INBOUND Blog

For years, marketers have been trained to think in rankings: rank on Google, drive traffic, optimize conversion. Repeat. That model influenced an entire generation of content strategy and defined what we wrote, how we structured it, and how we measured success. But at INBOUND 2025, Aja Frost, Senior Director of Global Growth at HubSpot, made it clear that this model is being replaced with AEO (the practice of optimizing your content so AI tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews can find, extract, and recommend your brand in their answers). AI is compressing what used to be a multi-step journey into a single, synthesized answer. If your brand isn’t part of the answer, you may never enter the consideration set at all. Frost knows this firsthand. HubSpot saw the shift early, pivoted their content strategy, and is now the number one most visible CRM in AI engines. Here's the playbook she sharedcheck and what you can start doing today.