u/Drummer-78

For the past 7 months, we’ve been transitioning heavily from traditional SEO to AEO using HubSpot and the loop marketing approach.

We’ve been testing a lot, running webinars, using real questions from sales conversations inside the HubSpot CRM, and building a content engine around what humans are actually asking, saying, and searching for.

Humans helping humans.

What’s been interesting is that we haven’t just seen results from these activities individually like webinar attendees that turn into clients.

We’ve also seen increases in:
- AI brand visibility
- Organic traffic
- Branded discovery through AI tools
- Better-informed prospects coming into conversations already familiar with our positioning

One tool we’ve been experimenting with is HubSpot AEO, HubSpot’s newer tool focused on tracking AI visibility. It helps monitor AI mentions and citations, competitor visibility, sentiment, and also surfaces recommendations on where you can improve. It is a great tool!

I’ll share a mini case study in the comments with some early findings showing how a few focused changes created a noticeable impact in AI visibility in a relatively short period of time.

Also, for the HubSpot community, I’m running an upcoming HubSpot User Group session as part of our “From SEO to AEO” webinar series in two weeks. We’ll be walking through some of the frameworks, workflows, and lessons learned from these experiments and how teams can start adapting content strategies for AI discovery.
Register here: https://events.hubspot.com/networks/events/160953

Would also love to hear if others here are testing the HubSpot AEO tool and what you think of it.
Have you followed some of the recommendations? Have you seen early signs of visibility increasing?

Has anyone else started noticing Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, webinars, and community discussions showing up more often inside AI-generated answers?

We’ve been testing this heavily over the last few months while trying to understand how AI visibility actually works beyond traditional SEO.

One thing that became pretty obvious:

AI search behaves very differently from Google search.

A lot of companies are still approaching AI visibility like this:

• publish more blogs
• add more keywords
• scale AI-generated content
• wait for rankings

But AI systems seem to care much more about:

• repeated expertise
• educational content
• entity consistency
• real conversations
• trusted sources
• authentic human experience

So instead of mass-producing AI articles, we started focusing on capturing:

• webinars
• customer conversations
• LinkedIn discussions
• Reddit engagement
• HubSpot CRM insights
• real-world expertise

Then we turned those conversations into structured educational content.

The interesting part is how quickly the visibility signals started changing.

We started seeing:

• more AI-generated mentions and citations
• stronger branded search activity
• more inbound opportunities influenced by educational content
• AI Overview visibility
• increased direct traffic and engagement

For one of our clients we saw 35%+ AI brand visibility growth in weeks

One thing I keep coming back to:

The internet is becoming one giant answer engine.

And AI systems are increasingly pulling from conversations happening across multiple platforms, not just webpages.

Honestly, I also think Google removing FAQ rich results reinforces the same direction.

Feels less like: “optimize harder”
And more like: “become the clearest trusted real human answer.”

Curious if anyone else here is seeing similar patterns with AI search, AI Overviews, or ChatGPT visibility?

Most companies still treat LinkedIn and Reddit like “social platforms.”

But increasingly, they’re becoming training data for AI search.

When people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or even Google AI questions about an industry, product, or workflow, the answers are often influenced by:

• Blog posts
• Reddit discussions
• LinkedIn posts
• Expert commentary
• Community Q&A

That changes how content strategy works.

It’s no longer only about:
“Can I rank on Google?”

Now it’s also:
“Can I become part of the answers AI systems trust?”

Here’s the framework we’ve been testing:

1. Start with a highly structured blog post

The best-performing content for AEO usually:

• Answers one specific question
• Uses conversational language
• Breaks information into sections
• Avoids fluff
• Makes extraction easy for AI systems

Think:
“How to Use LinkedIn and Reddit for AEO?”
instead of
“Modern Multi-Channel Content Strategies for 2026”

1. Repurpose the content into LinkedIn

Not just reposting the article.

Turn it into:

• Thought leadership posts
• Short educational insights
• Carousels
• Polls
• Video clips
• Mini case studies

LinkedIn reinforces:

• Expertise
• Consistency
• Topical authority
• Personal brand signals

1. Use Reddit for participation, not promotion

This is where most brands fail.

If every comment is trying to “drive traffic,” Reddit users immediately reject it.

Instead:

• Find communities already discussing the problem
• Answer naturally
• Add actual value
• Share experiences
• Link only when it genuinely helps answer the question

The interesting part:
AI systems increasingly surface Reddit threads because they contain authentic human discussions instead of overly polished marketing copy.

1. Repeat consistently across platforms

One blog post is not an AEO strategy.

The companies that seem to be gaining AI visibility are repeatedly reinforcing the same topics through:

• Website content
• LinkedIn expertise
• Reddit participation
• Consistent terminology
• Repeated subject authority

This appears to help with:

• Visibility
• Trust
• Entity recognition
• AI citations/references

The biggest mistake I’m seeing right now:

Publishing huge volumes of AI-generated content without adding:

• Real expertise
• Real examples
• Distribution
• Community participation
• Human insight

AEO doesn’t seem to reward volume alone.

It rewards useful answers that consistently appear where humans are already having conversations.

Human helping humans still matters.

Curious if anyone else here is seeing Reddit/LinkedIn content show up more often in AI-generated answers lately.

We’ve been testing HubSpot AEO across 3 long-standing Nextiny clients, and the results were pretty interesting.

All 3 are clients we’ve worked with for years, but their AI Brand Visibility scores are very different:

🟢 Client 1: 71.21% visibility
🟡 Client 2: 26.92% visibility
🔴 Client 3: 13.42% visibility

The biggest difference didn’t seem to be “more content” or “more tools.”

It came down to two things:

1. Does the client capture real human expertise?
Sales conversations, team insights, video, webinars, real examples, humans helping humans.

2. Do they let us be strategic?
Or do they mostly tell us what to execute?

Here’s the pattern we’re seeing:

Client 1 does both really well.
They create real human content internally, and they trust us to turn that into structured, scalable marketing. Result: 71% visibility.

Client 2 doesn’t consistently capture enough internal expertise, but they give us strategic freedom. So we can still optimize what exists, capture what we can, and build over time. Result: 26% visibility, with room to grow.

Client 3 does neither.
They don’t create much real human content, and they don’t really allow strategic direction. A lot of the content is polished, but it doesn’t reflect real expertise. Result: 13% visibility.

So the takeaway for me is:

AEO is not just a content volume game.
And it’s not just a HubSpot/tooling game either.

It seems to be much more about what you give AI to work with:

• Real expertise
• Clear answers
• Structured content
• Consistent distribution
• Trust signals across channels

At Nextiny we’ve been calling this our Human-to-Answer™ framework:

1. Capture expertise
2. Extract answers
3. Atomize content
4. Distribute everywhere
5. Earn trust signals
6. Amplify and optimize what works

Basically: turn real human expertise into content that AI can understand, cite, and recommend.

Curious if anyone else using HubSpot AEO is seeing similar patterns.

Are your strongest AI visibility scores coming from clients/brands that have strong internal experts and content engines?