO budgets, more inbound links, and more years of domain authority. Google rankings favored whoever had historically invested the most.

With AEO, the playing field has leveled. AI does not necessarily prioritize the biggest player, but rather the most relevant one and the clearest in its answers. A small agency in Medellín that answers its customers' questions with precision and structure can appear in ChatGPT's answers alongside (or even ahead of) much larger agencies.

Competition is more intense, yes. But it is also fairer.

Conclusion: Start Today, Not When Everyone Else Is Doing It

AEO is at a tipping point. A year ago it was an emerging trend. Today it is a market reality. A year from now, the companies that have not implemented it will be struggling to recover the visibility they lost while they waited.

The first step does not require big budgets or sophisticated tools. It requires changing a single mindset: stop writing content for keywords and start writing content for the real questions your ideal customer asks.

Not sure where to start? At Digitalegy, we can help you audit your current visibility in AI answer engines, build your prompt strategy for each stage of the journey, and optimize your content so AI recommends your company before your competitors. Schedule your consultation today