AEO Unlocked: A growth playbook for property managers in 2027

Welcome & Introductions

Pete Neubig: Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for spending your time with us. We're gonna talk about this new acronym that has taken the property management and marketing world by storm: AEO. Or if you're like me, A-E-I-O-U, or whatever, sometimes Y. Another alphabet soup. AEO Unlocked. We're gonna learn all about it, and we have our professionals here, so let me introduce you. I am Pete Neubig, CEO of VPM Solutions. Derrik Daun is our marketing strategist, who put this together with Heather and Juli. Derrik runs all of our marketing. Heather Park is my partner in crime and co-founder of VPM, and she's also the founder and CEO of Geekly Media. Juli Durante runs Geekly Media. So we've got some real brainpower here, because if you wanted me to talk about AEO, it would not go well, I can promise you. That's why we bring in the experts. I'm gonna let Juli, or Heather, get us started. Who wants to go first?

Heather Park: Juli's gonna get us started.

Pete Neubig: Alright, Juli, let's get it started. And if anybody has any questions while the webinar is going on, feel free to put them in the Q&A or the group chat. I'll be monitoring those and asking them along the way. What AEO Is (and Isn't)

Juli Durante: My job right now is making sure we're all on the same page with some language. The first question is, what is AEO? In a literal sense, AEO stands forAnswer Engine Optimization. It's the process through which we optimize website pages and other content you own for discoverability through AI. What we used to do was almost exclusively SEO, search engine optimization: how do we get found on Google, how do I show up number one? In the world ofAI optimization, there is no more number one. Everything becomes more customized and personalized for the searcher and the person asking the question. That's changed the game. Heather, I think you have some thoughts on what AEO is and isn't, and other terms people are using.

Heather Park: Yeah, absolutely. The screen Pete's sharing right now gives you an overview of what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about what AEO is, what it isn't, why it matters (because it's different in property management than in B2B or ecommerce), what it takes to get ready for 2027, and how you know if it's working, because you can follow every plan and tactic, and if you don't measure it, you won't know if it was impactful. So, what is AEO, what is it not, and all the other alphabet soup Pete mentioned. You're going to hearAEO, SEO, AI SEO, GEO. At the end of the day they all mean something slightly different, but the takeaway is, if you're pursuing appropriate AEO, you're going to handle your SEO in stride. It's not that SEO is dead. Let me repeat: SEO is not dead. AEO is an iteration of SEO, an expansion of it. I like to explain it this way: AEO versus SEO is the difference between asking Google Maps how to get somewhere five years ago versus asking Waze how to get somewhere today. If you asked Google Maps five years ago how to get to the nearby Target, it would say go straight, turn left, 1.3 miles, take a right. That's the Google Maps approach. Today, in AEO, if you ask Waze how to get to Target, Waze asks you: how are you feeling today, do you want coffee on the way, do you want to pay tolls? What are the context clues behind what you're trying to do and why you're going there in the first place? That's the difference between looking for a property management company, or any business, today in SEO versus AEO. AEO takes into consideration the user, their recent searches, their needs and desires, everything they've entered into the internet, to give a conclusion for them. SEO is a very literal approach: "property manager near me," etc. At a high level, that's the best explanation for the difference between AEO and SEO. GEO, in my opinion, is AEO. If you're talking e-commerce there may be a spin on it, but in our world I believe AEO and GEO are basically the same thing. Juli Durante: Heather, what does the G in GEO stand for? Heather Park: Generative. That's the difference: generative AI is a different approach. 

Why AEO Matters Now: The Data

Pete Neubig: Alright, Heather, why does it matter? All this stuff, why does it matter?

Heather Park: That's a great question. You're gonna hear a lot of different statistics depending on where you're reading or who you're talking to about why you should pay attention to AEO versus more traditional SEO. The audits Geekly's been running have a couple of really good stats that highlight the long and short of where we are today. If you looked at this a year or 18 months ago, only 6% of people were choosing to go straight to AI versus a Google search when they started their search process. Today, that's up to 45%. That doesn't necessarily mean not Google, it could be Google AI Mode, but it's involving an AI tool 45% of the time, compared to much, much lower a year ago. The other stat: when you're using Google to start your search, regardless of how, 38% of people are not going to scroll down to the search results if they get an AI summary. Those are the zero-click searches we're talking about, 38% fewer people clicking on the results below when that AI answer is there. I can't tell you how many times I don't click on anything. I read the AI summary, and that's my answer, I move on. My own behavior absolutely supports those statistics.

Juli Durante: I did a live review with a client last week. They do a lot of residential leasing in Manhattan, and we were trying to understand their organic search performance, why they weren't making progress on some of their open-ended, non-branded search terms. When we looked at that Google results page, it had changed radically in the last 90 days or so. Ads were still there. We had a map, Google Business Profiles showing up second, and AI answers that were no longer just words. The Google AI Overview now brings in listing photos, pulls information from listings, price ranges for apartments matching the query. The "people also ask" follow-up questions were still there too. Then we went into organic search results, and I had to scroll three times before I saw the first actual organic result. So, to Heather's point, SEO still matters because it incorporates Google Business Profile, People Also Ask, and those other pieces. We didn't really need any of the traditional organic listings, because the AI Overview gave me information, photos, and pricing, and aggregated all of that data. That's a great thing to try yourself: what actually comes up on the results page, and how does that change how you think about content and optimization?

Heather Park: Yeah, absolutely. We'll get into content specifically a bit later, but it's a fascinating experiment to ask the questions you think people are searching for you with. You'll often realize very quickly how wrong that is. It's a fun experiment to Google yourself, AI yourself, Claude yourself, and see what comes up. SEO Fundamentals in the AEO World.

Pete Neubig: We've got a question: are there SEO practices that matter more now because ofAI search, and are there ones that have lost their value? Should everybody lean all the way into AEO and drop SEO?

Juli Durante: I have specific thoughts on this. The foundation, the spirit of SEO, has not changed. And when I say spirit, I don't mean the idea that a 147-character meta description instead of a 152-character one gets you ranked faster. That's not the spirit of SEO. The spirit of SEO is unique, quality content, and in our new AEO world that has not changed. I think it's favored more. Depth is rewarded. Original research and statistics are rewarded. Your own information from your own business is rewarded, because only you have it. One thing falling very quickly out of favor, an old-school SEO tactic we hadn't fully shifted away from, is content volume. Back in my day, having more pages about a specific topic meant Google said, "you're more authoritative, let's reward you." Blog tags got overused, we had lots of similar-but-slightly-different content, and that was easier then. Over the last ten years that's changed a lot. Google stopped rewarding so many pieces of content, though there were vestiges of it, and it mostly wasn't hurting traditional organic search, it just wasn't helping either. AI sometimes sees that pattern as a negative indicator. It's like keyword stuffing for the AI world: saying "property management services in New Jersey" 700 times on a page to rank for it. Having multiple pages that do that reads to AI engines as gaming the system. I think the big takeaway is quality still wins the day, depth matters more and more, and if you've been doing SEO a while, you might have historical content worth pulling back, which can feel scary. We did this for Geekly itself. We pulled back some historical content that felt duplicative, and we saw what we expected: our impressions in organic search dropped a bit, but our clicks stayed the same and went up, meaning the quality of impression improved. Our hypothesis is the more we drive click-through rate and quality, the better results we'll get as we add more content.

Heather Park: Yeah, every time. 

Pete Neubig: We've always been taught that with Google, SEO is Google, Google owns it, Google owns YouTube, you should have all these videos. How does the content strategy change between SEO and AEO? Is there anything different around video specifically?

Juli Durante: My experience so far, and I'll say this about AEO generally: anyone who tells you they have all the answers about optimizing forAI, even if they're right this week, will be wrong next week. No one has all the answers right now. What I've seen is that AI can understand that a video exists on your site, it knows a video is there and might be about something, but it can't watch the video. Search engines can't watch it either, so transcripts, descriptions, takeaways, and captions are just as important now as ever. One interesting thing: there was a moment in SEO where we tried to keep video traffic on our own websites instead of sending people to YouTube. What I see more often in AI results is that things get pulled together. There's a lot of synthesis in an AI result that doesn't happen in a traditional search experience, where videos, blog posts, and other content are listed separately. Things start to fold together. So giving AI agents more context about your videos, via transcript, captions, details, descriptions, will potentially make them fold into results more often, though I'd expect them folded in rather than called out separately.

Heather Park: Yeah, and you'll see that in AI summaries specifically. When you see all the contributions to an answer, all the individual line items, there's a little link at the end for each: this website, that website, this video, this Facebook post. It's aggregating all of that context to support the answer it's giving you.

Juli Durante: Definitely still important, just a different use case. Some variety is good. ContentTactics: Long-Form, FAQs, and Schema

Pete Neubig: Is there still a place for long-form thought leadership, or is everything shifting toward short, direct answers?

Heather Park: No, and this is probably a split opinion. It's no longer a world where short is better or long is better. It's less is more, more is more, but better is better. It's not a volume play, it's not about nailing a trend or a formula. It's: answer the questions, solve the problem, be the solution for the person searching, in the best possible way. You want to answer as completely and accurately as you can so that answer is most likely to be surfaced. It doesn't matter how long or short it is, it's how accurate and how helpful it is.

Pete Neubig: How does it know how helpful it is? 

Heather Park: A, it's insanely smart. B, it's going to look at the follow-up inquiries that come after. If Person A asks question A, then asks B, C, and D down the same path, it remembers that, and when Person B asks a similar question, it's more likely to serve a similar path. So it's looking at all user behavior and how often people are landing on that end result. A bit of an SEO throwback, but a much smarter approach.

Pete Neubig: So you'd recommend having FAQs, or as many questions as you can think of, on your website?

Heather Park: Yes and no. Less is more, more is more, but better is better. You don't want to keyword-stuff, as Juli mentioned, stuffing your site with as many pages as you can just to rank. That's not what we're talking about. But if the question you're answering warrants more articles or pages because it genuinely requires them, then yes, you want those pages. But if you can succinctly answer the question on one page and then create extra pages that also answer the same question, you're pulling away from the value of the original page. It's a balance. There's no formula, no one way to do it, but there is a right way: answer it accurately, appropriately, and as succinctly as necessary.

Juli Durante: I'll say, I actually enjoy the idea of a frequently-asked-questions section on a page, and not for the reason I'm supposed to. In website world there's a concept called schema, code behind the scenes that tells search engine robots and AI agents what's on the page. AI has really latched onto schema markup to understand page components, including FAQs, so you'll often see AI recommend adding FAQs to help answer specific questions. What I like about FAQs isn't that they get you cited, it's that I can put information in the answers that doesn't fit the story of the page as I want to tell it, but is still an important indicator. We did this recently on the VPM site, we added FAQs to the homepage with hyper-tactical, nitty-gritty things, like how to work with VPM, recruitment models, VA payments, that would be boring and not exciting to a human visitor in the main page copy. I still believe you solve for the human first, someone's got to read this and choose to work with you, and then you help AI understand it too. FAQs feel like that balance: answering questions for users, adding information AI wants, in an easier container. They don't always have to be their own page, they can just be a section.

Heather Park: Let's talk schema specifically, Juli. FAQ schema: in, or not in? Do you buy into it or not?

Juli Durante: I think it's straightforward enough to create, especially using AI as part of your creation process, and I have no reason to believe it's harmful at this point, so I've implemented it for us and our clients where we're using FAQs. I don't think we're adding schema for the sake of adding schema, but it's generally helpful.

Heather Park: Same page. I hear a lot that you "have to" have FAQ schema. No. In my opinion, you have to have FAQs, answer the questions people are asking, but if you don't happen to have the schema for it, I don't think you're less likely to be serviced or cited without it. Is it going to hurt anything? Absolutely not. If it makes sense, use it. Is it going to make or break you? I don't think so.

Juli Durante: It's one of those things where once you've written the questions and answers, implementing the schema only takes another five minutes. Why not take the five minutes if it ends up being important? I'd rather do it now than later.

Heather Park: Exactly. Third-Party Validation: Reviews,BBB, and Local Press

Heather Park: You'll hear that called prompt tracking in the market. It's really important to track, because, as Juli mentioned, results change search by search and run by run, but also based on what your competitors are doing, or what your clients are saying about you. One of my favorite and least favorite things AI does is factor in sentiment. If you have great reviews, or someone's raving about you on Reddit, that comes into play, contributing to whether it surfaces and cites you. If you have not-so-great reviews, those show up too, both factored into the citation decision and literally displayed if someone asks about reviews or how you compare to competitors.

Juli Durante: Reviews are also interesting because we can drill down even more levels in AI search than in traditional organic search. I tell clients this story: I recently bought a new espresso machine. I'd been using Nespresso pods and got tired of it. I had specifications: it couldn't be too tall for my counter, no pods, no manual puck-packing, I just wanted to press a button, no auto milk frothing. I ran that whole query with ChatGPT. I'd had an espresso machine before where the water pump went and the whole thing was a wash, not worth fixing. So I asked specifically: of these three choices, have any had water pump issues in the reviews? I could hone in on that specific thing. Think about property owners the same way. They might be working with a management company and have a specific issue, maybe tenant placement, maybe response times, and they can ask about that specific issue in a company's review profile. That works both ways, you can surface the positives, fast response time, happy owners, or the negatives, slow response flags. Reviews become important not just on the initial result but in the follow-ups and drill-ins, especially when comparing two options.

Pete Neubig: Does it become important to get into industry publications or third parties, like the Better Business Bureau? Is that more important now than it was with SEO, because it's looking for third-party validation?

Heather Park: So many opinions about the Better Business Bureau. Third-party validation in general, though, yes. Any time you ask what AI factors in, it's going to say third-party validation. What that validation is, is a different story. It could be your neighbor down the street who had a strong opinion about an experience with you. It could be someone who reposted an article of yours about your maintenance process or vendor approvals, tweeted about it, posted on Facebook, bragged or complained about it. In the world ofAI those are often just as valid as a literal publication like the BBB. So, third-party validation, yes, but exactly what counts and how much it weighs is still up for debate.

Pete Neubig: Do local publications carry weight now? Here in Houston we have a bunch of neighborhood publications, online and in print. Is that a strategy we never would've used with SEO but should use with AI?

Heather Park: My opinion is twofold. Those have always mattered from the perspective of where your users are searching, even in an SEO world. The beauty ofAI is it evens the playing field a little. In SEO, a lot of citations were based on domain authority, where the link is coming from, and that still matters. But AI is smart enough to say, this is a publication close to the user, hyper-specific to what they're asking about, so even if its domain authority is lower than, say, the Houston Chronicle, it might surface more readily because it answers the question more directly. It comes back to the beauty of AEO: it takes context, sentiment, and impact on the end user into account, evening the playing field and allowing for a more aggregated answer from multiple sources.

Getting Started: The AEO Audit

Pete Neubig: Someone just asked, how do you even get started?

Juli Durante: Oh my gosh, is that a loaded question. I'll be honest, this is a bit self-serving, but anytime you're talking about getting started with a new marketing effort, you start at the very beginning. That means assessing where you are today, knowing the current state before you start working on new things. At Geekly we've built an AI audit tool, a first look at your AI performance. It's a great way to understand your baseline: can AI access your website, can it understand who you are and what you do, how does that compare to others in your market, what are the potential gaps? We'd love everyone to take part, we've got some signups already and they'll get it in the next couple of days. But if you'd rather do it yourself, a great way to start is asking AI about your own website. AI has opinions, it'll tell you potential gaps, things that might be missing, though take those with a grain of salt. Sometimes AI will tell you need something like an AI.txt file. It's actually LLMS.txt, the equivalent of robots.txt. It'll say you should have it, but then if you ask Claude or ChatGPT whether they actually use that file, they'll say, oh no, no one's using it yet, I just think you should have it. So interpreting the results matters, it can send you down a path of investing time in things that aren't the best use of it. The other thing you can do, and I recommend private browsing for this, not your regular logged-in browser, is think like your buyers. Whether your target motion is owner acquisition, tenant acquisition, or investor acquisition, ask what those folks are likely searching for, see how they'd engage with AI, and see what you get back. Then ask a great follow-up: why didn't you include this company? You'll get specifics, like their page doesn't include pricing, or sometimes just "I didn't this time," because not every result is the same run to run. Start with an assessment, ours or your own, then make incremental changes, favoring the things that help answer engines understand who you are, what you do, where you do it, who's the right fit, pricing, and follow-up questions. Those tend to be really powerful from a content standpoint.

Pete Neubig: So the first thing I do is ask AI about my website, it tells me things, and then I go make modifications where I can.

Juli Durante: Yeah, but be cautious with the results. If you're investing time, money, and energy, you also want a way to track performance. There are tools, either AI-specific or SEO-specific, though they can sometimes be bigger than what you need just for AEO. At Geekly, all our clients who use HubSpot have an AEO widget inside it that can also be purchased on its own. Measuring AEO Success

Pete Neubig: Anybody who knows me, especially Heather, knows I'm a stickler for data. One of the beautiful things about SEO is you can get a lot of it, HubSpot gets it six ways to Sunday. How do I measure AEO success, when a lot of this doesn't even result in a click?

Heather Park: I'll give a brief answer, then I want Juli's take. The way we look at it: first and foremost, repeatedly. It's never going to be the same, it changes so frequently that the results you get today won't be the results tomorrow. We send the VPM AEO visibility profile and updates weekly, and they change dramatically, fortunately all in the right direction right now, but I think that'll keep evolving. What you're measuring is a different question. You're going to look at share of voice, the specifics of your prompt tracking, whether you were mentioned or surfaced, or whether your website was literally cited, a page on your site used as a link in the answer. Monitoring that directly and specifically is the best advice I can give. There's a lot more to it, but I want to give Juli a chance to respond.

Juli Durante: There are some of those indicators, understanding traffic and citation volume, but you need web analytics tracking to see this, either Google Analytics with goals set up, or a tool like HubSpot doing it automatically. There's this idea of citations, when AI gives a link to your site in its results. People do click those, we see that volume come through as web traffic. But what we see with that traffic is actually conversions, people filling out a form or ending up in call-tracking software. And conversions are where AI search gets really interesting to me. I'll be fully honest: if I didn't see the proof in the conversion numbers, I'd probably say stay the course with traditional SEO, the AI stuff will shake out, don't overemphasize it, I'm a pretty moderate person generally. Except this one thing has happened across clients, across markets, even to some extent across industries: traffic from AI search is converting to leads for our clients at 4 to 10 times the rate of other sources, including organic search. I have a client right now, I pulled a report for him Monday. His session-to-contact rate for AI referrals is 7.5%, meaning 7.5% of his sessions from AI referrals turn into new leads in his system, not form fills, new leads. Compared to his organic rate of about 1.5%, which is what you'd expect, 7.5% is big. What we're seeing is the volume is still low, this is still emerging, so this isn't "drop everything for AI because it converts so much higher," there's a no-click likelihood to account for too. But when that traffic does come through, it's highly likely to convert, so make sure you're doing what you can, especially in the second half of the buyer's journey: answering questions, doing comparative content, and making sure the website experience is good when they land, because that visitor is highly qualified, they've probably gone through more than one round of Q&A with AI already.

Heather Park: The amount of funnel you're exposed to from an analytical perspective is so much more shallow than it used to be. Seeing that visitor much later in the funnel is ultimately what's happening with these AI conversions. 

Pete Neubig: Is it because, through the AI conversation, they're building more trust from the way they're prompting and asking questions, and that's why they convert at a higher rate?

Juli Durante: One signal, yeah.

Heather Park: It's also just the journey they've gone through. They've exhausted more of the research before they reach you than they traditionally would have from an SEO perspective.

Juli Durante: The traditional search experience is, I search for "should I sell or rent my home, I'm moving," I get a lot of content, and I bounce back and forth. That's what we were seeing in blog post bounce rates a year or two ago, a 90% bounce rate is typical search behavior, you read, get the answer, go back, validate, ask a follow-up, get a different results page each time. When I'm searching with AI, I usually get an automatic follow-up question: have you started working with a real estate agent, are you leaning one direction or another? If so, I can give you some resources. It pulls me through the process, all in one session. By the time I get a link to a website, or sometimes just a phone number, I've basically already made the decision. With my espresso machine, by the time I hit the product page I'd decided I was just going to price-track it and wait for a sale. I wasn't looking at anything else, nothing else in my cart, I'd gone through all my iterations of questions and gotten the answer that way.

Pete Neubig: Let's fast forward to 2027. What should I be asking my marketing team to report that they probably aren't today, because of this AEO stuff?

Juli Durante: I like the idea of collecting a baseline of traffic and leads generated from AI search. It's probably low volume right now, but understanding where you are at that mid-to-end-of-funnel point is important. If you track customer sources in something like HubSpot, where you can see customers closed or opportunities created from that same point, getting that part of your funnel benchmarked, even if the number is small right now, is great to know. Then we expand to the softer KPIs marketers love but don't always get to report as leading indicators up the org: visibility with LLMs, brand sentiment, competitive visibility, share of voice, how often you show up in the competitor landscape. If you have a tool like HubSpot, you can track specific prompts or queries to see how often you're mentioned or cited, I can say we come back in 77% of prompt runs right now for "HubSpot marketing services for property management," and I'd like that to be 95%, that's a benchmark I can set goals against. The order of preference is bottom-of-funnel metrics first, then the softer, market-y metrics, because you could show up in prompts constantly and generate no business, so I want to track both sides.

Heather Park: Even for VPM, Pete, we've talked a lot about our organic search declining and what that means for AI referrals, quality of leads, and quality of traffic, and we've seen a direct correlation there. That's what I'd want to track as a marketer and a salesperson: if your organic search is declining, is your AI referral increasing at a similar rate, what's that ratio, and what does your lead quality look like coming from each? Is your session-tocontact ratio from AI increasing at the same rate your organic is declining? Looking for those trend lines becomes more and more important, not for a single number to chase, but to understand whether the change you're seeing is a positive, a negative, or a nonissue, because it's not a question of whether you'll see change, it's what kind.

Pete Neubig: So what can companies do this last quarter of 2026 to be prepared for 2027?

Heather Park: First things first, get a lay of the land. Do the initial research into your overall visibility as an organization compared to your competitors, down to the service level. Look at share of voice, you can do a basic experiment: take a set of 10 questions your buyers are most likely to ask, top of funnel is fine, our AEO audit tool is a good example of this, and run that experiment. Look at it today, see how often your name is mentioned and your website cited, do it again in a week, again in two weeks, see if anything changes. If you're not seeing your name mentioned as often as you'd think, especially if you feel like you own your market but AI isn't reflecting that, that's a great opportunity to ask AI directly: I probably should have shown up for this question, why didn't I? It'll tell you, and it'll tell you why someone else did. Go down that path of the why, without going all the way down the rabbit hole, and start making incremental changes to solve the problem.

Live Q&A: Tools, Social Visibility, and Reddit

Pete Neubig: I've got kind of a boomer question, don't laugh at me. Does AI actually check social media too, is it looking at Instagram and all that?

Heather Park: Yeah, anything that's publicly visible.

Pete Neubig: Okay, so if someone asks AI, do you know a good property management firm in Houston, and somebody put our name in there, we'd be able to see that. That was my boomer question.

Heather Park: On the Reddit front, we're seeing that decline more and more. It still shows up fairly often, but it's not what it was.  

Juli Durante: Reddit was huge a couple months ago, and then Reddit changed some of its crawlability. There's a lot going on in the tech world about who gets access to what, and when. We're seeing Reddit get cited less because they've restricted access, and these things can happen any time, Meta could say no more access to Facebook comments for AI search tomorrow. Over-optimizing for any one channel is, in my opinion, a mistake.

Pete Neubig: In y'all's opinion, is there a better CRM out there for tracking and reporting on this stuff?

Heather Park: This Diamond HubSpot agency has no opinions on the CRM question.

Juli Durante: I can only give you an incredibly biased answer, which is that everyone should use HubSpot. But really, you should let your business needs and objectives drive the CRM and marketing software choice, not the other way around, you'll almost never be happy if you buy the software first and figure out how to use it after. What I like about HubSpot, and why I've spent most of my career in that ecosystem, is that it gives me the full story in one package: my content and marketing performance, how that connects to actual lead generation, leads as humans not just form fills, their sales journey, how many become customers, tying all those pieces together instead of having separate chunks you connect with dotted lines. It also scales well, whether you're just getting started tracking leads in a simple pipeline, up through institutional clients running many teams.

Pete Neubig: Got a question from Logan: how and where do we get analytics set up to track how much we're being cited?

Heather Park: Great question. There's no perfect tool here, you'll use what's available to the best of its design. Worst case, you can literally do this in a spreadsheet, tracking your search queries and the results you get back from different AI models. Best case, an AEO specific tool like the $50 HubSpot tool, or whatever else is out there, we're obviously biased toward HubSpot, but having a central source of truth for the history of your citations and mentions is the most important part. A basic spreadsheet is good enough to get started, it won't give you long-term analytics, but it's a great place to begin.

Lightning Round

Pete Neubig: We've only got a few minutes left, so a quick lightning round. Heather, you go first, then Juli can tell Heather how and why she's wrong. Is there anything about AEO you think is overhyped? 

Heather Park: Oh, 83.4% of it. It's great SEO. It's solid, expanded, intuitive SEO. It's making great content and using it the right way, and not, as Juli said, over-indexing in any one capacity. So yeah, a lot of it is overhyped. Pete Neubig: Juli, tell me why it's not overhyped at all. I'm kidding.

Juli Durante: Unfortunately, that's not something I can do. If I were being really quippy, I'd say AEO is overhyped because it's really just the stuff we've been saying we should be doing all along, the tactics haven't changed. That's dramatic and a little flippant, but a lot of the "if you do this and that, I'm an expert" talk out there is hype. Really, at its heart, it's stay the course, be a good content organization, treat your business like a publisher, and that's what it comes down to.

Heather Park: There's actually a video for the event about that, about whether the value of a website has changed, and who it should be created for. The value of a website has only increased, it hasn't been diminished at all, and the way you should be using it is even more important: human first, always, then optimize for the search engines.

Pete Neubig: It may be overhyped, but it's not something you can bury your head in the sand about.

Heather Park: Yes.

Juli Durante: Exactly.

Pete Neubig: Alright Juli, one tool you can't live without.

Heather Park: Unfair.

Juli Durante: My Sharpie pen? No. I'm gonna get really specific here, the new HubSpot homepage inside HubSpot, which rolls up everything I need to do from a HubSpot perspective daily and weekly. That matters to me specifically because I'm running both sales and marketing for Geekly Media, so my marketing tasks, my own AI prompt tracking, emails I'm sending, prospecting I'm doing, it rolls it all together for me. I'm trying not to just blanket-answer "HubSpot," but it kind of is.

Pete Neubig: I'm hoping a bunch of HubSpot nerds are on this call.

Juli Durante: If you're not, I'm so sorry.

Pete Neubig: Heather?

Heather Park: Selfishly, the Geekly Command Center. It's built on the backbone of a lot of our AI tools, our Claudes, our Chats, our Hugos, all the AI tools we've pet-named, but it serves as a central source of truth pulling from HubSpot, the AI tools, our emails, social media, our project management system, everything, and it aggregates all of that into one location, then uses ourAI tools to interpret sentiment and context across each piece of information, and helps us make better decisions.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, I got a sneak peek of that last week, it was pretty cool, even for somebody who doesn't know anything about AI. I thought it was. Alright, which one, prediction, Heather, that you're willing to be held to next year?

Heather Park: Oh gosh, unpopular opinion. The stat I gave earlier, 45% starting with AI tools and 38% of Google searches dropping, I think that's going to start waning a bit. I think people are going to lean back toward using actual search results, mainly because they'll become more informed and more intelligent in how they use their own follow-up sequences. So I think link clicking, maybe not dramatically increasing, but I don't think it'll continue the dramatic decline we're seeing right now.

Pete Neubig: Juli?

Juli Durante: I think we're going to start seeing more rich results in AI. We're already seeing it in Google AI Overview, listing photos and things like that. I think we'll see more and more of that, and it'll underscore the importance of building out the experience on your site, your own unique content, position, and research, because those are what's going to keep falling into these results. Over the last year I'd say a lot of AI responses have been 90% or more text-based, and I think we'll see some shifts there.

Pete Neubig: Well, guys, thank you for all the knowledge. An hour of talking AEO and I did not fall asleep, so that's pretty powerful for me.

Closing: What's Next, and 2027 Predictions

Pete Neubig: Most of y'all on this call have already scanned the code for your free AEO audit, so I'll give you a couple minutes to do that. We just had AEO Unlocked, and we actually have another one on December 4th that you'll be able to scan as well. Juli or Heather, what's the December 4th webinar about?

Heather Park: We're going to jump into your AEO content plan for 2027. We've talked a lot about the context and use case of content, even a bit about the how, but we're going to talk a lot more about the planning side, the order of operations. To be as prepared as you can be for that one, this AEO audit, which is 100% free from Geekly, will give you a great head start. I'm going to drop a file in the chat so you can see an example of one of our client audits. 

Juli Durante: My wrap-up: if you have any specific questions about AEO, content, this marketing world, or anything crazy I said on this call, go to the Geekly website and book a meeting, it goes directly to me. There's a widget on our homepage, happy to talk through anything.

Pete Neubig: Appreciate it. This was a higher-level session, good for folks like me, and on December 4th we'll peel the onion back a layer and get a bit deeper.

Heather Park: Yes, and I'll quickly mention a few things we meant to talk about and didn't. There are so many VAs on the VPM platform who've already taken our AEO course and are getting started down this path. If you don't want to tackle everything yourself, there are great options there, almost 200 have already enrolled and many have completed it already. And as mentioned, the QR code leads straight to the free AEO audit from Geekly. I showed one screen example, but it's actually a fully narrated video with several chapters on where your company stands today in AI visibility.

Pete Neubig: And I'll give you my big prediction for '27: the VA that is AI-enabled is going to become the new maintenance coordinator. That's the new job everybody's going to want. Alright everybody, we're one minute over, so I'll let everybody go. Heather, Juli, Derrik behind the scenes, thanks so much for being panelists. I'll see everybody.

Heather Park: Thank you, Pete.

Juli Durante: Thanks everyone! Bye.