What I’ve Learned Going Deep Into AEO Over the Last Two Months for Meet-Ting

Inspired by Lenny’s podcast with Ethan Smith (so good, you need to listen - the advice for builders is insane and can't believe it's free...), I wanted to share a few things I’ve been seeing going deep into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for @Meet-Ting.

I spend a lot of my day in GPT and Gemini, and over the last few months I started getting more curious about how their recommendations are actually pulled from the web. I'm not an expert, listen to the podcast, but I am actively tackling it so have some tactical learnings.

I mainly came across AEO by looking at competitors and researching. I was always surprised that I’d search and end up on the home page of a product, not another more credible source - just because they’d written a smart blog post about it.

See this for "best free AI meeting assistants", it's just their own web info, but the search term is about "best" so it's an interesting curation:

So from the start I thought: when we get Ting going, we need to understand this and use it. Especially if in the future everyone goes straight to GPT or Gemini to figure out what products to use.

Side note: I wonder how Amazon feels about this?

So what have I found?

• Reddit work pays off. All the posts we did around our PH launch are now adding value - previous threads are being referenced by GPT. People are surprised Reddit is so indexed, but it makes sense since they licensed their data early to OpenAI...

• Product Hunt is key. Due to the high authority of PH (I assume) it's well cited by GPT and Gemini from what I've seen so far. See image below.

• PR matters. An old colleague used to say “old media is dead, no one reads it.” Well… AI does. We got a full product review recently and within days ChatGPT was quoting it. Again, see image below.

• Reddit + Quora replies matter. Jumping into the right forums and conversations gets picked up so you need to produce content AND reply to open topics in your domain area.

• Wikipedia is powerful, but tricky. You need notable online coverage to get approval by Wiki moderators to have a page about your company/product, which again comes back to press. We're close to our page going live, fingers crossed.

• Competitors already use AEO. Smart content is how they show up when you search product categories currently, lots of classic SEO tactics like labelling the blog "The Best X in 2025 Are X, Y, Z".

My takeaway

Just like Ethan explains in Lenny's podcast, this feels like an area where startups can actually win vs. the incumbents.

We’re used to being scrappy - diving into Reddit, Quora, getting press wherever we can. Now all of that work gets amplified by AI models when people ask questions like “what’s the best X?”

Here’s the latest on Meet-Ting now that we’ve been “feeding the beast” for a few weeks:

Curious if anyone else here has been experimenting with AEO yet?

If you do one thing today, listen to that podcast!