If your company isn't being surfaced in AI-generated answers, you are losing deals before they even hit your CRM. Your buyers are no longer Googling keywords, clicking your website, and downloading a whitepaper. Instead, they are asking AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to build their vendor shortlists for them. A recent 6sense survey found that 94% of B2B buyers now use AI during their purchasing process, and G2 reports that 50% of software buyers start their journey inside an AI chatbot.
To meet buyers where they actually are, you need to shift your strategy to Answer Engine Optimization, also known as AEO or GEO. Because these AI models crave authentic, human-verified consensus to validate their answers, they heavily weight their results toward the two places where real practitioners debate real tools: Reddit and LinkedIn. If your team isn't actively sharing their expertise on social media, AI engines have no human consensus to cite for your brand.
And before you say “wait Ryan, I thought this was a newsletter about HubSpot,” you should know that AEO is top of mind for HubSpot as well. There is currently a native AEO tool in private beta. And I’ll be talking about some ways to close the loop by bringing social engagement data back into HubSpot.
Even before AEO was top of mind, I put a lot of thought into activating social. It was my top priority as the Director of Marketing at Aptitude 8, because both LinkedIn and Reddit were extremely high performing channels for us, even without AEO benefits. But, as this recent post from A8 CMO, Em Wingrove shows, it definitely had some positive downstream effects on how people found the company.
This newsletter is a tactical guide built from my experience that should help you start activating your brand for AEO.
If you want to influence LLMs, you have to start with Reddit. It is currently the number one data source for AI tools when it comes to software and service recommendations.
Why? Because Reddit is where unfiltered opinions happen. The community upvote system naturally surfaces the most helpful, accurate, and human-verified answers while burying corporate fluff that stays at the top of the feed in other social platforms. LLMs view a highly-upvoted Reddit comment as the ultimate signal of human consensus and trustworthiness.
However, Reddit is also notoriously hostile to overt marketing. You can't just drop links and run. Here is how you activate your team on Reddit effectively and safely:
1. Map Relevant Subreddits & Assign SMEs
Create a curated list of relevant subreddits. r/hubspot, which I am a co-moderator of is a great place to start, but look for a highly specific niche community where your buyers actually hang out. Assign specific Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on your team to monitor, comment, and participate within these communities organically.
Use real employee accounts that state who they are and where they work in their bio. Transparency builds trust; deception can get your brand permanently banned and blacklisted.
Pro Tip: Observe first. Pay attention to what types of posts and comments are celebrated and which are downvoted into oblivion. Then, start being helpful in the comments. Some subreddits have rules around gaining a certain amount of comment karma (essentially a score of the value you’ve generated) before you are even allowed to post. Finally, only start posting once you are sure you understand the rules and community (more on that in point #3).
2. Automate Social Listening
You can't expect your team to sit on Reddit scrolling all day. You need to automate the listening process. This is where signal-based tool like Trigify or Clay’s Signals become incredibly useful. You can set it up to monitor your target subreddits for specific keywords, competitor mentions, or pain-point questions.
When a relevant post goes live, Trigify can send a Slack notification directly to your team's channel, complete with the original post and a pre-written draft comment. Your team member can then quickly edit the draft for authenticity and post it. Speed matters on Reddit. Early upvotes compound, and the top-voted answer is the one the LLM will ultimately read and cite to future buyers.
3. Leverage the Reddit Engagement Assistant
Every subreddit has its own highly specific rules and cultural nuances. To help your team navigate this, have them install the Chrome extension Reddit Engagement Assistant, created by the HubSpot community’s own Stjepan Grcic.
This tool scrapes the rules of any given subreddit and helps you write compliant, highly engaging posts that fit the community's vibe. It even provides data on the optimal times to post in each specific subreddit, ensuring your content gets the early visibility required to dominate the thread and catch the AI scraper's attention.
If Reddit is the digital breakroom, LinkedIn is the digital networking event. It provides the professional context and verified identities that LLMs look for to establish authority and expertise.
But activating your company on LinkedIn requires a fundamental shift in how you think about your team.
The LinkedIn Tactical Playbook
How do you actually activate your employees on LinkedIn without it feeling like a forced corporate mandate? You have to empower them and make it frictionless.
1. Provide AI Prompts for Personalized Sharing
Company-authored posts get notoriously low engagement. Don't just hand your team a sterile corporate link in Slack and say, "Please share." Give them customized AI prompts that help them write their own authentic takeaways.
If your marketing team produces a new case study, share it specifically with the employees who directly contributed to that customer's success (the sales rep who closed the deal, the CSM who manages the account). Provide them with a prompt like this:
Write a 150-word LinkedIn post about the following case study. Highlight the specific challenge(s), goals, solutions, and results. Include statistics from the case study to convey the benefit to the client. Speak about the personal impact you had on the project in your role as a [employee role]. Ask clarifying questions to ensure you have a clear understanding of what your personal contribution was. Start the post with a compelling hook that will encourage readers to continue. Use a casual and conversational tone. Do not use marketing or business jargon.
[Insert case study content here]
This allows them to put a personal spin on the content, boosting their own accomplishments while creating the authentic, human-authored content that AI models love to cite.
2. Operationalize Social Selling
You need to bridge the gap between your team's social engagement and your HubSpot portal. It is time to get your sales and SDR teams using a social automation tool. This is how you do social selling at scale.
These types of tools allow for automated connection requests, profile enrichment, and even messaging. However, because LinkedIn limits you to 20-30 connections and messages per day, you need strong qualification before triggering automation.
My personal favorite tool in this category is is FirstTouch, because of it’s HubSpot integration and human-in-the-loop approvals. You can literally trigger connection requests HubSpot workflows and approve messages from a UI card.
3. Hire for Social Presence
Because buyers are relying on AI, and AI is relying on human expertise, companies need to completely rethink their hiring criteria. You need to be hiring with social presence in mind.
In today's B2B landscape, a candidate's LinkedIn profile is arguably far more important than their resume. When you hire people who already have strong personal brands and active industry voices, they act as a rising tide that lifts your entire company's brand profile. If you want to see this point in action, look at how Supered shows up on LinkedIn. Every single employee is active and they have a massive social presence that has catapulted them to one of the top app partners in the ecosystem.
Hiring individuals who are comfortable sharing their expertise publicly means you are instantly acquiring high-quality nodes in the AI ecosystem. Empowering these employees to build their personal brands is no longer just a nice workplace perk; it is a mandatory component of your demand generation strategy.
Formatting for the AI Scrapers
Having your team post on these platforms is step one. Step two is ensuring that the AI scrapers can actually read and understand what your team is saying. If you want LLMs to digest your content and serve it to buyers, you have to format it for machines while writing it for humans.
AEO Formatting Cheat Sheet For Reddit
Platform/Format | Element | Do This | Avoid This |
|---|---|---|---|
Reddit — Posts | Title | Frame as a searchable question or definitive answer: "How multi-touch attribution works (5 models compared)" | Vague titles: "Some thoughts on attribution" |
Opening lines | 1–2 sentence direct answer or thesis | Long preambles or personal backstory before the answer | |
Body structure | Use Reddit’s markdown tools to format headers for subtopics, numbered lists for steps, bullets for comparisons. Keep paragraphs to 2–3 sentences. | Wall-of-text paragraphs with no formatting or structure | |
Terminology | Define terms inline: "last-touch attribution, where 100% of credit goes to the final interaction." | Jargon without definitions | |
Closing | Clear takeaway or recommendation. Optional link to deeper resource as a P.S. | Trailing off with no conclusion or making readers visit an external link to get the point of the post | |
Reddit — Comments | First sentence | Lead with the answer. Make it extractable on its own: "First-touch attribution gives 100% credit to the channel that started the buyer journey." | "Great question! So basically there are a lot of ways to think about this..." |
Structure | Direct answer (1–2 sentences) | Stream-of-consciousness with no clear structure | |
Specifics | Include model names, percentages, tool names, step counts, timeframes | Vague hedging as your opener: "it depends" / "there's no one right answer" |
AEO Formatting Cheat Sheet For LinkedIn
LinkedIn — Posts | Hook (line 1–2) | State a specific, clear claim: "Most B2B teams running multi-touch attribution are measuring the wrong thing." | "I've been thinking a lot about attribution lately." |
Body format | Short paragraphs (1–3 sentences each), line break between every paragraph. One idea per paragraph. Use numbers or "-" for lists. | Dense blocks of text with no whitespace. Emoji-heavy bullets, hashtags in body text, engagement-bait CTAs | |
Content | Concrete specifics: model names, %, tool references, before/after scenarios | Generic advice with no actionable detail | |
Closing | Clear takeaway or insight with a CTA to engage or comment | "Thoughts?” | |
LinkedIn — Comments | Approach | Add a specific, substantive point, not just agreement. 3–5 sentences. | "Great post! Totally agree." |
Content | Define/clarify a term, add a concrete example or stat, name a framework | Restating what the original post already said |
Universal Rules (Reddit and LinkedIn)
Rule | Example |
|---|---|
Answer-first structure | Put the extractable insight in the first 1–2 sentences, always. |
Name things specifically | "Linear attribution model" not "one type of attribution." "HubSpot's default last-touch reporting" not "your CRM." |
Define terms inline | AI engines love content that pairs a term with its definition in natural language. |
Use exact search phrases | "What is marketing attribution" > "how to think about credit assignment in marketing" |
Be the most helpful answer | AI engines weight upvotes/engagement — the best tactical content wins on both fronts. |
Include citable specifics | Numbers, model names, tool names, step counts, timeframes. Vague advice doesn't get extracted. |
It is time to stop treating social media as just another distribution channel for your corporate blog, and start treating it as the primary feeding ground for the AI engines that are actively shaping your buyers' decisions. Equip your team, shift your hiring mindset, and get AI talking about you.