What type of content do you primarily create?
Just when you think you’ve mastered SEO, here comes AI with a whole new black box to solve: AEO.
While SEO, or search engine optimization, focuses on climbing the Google search results; AEO, or answer engine optimization (AKA GEO, or generative engine optimization) focuses on showing up as a citation in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or other large-language-model results. AEO is an uncharted frontier where the rules for success are still being written—but there are a few experts who are studying it, and some emerging advice.
Recently, Ethan Smith—CEO of Graphite, a respected SEO agency—appeared on Lenny’s Podcast to share what he’s learned about this burgeoning search platform.
One thing he says is key for AEO growth? Posting on video platforms like YouTube.
“Stuff that worked especially well was just straight SEO, number one,” Ethan says on Lenny's Podcast. “Number two is YouTube videos.”
How do you get your YouTube videos to show up in ChatGPT and the others? Make sure it clearly answers whatever query you’re aiming for, and that it’s well-structured with good production quality.
In other words, make it good.
It turns out that we know the perfect tool for making lots of video and making it good. (It’s Descript, in case you hadn’t caught on yet).
Keep reading to learn Ethan’s keys to AEO success, and how to master AEO with YouTube plus I Descript.
AEO: The basics
While it sounds complicated, AI search isn’t all that different from the old-fashioned kind.
“Everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO,” Ethan says.
Here’s a breakdown of the main differences between SEO and AEO.
The key differences to remember:
- For SEO, you need to spend time building domain authority before you can rank. For AEO, you can get mentioned immediately.
- For SEO, you benefit from putting a lot of effort into one page.For AEO, you benefit from appearing in multiple citations — not just your website, but YouTube, Reddit, media publications, wherever you can.
- AEO has a longer tail for its queries. That is, while Google rewards simple, high-volume keywords like “best video editor,” AI search is more likely to surface specific, targeted questions like “What video editor should I use if I want to translate old movie captions into Spanish?”
- AEO has higher conversion rates than SEO. Someone who clicks your link from an AI search result has a better chance of using your product.
Importantly, though, both SEO and AEO value comprehensive, high-quality content and penalize AI slop. Your stuff has to be valuable to your audience—that hasn’t changed.
How to succeed in AEO on YouTube
The first key for AEO success on YouTube, Ethan says, is topic choice. Choose super-specific questions and answers over more general topics. You’ll have less competition and reach a higher-intent audience.
"The interesting thing with this, especially for B2B, is that YouTube, Vimeo, other video sites, the kinds of things people make videos for are food, traveling, fun, beauty,” Ethan says. “There's not that many videos about AI-powered payment processing APIs, but it's a great money term. So, if you make a video for these really specific, high-LTV, maybe non-glamorous keywords, questions, topics—that's actually a big opportunity."
The second key is to get lots of citations. That means appearing on a variety of websites and platforms, but it also means appearing multiple times on each one. On YouTube, an AEO best practice is to find each of those specific questions and keywords and make a video for every one of them.
How to make video AI will cite
Here’s the problem: Ethan’s strategy sounds simple, but it’s actually really demanding. You need to create videos for dozens of hyper-specific topics—many of which aren't naturally video-friendly. How do you make an engaging video about “API rate limiting for payment processors” or “compliance features in HR software”?
If you’re just getting started making video, or you’ve been making it but need to up your game, we’ve got a whole bunch of content to help you quickly learn to do it well, so your videos get cited in AI search:
- Hitting the round running: A hierarchy of video needs and a 15-minute video preproduction checklist
- Making technical topics visual and engaging: 5 strategies to add visuals to how-to videos
- Creating effective tutorials and demos: Tutorial video best practices and product demo techniques
- Looking and sounding professional on camera: How to appear natural on video (crucial when you're the face of your B2B brand)
- Creating content for maximum impact: How to get your educational videos to a broader audience on YouTube
- Avoiding common pitfalls: Mistakes that kill new YouTube channels and insights from successful YouTube editors
- Getting the sound right: How to sound design a YouTube video
- Scaling educational content: Course creation strategies
How to make video at scale
Quality is just one challenge. If you're following the AEO playbook correctly, you're not making just one video. You're making videos for every variation of every question your potential customers might ask. That's a lot of content to create.
This is where your YouTube AEO strategy could fall apart if you’re not careful—not because the strategy is wrong, or the content is bad, but because the execution is too time-consuming and expensive.
Unless you have the right tools.
Why Descript is best for AEO on YouTube
Descript has a ton of features that make it uniquely good for an AEO approach:
- It makes video editing fast and easy. Descript uses text-based editing, which means that anything you do to the auto-generated transcript also happens to the audio and video: Delete a sentence, and that sentence is cut from the video.
- You can make a whole video without ever pressing record. Write a script, generate a realistic AI avatar with an AI voice, add captions in one click, and send that video out into the world. You don’t even need to shower.
- You can let AI do the video editing for you. Just tell Underlord, Descript’s AI co-editor, what you want to do to your video—add a title card, make it faster-paced, create a vertical social clip for YouTube Shorts—and it’ll do it.
- It publishes straight to YouTube. No downloading just to upload somewhere else. If you’re making a ton of video, this adds precious time back to your workflow.
While other video editors take a lot of upfront time to master, Descript is designed to make video editing as easy as editing a doc. And with Underlord, you don’t even need to know how to edit a doc—just tell it what you want and it can make the entire video for you.
Getting started with your AEO strategy
Want to give this AEO thing a whirl? Here’s your action plan:
- Start by finding those specific, “non-glamorous” questions Ethan mentioned. If you’re a business, that might begin with an audit of customer support ticks and sales calls.
- Pick 5–10 questions that seem boring for the average viewer but are actually super valuable for the right person (and, by extension, you)
- Create simple, direct videos answering each question. These don’t need Hollywood production value; they just need to be helpful and easy to find.
- Publish them to YouTube, then track your traffic attribution to see whether people are finding these videos via AI search engines.
- Adjust your approach based on performance, and keep going.
The best thing about this approach is that you can start small, test it out, and keep doing what works. Start with a few videos using Descript’s free plan, see which topics get picked up by AI search tools, then expand from there.
As Ethan said, we’re all playing the AEO game whether we want to or not—your competitors definitely are. The question isn’t whether you should optimize for AI search, but how quickly you can get started. With the right approach and tools, you could be creating AEO-optimized videos and getting cited by AI platforms within days, not months.
Try Descript for free and see what you can accomplish.
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