Many marketers now know the best practices they must implement to get mentioned and cited by ChatGPT, Google, and Claude but still struggle to implement answer engine optimization (AEO). Marketers sync with web developers about the technical prerequisites of visibility: server-side rendering, Bing’s IndexNow protocol, monitoring for indexation issues, and more. They’re well aware of the weaknesses of SEO’s KPIs and are beginning to benchmark new KPIs such as citation attempt and recommendation share. But despite internalizing these best practices, most marketers haven’t mastered the cross-functional collaboration that AEO requires.
AEO Works When Every Team Reinforces Authority
AEO is a marketing discipline and organizational imperative. Copywriters can create deeply distinctive, quotable content, but if customers are bad-mouthing a brand on Reddit and the brand’s site promotes products rather than answers FAQs, that content won’t be cited in ChatGPT.
Web developers can ensure that pages load in less than 3 seconds, are responsive on mobile, and have schema markup, but if the content on those pages doesn’t convey the trust signals that answer engines reward, they won’t be included in AI Mode’s answers.
AEO is a fragile, sprawling process that must be greater than the sum of its parts. It requires coordinating content, IT, social media, PR, paid media, brand marketing, information security, and legal to monitor and augment authority across engines.
Forrester’s New Tool Turns AEO Strategy Into Action
To help cross-functional teams effectively orchestrate AEO, we created The Answer Engine Optimization Capability Prioritization Tool. The downloadable tool empowers marketers to evaluate the importance, effectiveness, and difficulty of content, technical, and measurement best practices critical to AEO. It reveals gaps between capabilities’ importance and effectiveness.
It can help you realize that your most important priority — amplifying offsite authority, for instance — is your least effective as narratives across Reddit and YouTube spin out of your control. It can also highlight the fact that you can’t get resources to effectively implement content and technical best practices without first solving AEO’s biggest measurement problem: attributing lower-funnel outcomes to view-through traffic referred by answer engines.
To maximize our tool’s value, consider pairing it with other recent research on AEO:
Role Profile: Director/VP Of B2B Digital Visibility And AI Discovery. This report provides a job description for the director or VP of B2B digital visibility and AI discovery, an emerging leadership role for AI-mediated buying. As AI informs how buyers discover, evaluate, and select vendors, organizations must actively manage how they are represented across owned digital channels and AI-powered search environments. The successful candidate for this role will define standards, structured content, and digital requirements for accurate representation and consistent discoverability. This role will establish governance and measurement practices that align teams to improve buyer confidence and decision progression.
Turn AEO Into Brand Growth. ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity act more like billboards than search engines. They’re upper-funnel media that grow brands’ market share by generating awareness with strong halo effects on consumers’ consideration and commitment. But SEO processes aren’t set up to realize answer engines’ brand-building potential. Marketers must shift their approach to more effectively influence answer engines’ opinions. Read this report to learn about adapting search marketing to answer engines’ current and future dynamics.
Stay tuned for our landscape report on answer engine optimization technologies, set to publish in Q3 2026, which will catalog dozens of notable vendors, unpack the market’s maturity and dynamics, and clarify where the market’s going next.
As always, feel free to request a guidance session to discuss.
