How I'd build an AEO program in four weeks

This is the follow-up to a post where I argued most early-stage startups shouldn't chase AEO yet. The short version: until you've found PMF and a channel that's actually driving growth, organic content is too slow and too detached to help. So this post assumes you're past that bar. You know who buys and why, you have one channel working, and you have source material to pull from: sales calls, customer conversations, a community, events.

I've spent the last year building content programs for companies like Ramp, Lovable, and Webflow, and running my own paid community where the content was the product. I'll get into specific tactics below, but I want to start with the two things I've watched hold up across all of it. Tactics change every few months. These don't.

New to GEO/AEO? This field guide is a good primer on what it is and how AI search works.

Principle 1: the content has to be as valuable as your product

Most SEO programs feel disconnected from the company that's paying for them. The articles are generic, poorly written, and don't compound with anything. Founders who care about writing can spot this a mile away, and so can the models now doing the reading.

The bar I use is simple: would someone pay for this? Over the past year, alongside the client work at GrowthX, I built AI-Led Growth, a community where the content was the product. A few hundred people paid to read it, and it sourced most of our pipeline. If your content couldn't survive behind a paywall, it won't earn a free read either.

The way you clear that bar is by pulling from your hard-won customer relationships. Your QBRs, the awkward sales calls, the questions people ask you in a room. At GrowthX our channel was workshops and dinners, and the best content just fell out of the room. The recordings became clips, and the questions people asked became posts no competitor could write, because they hadn't been there. If you're not mining that, you're leaving your single biggest advantage on the table and writing the same generic piece your competitor's agency is writing this week.

Principle 2: keep a mental map of the buyer's journey

This is the one I'd tattoo on the wall. Before you write a single word, you need a map of how a buyer moves from not knowing they have a problem to picking you. Almost everything that matters hangs off that map.

It does two jobs at once. First, it tells you who you're writing for and why on every single piece. A post aimed at someone who doesn't know the category yet is a completely different piece than one aimed at someone comparing you to a named competitor. Without the map, you write into the void and hope.

Second, the map is how you know if the program is working. Each piece is supposed to move someone from one spot on the map to the next. So you measure against that intention instead of against a vanity number. A top-of-funnel post that gets 50,000 views and moves nobody toward a decision is failing at its actual job, and the map is what lets you see it.

Most buyer journeys collapse into three zones, and content for each looks different:

Aware of the problem. This was SEO's old home turf. Ranking for "what is a CRM" drove enormous awareness for HubSpot. AI has eaten most of this zone, and even the articles that still rank rarely give the reader an opinionated path to a product.

Aware of the problem and the products. This is where most of the money is. "Best CRM for startups," "alternatives to [competitor]." The person typing them is already shopping. First Page Sage puts the bottom-to-top-of-funnel conversion ratio around 25x, which is why comparison and alternatives pages are usually the highest-ROI pages on a site.

Evaluating your specific product. Questions like "does Webflow integrate with Stripe?" For anything sold through sales or procurement, whether you've answered these is the difference between a buyer who closes and one who quietly disqualifies you.

The last piece of the map is progression: a single article converts about as often as a single call with a BDR, which is to say rarely. Each piece should know where the reader came from and where you want to take them next. HubSpot is still the best model I know. Almost every post carries a CTA for a template, a calculator, or a checklist, and almost none of them just say "sign up." The lead magnet captures the email, the nurture sequence moves people toward the product, and the post opens the whole ladder.

Hold those two principles still, and everything below is just the distribution nuance of how I'd execute them this quarter. The tools will be different in a year. The principles won't.

The four-week build

If a company handed me a working channel and asked me to stand up AEO, here's roughly how I'd spend the first month. Treat the weeks as sequence, not a stopwatch.

A note on tools

People always ask which tools. Honestly it matters less than the two principles, and the specific stack will have rotated by the time you read this. The setup I'd reach for today: an AI writing workflow with your real source material loaded in as context so drafts start from your sales calls and customer language instead of a blank prompt, an SEO tool like Ahrefs for keyword and SERP research, and one of the AI-visibility trackers to watch what the models say about you (Scrunch has a solid guide to monitoring, or a free CheckThat.ai to start). For a sense of what AI actually cites, Ahrefs has some useful data. The pattern that lasts is feeding strong source material into production and keeping your brand consistent across the web. Whatever tool does that this quarter is the right one.

Two reasons to start now instead of later

Stake your claim while the surface is open. The first six to twelve months of any new channel is where the disproportionate gains live, especially one with momentum. The pages you publish today get indexed, cited, and locked in as the model's reference for your category. Wait a year and you're muscling against companies that already hold those citations.

Build the muscle, because the bar keeps rising. A lot of marketing is giving the buyer a signal that your product is worth their time. Writing content used to take real resources: a writer, an editor, weeks of time. That cost was the signal. Generic written content is cheap and noisy now, so the signal has moved to curated editorial with first-hand data, original video, and events. The specific tactics for influencing AI will keep changing. The machinery behind it won't: producing strong content at scale, keeping your brand consistent across the web, capturing source material from sales and customers. Build that, and the tactic shifts take care of themselves.

Worth flagging the irony. I just spent a whole other post arguing against AEO, and I sell this work. Now I'm telling the people who are ready to invest more, and earlier. The "ready" qualifier is doing all the work. Most companies still aren't. If you are, the two principles are the whole game, and the four weeks are just where I'd start.

If you want to talk this through for your company, reach out.