On October 22, we hosted Winning the AEO Battle in 2027, a live webinar on answer engine optimization (AEO): the work of getting your website found, trusted, and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI answers.
If you couldn’t make it, here’s the short version. The full session, including a live demo of our new WordPress plugin and the audience Q&A, is free to download.
Why does AEO matter right now?
Buyers don’t start with Google anymore. They start with a conversation. A buyer describes a problem to AI, gets a recommendation, searches for that brand by name, and lands on your site ready to talk. More and more of the learning stage happens before anyone visits your website.
Webflow research presented at MAICON 2026 found that 94% of B2B buyers used AI in a recent purchase research project. We’re seeing it in our own client data too. One client that generates about 300 leads per quarter went from 22 AI-sourced leads in Q1 2026 to 47 in Q3. That took AI from roughly 7% of their leads to 15% in six months.
NgageContent CEO Mike Cottrill put it plainly: if you ever wished you’d been early to SEO, now is that moment for AEO.
Is AEO Different from SEO?
Mostly not, yet. At NgageContent, our best estimates gauge that 60-70% of AEO today is SEO: site speed, clear page structure, organized content, and detailed FAQs. If your SEO foundation is solid, you aren’t starting from zero.
The differences are growing, though, and that’s where the webinar spent most of its time.
What Do AI Answer Engines Look For?
The session broke it down into four signals:
- Structured data. Schema tells a bot outright what a page is, who wrote it, and what it’s about, so it doesn’t have to guess.
- What people are saying. AI looks for consensus in reviews and third-party mentions, not in what you say about yourself.
- A fast, well-kept site. Bots read the top of a page first and give up on sites with broken links.
- Human content. AI favors original research, expert opinion, and real experience over generic AI-written content.
The recording goes deeper on each one. That includes why AEO queries now run 20 words or longer, and what Claude said when we asked it directly what it looks for on a web page.
What is the SAAD Plugin?
To put all of this into practice, co-founder (and Web Lead) JD Eaton built SAAD, a custom WordPress plugin that scores how ready your site is for AI. (We pronounce it “sad.” We’ve made peace with that.)
SAAD stands for Structure, Answerability, Authority, and Discoverability. The plugin audits every page on your site, flags what needs fixing, and builds clean feeds of your content so answer engines can find and read it. To design it, JD asked the AI tools themselves how they prefer website data to be structured.
In the recording, JD walks through the live dashboard and the full page-by-page audit. He also shows how the plugin notifies AI crawlers the moment your content changes, instead of waiting for them to come back around.
Did You Miss the Webinar?
Download the free recording to see the full presentation, JD’s live plugin demo, and the audience Q&A.
Want to know where your site stands today? Learn more about our AEO services.
Curious how AI sees your site right now? Run our free AI Readiness Scanner. It samples five pages and returns a quick, high-level readiness score in minutes, no plugin required.
