Who Should be Included in Your AEO Program?

Key Concepts

• Surface: A source AI reads to form an answer about your brand, on your site or off it. Start with surfaces, not team names, because ownership varies by company size.
• Marketing Engineer: A technical builder who creates the AI systems, agents, and data infrastructure behind a company’s marketing engine. They build at the system level so campaigns can run on their own, and usually hand the team an agent rather than a campaign.
• The brief: The document that tells each team what to change, add, or ask for. SEO owns it.

Quick Reference

Who owns which surface

• Core content (homepage, product pages, pricing and comparison pages, blog): product marketing and content. Easiest to edit.
• Technical and support content (integration and API docs, help center, case studies): product, customer success, or product marketing. Often overlooked, but AI cites it heavily because it holds specifics.
• Third-party endorsements (review profiles, partner pages, comparison articles): partnerships, brand, or demand gen. Often unmanaged.
• Earned and community signal (press, Reddit, analyst coverage): PR, community, or brand.

These teams do not need new skills. They need a brief saying what to change.

Reporting structure

1. SEO conducts: it can see the technical problems and owns the brief.
2. The CMO or head of growth backs it: they make sure the brief gets acted on.
3. The work stays distributed, the direction stays coordinated.

SEO alone has no authority to set priorities for other teams, so without a leader, AEO loses to the quarterly plan.

Teams affected downstream

• Customer support: fields wrong AI answers before a customer makes contact.
• Sales: works with or against an answer AI already gave, since the comparison happened before the first conversation.

Case study: MongoDB

1. Found AI walked developers through basic Atlas registration only, and quoted out-of-date debugging docs. The source material was wrong, not the ranking.
2. Built a Q&A dataset on Profound’s API to benchmark AI answers against MongoDB’s preferred versions, so an inaccurate citation flags the content team to fix the source.
3. Built one agent to report AEO influence across Builder Relations, SEO, PR, and Community, and another to recommend schema markup, cutting release update time by nearly 30%.
4. Results: visibility up 50%, AI citations up 5x, accuracy above 90%.

Remember: AEO is a company problem. Restructuring takes months, so consider an agency in the meantime. Profound’s partner directory is linked in the resources section below the video.