Andrea Fryrear adapted her entire marketing strategy to appear in AI-generated buying journeys, not just search engine results. In this episode, she explains how AgileSherpas replaced legacy SEO tactics with AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to show up inside LLMs like ChatGPT—where more B2B buyers are starting their research. By restructuring content, technical markup, and messaging around real buyer questions, Andrea positioned her firm to win in the “dark funnel” of AI-led discovery—before prospects ever land on a website.
What you’ll get from this session:
• What AEO and GEO mean—and how they differ from SEO
• How to restructure your content for AI-based recommendation engines
• Why updating old posts is more effective than publishing new ones
• How to influence LLMs when you can’t see what they’re doing
• How to map your website to buyer journey stages in an AI-first world
Why it matters:
• More buyers are using LLMs than Google for early-stage research
• Founders who optimize early can own high-value answer positions
• Traditional SEO metrics and attribution models are becoming irrelevant
• Content still wins—but only if structured for machines, not marketers
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. This show is for owners and operators of boutique professional services firms, so if you market, sell, and deliver expertise for a living, this is for you. We aim to do three things on this show, and that is to help you make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. On today’s show, we’re gonna talk about discoverability, and how the world of SEO, classically defined, is now the world of AEO and GEO. Welcome to the world of multiple three-letter acronyms, and what you should be doing about it. And joining me is a long-time Collective 54 member, very well liked, very well respected. She pioneered agile marketing for many of us, and she’s now pioneering a new thing, which is this new discoverability framework. So, Andrea, welcome back to the show. Would you please reintroduce yourself to the new listeners?
Andrea Fryrear: Happy to do so. Hi everybody, I’m Andrea Fryrear. I’m the CEO of Agile Sherpas. We work with brand-side marketing teams to help them be more efficient and effective in their marketing practices by teaching them how to use Agile frameworks and practices to get more done in less time.
Greg Alexander: Okay, great. Alright, well, let’s start off with the question that everybody’s asking is, what the heck is AEO and GEO, and how is it different than SEO?
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, so nobody’s really settled on what the proper acronym should be, so we just are using all of them, I think, right now, but AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, so, like, all of the things we are asking questions into. That’s optimizing to be found as the answer to those queries that people are putting in, and then GEO is generative, I think? Like, you’re gonna get a different answer, depending on who you ask, but both of them are meant to cover this idea that we need to be showing up as the answer inside of people’s conversations with their LLM of choice. Because a lot of the discovery, research, activity is happening now, not just in a search engine, where normal SEO would apply, but a lot of that is happening now in LLMs of various kinds.
Greg Alexander: Okay, fantastic. So fundamentally, how are they different? And I’m going to say they, because I don’t want to repeat those three acronyms over and over. How are they different than the way we used to do it with SEO?
Andrea Fryrear: So the nice thing is there’s a lot of overlap, so a lot of things that worked and continue to work for SEO serve you well in showing up in LLM answers. If you’ve got a good foundation for SEO, you’re set up well, and you don’t have to throw everything out. Being clear in what you do and how you solve problems for people on your website, in social media, all of that kind of stuff, and having it clearly laid out on all of your digital presence, that’s foundational and still matters a lot. But then you have to start thinking about how LLMs view the internet, which is different than how search engines view the internet. LLMs are looking to find an answer and give it out, whereas a search engine was looking to parse things and show it as a place for a user to go. It’s a different practice. A lot of the LLM stuff is about what’s going on behind the scenes, like technical stuff about markup, how your schema and the things a visitor to your website wouldn’t see are structured. Making sure things are up to date, broken down, like FAQs, is really important. People are asking questions to LLMs, so showing that you are answering who, what, where, and why kinds of questions in your content is more important for LLMs than it ever was in SEO, although it helps SEO too. The Venn diagram is pretty big, but it’s not all overlapping.
Greg Alexander: So why does this matter now?
Andrea Fryrear: It’s something like a 150% increase in the last two quarters in the amount of research that people are doing in LLMs. More and more of the sales process and discovery process is happening there. It’s still really small compared to Google, which still has something like 80% of the search volume, so you can’t abandon SEO yet. But more and more is going to start happening in LLMs, and we have to be able to show up there. It’s primarily still dark. We can’t fully know what’s happening. You can track some of it if people click a link from an LLM chat, but that doesn’t happen much. They’re probably staying in the LLM chat and continuing the conversation, and you’ll never know unless you ask during a sales conversation. We have to optimize for something we might never see, but that’s increasingly happening before they ever talk to us.
Greg Alexander: Where are you seeing the earliest and strongest impacts of this so far? Any industries or topic areas where pioneering work is happening?
Andrea Fryrear: I was listening to a Gartner webinar about this, and the impact is being felt more in B2C right now, but I think for those of us in ProServe, we’re going to start feeling it. Anecdotally, I’ve started asking prospects how they heard about us, and about 60% of my conversations in the last quarter told me ChatGPT sent them.
Greg Alexander: Wow. Sixty percent.
Andrea Fryrear: Anecdotally, yes. We’re very inbound as an organization, so this is my bread and butter, but it’s happening now, and it’s only going to increase.
Greg Alexander: What prompted you to dive into this? What put it on your radar?
Andrea Fryrear: The vast majority of my business comes from organic search and inbound. I could see the writing on the wall early in 2025. It was impacting how buyers bought, because it was impacting how I bought. I was using it for B2B and B2C purchases. I wanted to make sure Agile Sherpas was prepared. My team spent a lot of time over the summer experimenting with what we thought we should do and what we heard as best practices, because I didn’t want to get caught flat-footed. In the early days of SEO, early movers had a huge advantage. If you got there early, it was hard to unseat you. I think the same thing is true now.
Greg Alexander: When you were doing those early experiments, what surprised you the most?
Andrea Fryrear: How effective updating older content has been. We didn’t need a lot of new content. We added things like a table of contents to old blog posts and an FAQ at the bottom. That alone had a big impact, as far as we can tell. It’s still hard to know exactly how you’re showing up, but anecdotally from sales conversations, it seems effective.
Greg Alexander: Is it too early, or are there core pillars to this strategy now?
Andrea Fryrear: It’s early, but content is still critical. Having a strong foundation of valuable content that clearly demonstrates authority and answers questions is essential. Not just on your own site, but across social media, Medium, Reddit, and niche publications. Multi-channel and multimedia are becoming more important, along with the technical schema and markup work. Together, those are best practices as far as we can tell right now.
Greg Alexander: I learned about applying Agile to marketing from you years ago. You had multiple content authors inside your firm. Are you still doing that, and has this strategy changed how they produce content?
Andrea Fryrear: It’s a very similar approach. What matters more now is consistency. If someone has a byline on my website about Agile marketing, I want their LinkedIn profile to mention Agile marketing too, so it’s clear they’re an authority on that topic across their web presence. So, it’s harder to say, like, a freelancer can write about 10 different topics, you know, and have that sort of mix of content around the internet, because you want authority to be attached to you as an individual in a particular content area. So, we gotta force people to kind of niche down and stay in their lane more.
Greg Alexander: Somebody gave me, because we produce a lot of content as well, as you know, someone gave me a piece of advice I want to run by you, and they were encouraging me to cite sources more frequently. Because that gets picked up better in LLM training models. Is that true, or is that false?
Andrea Fryrear: You know, I don’t… I don’t know, to be perfectly honest. The interconnectedness of, like, backlinks was really important for… is really important for SEO. I haven’t seen any data about whether or not that’s valuable from the LLM optimization. I know there’s a lot bigger emphasis on traditional PR, like mentions of you and your brand in other areas is important, so I’m gonna imagine that other people will want you to mention them in your content. I’m not sure if that’s gonna give you a lift, right? Or just… it would give them a lift to have a mention elsewhere.
Greg Alexander: You know, at the top of this interview, you talked about, or I mentioned, discoverability. If you think about different types of content, there’s content you produce to get discovered. And then, you know, when someone’s maybe in the middle of the funnel, you’ve already been discovered, you produce a different type of content, maybe to differentiate. So with your experimentation here, are you limiting that to just discoverability content, or are you going beyond that?
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, we are really focusing different types of content into different areas. So, now I feel like blogs and social media and guest posting, like Medium and those kinds of other channels, those are the discoverability content that are really the research phase, and those are different types of content. That’s where we are focusing on the discoverability piece. But then our homepage now, we’re really experimenting with that as more of a place where people are coming when they’re much farther along in the buyer journey. So we’ve published our prices on the homepage. We’ve never done that before, but I’ve seen a lot of research advocating very strongly that that is a big signal right now for showing up in the LLMs as an answer, right, when people are doing buying research. And so we’re assuming that when people get to the website, they’re farther in their buying journey, because a lot more research has happened in LLMs and things like that. So we’ve changed the way that we’re presenting ourselves on our homepage and in those later stage pages on the website. So, that seems to be the right approach right now. But yeah, we’re thinking about different parts of our website as different stages of the buying journey in a much more differentiated way than we have before.
Greg Alexander: did the same thing, but we took it one step further. We put the prices of our competitors on the website, too. Oh, I like that. Yeah. And again, for the same reason, because people are going to these things and saying, hey, how much does Collective 54 cost, and how much does Visitz cost, and how much does EO cost, and it just shortens the sales cycle. they’re gonna find it out anyways, you might as well just find it out quicker, right?
Greg Alexander: Alright, you know, for years and years and years, marketers handled attribution based on the URL. And that’s gone now. So, how do you… how do you deal with attribution in this new world?
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, it’s rough. It’s been rough for a while, it’s getting rougher, you know? I think some of it comes down to the conversations, right? In a sales conversation, how’d you hear about us? Where did you come from? You know, and it’s a bit of a manual process, but that’s last touch, right? Like, where did you come from last time? That doesn’t tell you that they went to a webinar 6 months ago, and all the other things that happened in between. But this is why I love content, because it’s just this web, right? That’s my favorite metaphor these days. It’s a web, and you catch people in it, and they sort of flail around, and then eventually the spider grabs them, and you get their business. But in some ways, you just gotta believe, and you just have to kind of trust that it’s happening. And if they’re showing up in your pipeline, you know it’s working. And as a business owner, that’s hard, but in some ways, that’s all we’ve got right now.
Greg Alexander: When advertising agencies, you know, before the internet, would make a pitch, and they would say, well, how do I know it works? There was zero attribution. You had to have faith, you had to believe, as you say, in a strange, weird, twisted kind of way. We might be headed back in that direction, and you’re right, that is hard.
Greg Alexander: Alright, just a couple more questions for you. So, what are marketers still doing from the SEO playbook that is now a waste of time?
Andrea Fryrear: Oh… I think the chasing of backlinks for their own sake, we’re done, right? Like, that’s… that’s old school stuff. We don’t need… we don’t need the backlinks anymore. Don’t worry. Don’t worry about that anymore.
Greg Alexander: Isn’t that crazy? That used to be such a focus. Yeah.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. All right, and then I guess lastly, you know, for someone that hasn’t been thinking about this, which is probably the majority of the audience, because this is so new. Is there any, like, I don’t know, early things that somebody should do just to dip their toe here and get started?
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, if I was starting today, right, we’ve been doing this for years, so I have, you know, a bit of a different perspective from what we are doing, but if I was starting today, I tell people I’d start with video, because if you record a video, you have automatically a written transcript of what you said, which can be then turned into a blog post, a newsletter, a lot of other things, plus you have the visual content that goes along with it. So, I’d start with a video play. YouTube is the easiest, right? And just answer questions you get on sales calls. That’s it. Just, like, sit down and answer a question that you got on a sales call this week, and put it on YouTube. And put the transcript on your website as a blog post. That’s an easy place to start, and you’re answering questions, which LLMs love. And you’re adding value to prospects because somebody else has that question, too. And it’s low pressure, because you already answered that question this week. And it’s easy for you as a founder or a salesperson to get started. Like, you don’t have to think of a topic, you don’t have to worry about keyword density or any of those fancy things, just answer the question, record yourself like you were talking to a prospect, and put it on YouTube, and you started. Just work… work from there.
Greg Alexander: That would be an easy way to do it. having sales calls on Zoom. Everybody’s comfortable now that there’s a note-taker or some recording of the call. And if you’re wondering what questions are being asked, well, you can load all those transcripts up to AI and say, tell me what questions their prospects are asking, and there you go. And then just answer those questions in the way that Andrea said, and that’s a… that’s an easy hack to get done. That’s what we’ve been doing. It seems to be working pretty good.
Greg Alexander: All right, well, very good. This was, as usual, extremely helpful. Congrats to you for being an early pioneer on this. I’m sure, maybe in a little bit more time, we’ll ask you to come back and tell us how it’s going. But thanks again, we appreciate it.
Andrea Fryrear: Always happy to be here.
Greg Alexander: Alright.
Greg Alexander: Alright, a couple calls to actions for listeners. If you’re a member of Collective 54 and you’re interested in this topic. Look for the meeting invitation that you’ll get, where you can come to the Q&A session with Andrea and ask your questions directly of her. If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, if you might want to become one, go to collective54.com and we’ll get in contact with you. But until then, I appreciate you listening, and until next time, I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.