For many businesses their website is a vital shopfront, so losing 140 million visits in a single year would be a big problem. That's what happened to HubSpot, and the cause was AI. The company provides sales, marketing and customer service tools for business-to-business companies.
Like many firms, HubSpot, has been hit by a crucial change in the way we search the internet. "I remember the days when I would search [the web] and there was no good information," says Kipp Bodnar, chief marketing officer at HubSpot. "Sometimes there was some stuff, but I had to scroll through 10, 20, 30 links.
"What you have now is access to all the world's intelligence in an instantaneous way. How people find information and subsequently take action is very, very different." For companies like HubSpot there are several causes for the drop in traffic. Search engines rejigged their algorithms to fight AI slop, which made it more important for a website to be seen as credible on a core topic.
Users are increasingly switching from search engines to AI tools. Meanwhile, search engines themselves are including AI overviews at the top of their results and that often means that users are getting their questions answered, without having to click on to another website. "The click-through rate for searches that have AI overviews is about 60% to 70% lower," says Bodnar.
So, companies are trying to work out how to be prominent in the answers given by AI. Answer engine optimisation (AEO), sometimes called generative engine optimisation (GEO), is about helping websites to rank well in AI tools, including AI overviews and tools like ChatGPT. These are built on an AI technology called large language models (LLMs).
Many companies are using AEO alongside search engine optimisation (SEO), which aims to get websites ranking in search engines. "We've been able to use answer engine optimisation to increase the conversion rate and quality of the people who are coming to us," says Bodnar. "I don't know how you are a competitive business in the future without having a strong competency in this." It requires an understanding of how search behaviour is changing.
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