The AEO Playbook: Own the AI Shortlist - Live with Sydney Sloan at GTM Tailwinds - Ep 80

Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2, joined Craig, Matt, and our amazing audience of GTM leaders at our GTM Tailwinds event this spring for a live recording where she outlined the major shift in B2B buyer behavior, how to measure and track Answer Engine Optimization, and why the partnership and distribution layer is as important as content creation.

Critical Takeaways

• Over half of B2B buyers (51%, up from 24% just one year ago) now start their research in an LLM rather than Google. GTM leaders must treat AI answer engines as the new top-of-funnel, not a novelty. Waiting another year means your competitors get a 12-month head start on owning these answers.
• Stop writing for search crawlers, instead write for the person you're trying to influence. The old HubSpot model of casting a wide content net (writing for non-marketers to drive traffic) is losing effectiveness. Instead, teams should map out the specific jobs-to-be-done for each buyer persona, the product leader, the CFO, the practitioner, and write questions and answers directly for that person. This persona-centric content approach is what gets surfaced and cited in LLM responses.
• LLMs favor content that mirrors the structure of a question, such as FAQs, pro/con lists, pricing comparisons, and definitional formats. G2 proactively added pricing data and pro/con lists to every product profile after seeing those formats show up in prompt patterns six months earlier. GTM teams should audit their top-performing SEO pages and rewrite AEO versions with this structure immediately.
• Publications like Forbes and VentureBeat are now formal citation sources for LLMs. G2 counter-pitched a negative MIT AI study and earned significant coverage, which then got indexed and cited. Teams should re-engage PR agencies (if they have newsworthy content) and consider low-cost options like Forbes Council ($1,600/year) to establish founder brand as authenticated content on authoritative domains.

Chapters

00:00 Episode Preview

00:42 Introducing Sydney Sloan, the CMO of G2

01:25 Focus Wins at SalesLoft

03:01 AEO vs GEO Explained

04:00 New Buyer Research Behavior

05:18 Build Brand in LLMs

06:44 AI Citations of Reddit and G2

09:30 Zero to One AEO Setup

10:10 Content Engineering Playbook

11:58 G2 Adapts to Prompt Trends

13:50 Measuring AEO Impact

17:29 Consensus Signals and Sentiment

19:37 Bots vs Humans Traffic

20:14 Own Citation Sources

21:07 Reddit and Influencers

22:32 Freshness vs Old Content

23:51 Pruning Content for LLMs

25:01 PR Is Cool Again in B2B Marketing

27:02 Should Founders Hire PR

28:57 Partnerships and Frenemies

33:07 AEO and SEO Together

34:40 LinkedIn Virality Tips

35:43 Wrap Up and Outro

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Epic Quotes

• “AI's changed everything. Including where your buyers go to do their research, discovery, and shortlisting.” - Sydney Sloan

Connect with Sydney Sloan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sydsloan/
• G2 Website: https://www.g2.com/

Shoutouts

• GTMshift: https://gtmshift.com/

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