Hey, AI. I'm over here. Will you tell people about me? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

You've heard of search engine optimization or SEO.

That's what you need to do to get your shoe brand or your coffee shop or your public radio show

picked up and pushed out by a search engine.

Now, with more people using AI to search for things, these brands have to work on what's

being called AEO.

That's short for answer engine optimization. So when

someone asks chat GPT, where do I get good coffee in Baltimore, your brand shows up. I talked with

Aaron Griffith, a reporter at the New York Times, about what companies can do to make the AI look their

way. Humans need, you know, kind of like something to catch our attention, something novel

or surprising, a narrative hook, a story that we want to get pulled into. Chatbots just want

pure information. The key is just a ton of very, very highly detailed information that could

answer any possible question that a human could have.

So if you're an automaker, you're uploading your entire user manual.

So if someone is wondering if your car has X, Y, and Z feature or can do a certain thing,

that the chatbots are going to find that information and correctly spit it back out to whoever's searching for it.

Or say if you are a pharma company, a lot of people are for better or worse, doing a lot of searches about health and medications on these chatbots because they can spit out highly specific results for people.

And so the pharma companies are, you know,

uploading very detailed, you know, scientific studies and things so the chatbots can absorb them.

If you are a luxury brand, perhaps, you are going to start putting out a lot more detailed

information about your products. Instead of, you know, publishing a few blog posts that

might appeal to some of your super fans, you're now going to be just like churning out a ton of

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