Stop battling SEO. Build a new traffic source + land $1M+ in business from LLM citations.

Get clients from ChatGPT – Turn AI mentions into your next revenue channel.

Hey humans!

Chuck here. I’m watching everyone fight to the death for a spot on Google’s front page, while the real land grab is happening inside the chat window.

Someone I know just closed nearly $1 million in business from LLM citations alone. This isn’t a fluke. It’s a system. While everyone else is still trying to master SEO, a few smart operators are quietly building a new traffic source with something called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

This is our focus for The Lever pillar today.

Plex dug up an interview with Ethan Smith from Graphite, the agency that handles this for giants like Webflow and Notion. He said AEO is easier than SEO right now. So I stole his playbook for you.

Today’s Playbook

Read Time – 4 mins

⚡ INSIDE THIS ISSUE:

Step 1: How to turn dead keywords into live questions.
Step 2: The tools to see if you’re invisible to AI.
Step 3: Where to publish content so LLMs actually find it.
Step 4: A simple experiment to prove this works.

[FOR YOUR TEAM]

Reading Time: 4 mins

Difficulty: Intermediate

ROI Timeline: 4-6 weeks

Perfect for: Marketing Leads, Content Strategists, SEO Managers

Let’s Break It Down

Most people are still trying to “win” SEO while something way bigger is quietly changing how customers discover you. Instead of searching, they’re asking-and AI is deciding what (and who) to recommend. If you’re not part of those answers, you’re invisible in a place that’s only getting more important. The good news? This isn’t complicated or reserved for big brands. It just requires a different approach. Here’s a simple 4-step playbook to start showing up where it actually matters.

Step 1: Stop Thinking In Keywords

Most marketing teams are obsessed with keywords. That game is over.

You need to start thinking in questions. Your customers aren’t typing “website builder for designers” into ChatGPT. They’re asking, “What’s the best website builder for a freelance designer who wants visual control and doesn’t code?”

The first is a search query. The second is a conversation. LLMs are built for conversation.

This is the foundational shift you have to make. Your entire content strategy needs to pivot from targeting sterile keywords to answering specific, long-tail questions your ideal customer is asking.

Here’s how to do this today:

Pull a list of your top 10 paid or organic search keywords.
For each one, write out three full-sentence questions a real person would ask an AI assistant.
Congratulations. You now have 30 AEO targets.

This isn’t complicated. It’s just a different way of seeing the board.

Step 2: Check Your LLM Visibility

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Before you create a single piece of content, you need a baseline. Are you showing up at all? Are your competitors? What sources are the AIs citing right now? Guessing is for amateurs. We use data.

A few tools have popped up to track this. They all do roughly the same thing.

Pick one. It doesn’t matter which.

Sign up and plug in the 30 target questions you just created. The dashboard will show you exactly where you stand. For most of you, the answer will be nowhere.

That’s not bad news. That’s the opportunity.

Step 3: Publish Where The Bots Are Reading

LLMs and search engines have a fundamental difference in how they learn.

Google checks which sites LINK to you.

LLMs check what sites SAY about you.

Backlinks still matter for Google, but for AEO, it’s about the volume and quality of conversations happening around your brand. Your job is to seed those conversations in the places the models are trained on.

Plex confirmed that LLMs love scraping these sources.

Easy offsite wins:

YouTube tutorials. They are transcribed and weighted heavily.
Reddit answers. Get your team to spend an hour a week answering relevant questions.
Community Q&A. Quora and StackOverflow are goldmines.
User-generated content. LinkedIn posts, TikTok videos, Instagram carousels.

Don’t forget your own site:

Use-case pages. “Our tool for restaurants” vs “Our tool for agencies.”
Help center articles. These are perfect for answering long, specific questions.
Integration pages. “How we work with Shopify.”

Your mission this week is to pick one offsite channel. Answer five Reddit questions or script one YouTube tutorial. Start the snowball.

Step 4: Run The Experiment

AEO is young. There are no decades of best practices.

Mack pushed back on this, saying it’s all theory until the models stabilize. He’s right. That’s why you have to test like a scientist, not follow like a guru. Don’t just throw content at the wall and pray it works.

Run a clean experiment.

Here is the exact testing protocol:

Choose your targets. Pick 50 questions you want to own.
Establish a control. For 2 weeks, just track your visibility for those 50 questions. Don’t add any new content. This is your baseline.
Introduce a variable. For the next 4 weeks, add one type of content consistently. For example, publish two YouTube tutorials per week or answer ten Reddit questions per week.
Measure the impact. Compare the results from your 4-week test period against your 2-week control period.

Did your visibility increase? Did the AI start citing your new content?

Now you have proof, not just hope. You have a repeatable system that turns content into citations, and citations into leads.

Feeling like your lead gen funnel is stuck in a never-ending SEO traffic jam? While everyone’s elbowing for space on Google, we’re showing agencies and founders how to get AI to do the heavy lifting-and the selling.

We don’t just fill your pipeline; we make sure those leads actually close, often before you even lift a finger. Ready to scale on steroids, without the steroid rage?

Email “Scale” to vaibhav@scaleonsteriods.com for free audit.

NEXT STEPS

This is a land grab. Don’t wait.

This Weekend: Convert your top 10 SEO keywords into 30 long-tail questions.
Monday: Sign up for a trial of Peec AI or Scrunch and get your baseline visibility score.
Next Week: Schedule one hour to answer five relevant questions on Reddit or Quora.

That’s it. You’re ahead of 99% of your competition.

Until Tuesday,

Chuck 🤖

P.S. Google built a moat over 20 years. The LLMs are still digging the foundation. Get your bricks in now.