How To Organize For Answer Engine Optimization

Answer engine optimization (AEO) demands broader, more intensive collaboration than SEO, which runs on ad hoc coordination between content marketers, web developers, and paid search practitioners. AEO requires actionable insights flowing constantly across content marketing, web development, paid search, social media marketing, PR, and brand marketing.

AEO Needs A Center Of Excellence

AEO’s cross-silo collaboration requires a center of excellence (CoE) led by an evangelist who grasps the technical details of AEO as well as answer engines’ impacts on the top and middle of the funnel. AEO CoE leaders must be accountable to growing brands’ market share by making brands increasingly visible across answer engines. It’s on them to educate stakeholders about how to increase brands’ visibility, measure the quality of traffic sourced from answer engines, and earn cross-functional buy-in to content and technical AEO best practices.

AEO Makes Search More Social, Offsite, And Upper-Funnel

Collaboration between content marketing, IT, and paid search is core to AEO, as it was to SEO. In addition, social media marketing is now part and parcel of AEO, as is PR and brand marketing. Here’s how the newcomers to organic search — social media marketers, PR practitioners, and brand marketers — should partake in AEO:

Social listening informs AEO and vice versa. Social media is much more prevalent on answer than search engines because social media aggregates the voice of the customer that answer engines prize. Engines try to deliver the most authentic answers, and there’s almost nothing more authentic than user-generated content. Lessons learned from social listening should inform the substance and types of content created for answer engines. Reciprocally, the voice of the customer gleaned from prompt and sentiment analysis across answer engines can inform the copy and images used in paid and organic social posts.
PR and AEO should be symbiotic. Because answer engines prioritize what others say about a brand over what a brand says about itself, brands need to cultivate authority off their owned and operated properties. Effective PR earns high-quality backlinks, which boosts authority and brings PR and organic search closer together. AEO experts’ understanding of which offsite voices have the most topical authority can influence the PR team’s outreach. In exchange, PR practitioners can identify gaps in offsite authority that brands can fill with answer engine-friendly content.
Brand marketing and AEO suffuse each other. Answer engines generate demand, lift branded search, and exert strong halo effects on consideration. Therefore, the work that brand marketers do to measure brands’ health, sentiment, energy, and salience at the top of the funnel is increasingly correlated to brands’ visibility across answer engines. Voice-of-the-customer data gleaned from brand measurement should be used in content created for answer engines. Brands’ unique selling points ought to resonate with FAQs expressed across answer engines.

Introducing Forrester’s AEO Role Connections Tool

To help marketers establish an AEO CoE, we created the AEO Role Connections Tool. Our tool defines the seven roles essential to AEO and clarifies how they interrelate. To contextualize our tool, familiarize yourself with our research on AEO:

Stay tuned for research next year about answer engines’ impacts on full-funnel marketing, a landscape report on AEO technologies, and another report on how to upskill and reskill for the future of search. Feel free to schedule a guidance session to discuss.