Why AEO won't fix your early-stage growth

AI visibility is being sold as the magic pill for growth in 2026. I just spent the last year running SEO and AEO programs for companies like Lovable, Webflow, Surge AI and Augment Code, and teaching workshops on how to do it.

So it might surprise you that when people ask "Should we prioritize SEO or AEO right now?" I usually say:

Neither.

I'm a big believer that at most startups, one main channel ends up driving about 80% of the growth. Before you've found PMF and before you've found that one "double-down" channel, SEO and AEO are almost always the wrong place to focus. The channel takes months to start working, converts lower on average, and doesn't do much unless you can feed it from a go-to-market that's already converting.

This post is the case for waiting, and how I'd find the channel to bet on instead. If you're already past that bar, I wrote a companion piece on the plan I'd run to build an AEO program.

Quick primer: What is SEO and AEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is structuring your website so Google ranks your pages near the top when someone searches a relevant query. Links, content, technical hygiene, topical authority.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the same job for AI assistants. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini a question, the model picks which sources to read, cite, or paraphrase. AEO is the work of becoming one of those sources.

Why do people invest in SEO and AEO?

A single keyword can be worth $10,000+ a month. A whole family of related prompts (the AEO equivalent) is worth more.

Take "best corporate credit card for small businesses": 600 US searches a month directly, under a 37,000/mo parent topic ("best business credit cards"). The page-one results are competitive. NerdWallet holds the top organic slot, Brex's product page sits at position 10, Ramp and Capital One run paid ads at the bottom.

For a self-serve product like Ramp or Brex, ranking near the top pays out a few ways. There's the traffic and its ad value: NerdWallet's #1 article pulls ~45,000 monthly visits across hundreds of related queries, worth ~$550K/mo in Google Ads terms. There are the self-serve signups those visits convert into. And the brands ranking organically tend to be the ones LLMs cite, so you earn the AEO answer at the same time. Ask Claude for the best small-business card and you get Brex, Ramp, Chase Ink, Amex, the same page-one names.

And this is one keyword. A real program targets hundreds: every "best X for Y," every "alternatives to," every category and competitor. Nobody can give you a clean ROI number, but like a brand survey, there's real value in influencing what the models say. The question is when to invest.

Organic content is slow, and early on you're buying speed

If you don't have PMF, as a founder the constraint is your time and how fast you can iterate the product. Founder sales, warm intros, events, and direct outreach are most effective. None of these scale incredibly well, but a scaled channel is worthless if you aren't solving a problem that matters yet.

Organic content is too slow and too detached to help here. Your site has zero authority, so content takes six months to even rank. You spend that time guessing at what your buyer wants instead of hearing it from them. It's like stopping mid-hike to build a suspension bridge over a pond you could wade across in a minute.

At Kite we had 5 million Python developers a month on our docs site and tens of thousands of signups, and none of it moved the company forward meaningfully. Traffic can't fix a product that's not ready.

You must find the double-down channel

Early on, growth tends to follow an 80/20 rule: one channel ends up driving most of it. You probably haven't found yours yet.

You find it by pushing hard on your unfair advantages: a founder who can sell, a network, a wedge audience. Organic content almost never wins that race from a standing start. It works best amplifying a channel that's already converting, turning sales calls and customer wins into pages that compound.

Here's how that priority shifts by stage for a sales-driven B2B SaaS business:

So how do you actually find the channel? This is roughly the order I'd work through it:

1. Write down your unfair advantages. A founder who can sell, a network you can mobilize, a wedge audience that already trusts you, a distribution edge. The channel you double down on usually grows out of one of these. A best-practices list won't hand it to you.
2. Run small, real tests on the two or three channels that teach fastest. Founder sales, warm intros, events, direct outreach. Before you pour money into anything, answer three questions: do you know who buys and the job they're hiring you for, have you found the channel that creates the fastest real learning, and can you predictably turn its attention into pipeline.
3. Watch for the channel that both converts and that you can push harder on without it breaking. That's your double-down candidate. A channel that converts but caps out at ten conversations a week is a different bet than one you can keep feeding.
4. Concentrate there until it's clearly working before you open a second channel. The common failure is spreading across five half-channels because one of them twitched. A little SEO, a little founder social, a little outbound, a few events, and nothing with enough force behind it.
5. Until then, publish only artifacts from what you're learning. A product page after ten sales calls. A customer story after one surprises you. The site gets stronger because you're codifying positioning, not because you're chasing rankings.

AEO has changed the math, which is why "wait" isn't "ignore"

ChatGPT and Claude have increased how much content influences buying decisions. The behavior shift is obvious if you watch yourself. I use Google directly maybe a fifth as much as I used to. A single product-evaluation prompt fires off ten or twenty searches and reads more pages than I'd ever open, then hands me the answer. The buyer often doesn't click through.

The bigger shift is trust laundering. Audiences that never trusted a random Google result, enterprise procurement, developers, now get the same information synthesized inside Claude or ChatGPT. The source gets obfuscated and you trust the model. So think of AEO as brand work aimed at a new set of buyers: Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity decide who gets cited and how a person is first told about you.

It shows up in the numbers. At Webflow, about 8% of self-serve signups now come from LLMs and convert at six times the rate of non-branded organic search. Adobe Analytics found AI-driven traffic to US retail sites up 693% year-over-year over the 2025 holidays, converting 31% better than other sources.

That's why "not yet" isn't "never." When you've found your channel and you're ready to compound it, AEO is worth real investment, and probably earlier than most people think.

What's next

If you're past the bar, that you know who buys, you have a channel that works, and you have source material to pull from, the next question is how to actually build the program. I wrote that up separately: the plan I'd run to build an AEO program, the two things that stay true no matter how the tactics change, and the order I'd do the work in.

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